Ann-Christin Zuntz’s “Human Routers” offers a powerful peripheral vision of contemporary (im)migration, border regimes, and agency by shifting attention from refugees to those who facilitate their movements and the circulation of knowledge, money, and opportunities between Syria and Syrian diasporas in the Levant, Turkey, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Focusing on the figure of the refugee broker—metaphorized as a “human router” who enables the movement of people and things across political borders—Zuntz illuminates an “infrastructure of displacement” that operates in the cracks of other global infrastructures. Beyond disclosing the social (and affective) labor and communicative channels that underpin the movements of people and resources, “Human Routers” raises critical questions regarding the ethics of ethnographic engagement and dissemination.

The following author interview elaborates on the tensions of visibility in contexts where preserving interlocutors’ anonymity is paramount and explores the possibility of alternative visualizations—illustrations, graphic novels, and counter-maps—that might leverage the power of images while respecting interlocutors’ need for circumspection.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: When we first spoke about the possibility of creating supplemental materials for your article, “Human Routers,” you mentioned that you have many photos from field work, but it’s impossible to share them publicly. Could you say a bit more about the tension between supporting ethnographic writing with visuals and protecting your interlocutors’ anonymity (or right to opacity)? (Incidentally, a recent piece by Arantxa Ortiz in the Visual and New Media Review broaches this impasse by using AI-based photo anonymization software.) Phrased otherwise: how can one visualize situations and relationships without rendering one’s interlocutors dangerously visible (e.g., to surveillance)?

Ann-Christin Zuntz: When I return from fieldwork, my phone is usually full of pictures. In many interview situations, it is not appropriate for me to use an audio recorder, but I always like to take photos (with my interlocutors’ permission) to remind myself. The tiny details in someone’s flat or office—a bird cage, a painting representing the palm trees of one’s childhood, or a hand-made dress brought from Syria—can tell you a lot about what people do to feel “at home” in exile. As many of my Syrian interlocutors are themselves busy snapping selfies with me, this is not awkward.

However, I cannot usually share these pictures online. Like anyone, my interlocutors have a right to privacy. (Would you like to see a picture of your living room pop up on the internet?) Research with migrants and refugees in the Global South, conducted by northern scholars, also raises concerns about the wider ethics of visibility. These populations are over-researched, but research often does not generate tangible benefits. As others have argued, the gold standard for migration research has become to be “policy relevant,” but there is a risk that better data might increase surveillance of populations already at risk of deportation. Many of my Syrian interlocutors do not have secure legal status in the countries they currently live in. Some also fear repercussions for themselves and family left behind from secret services inside Syria. Syrian brokers, the protagonists of my research, often run businesses that are partly “under” and “over the table,” or even entirely informal (often in legal contexts that make it difficult or even impossible for Syrians to open a business in the formal economy!).

As ethnographers, we cannot remain blind to the politics of knowledge production in migration studies and policy-making. Protecting my research participants from arrest and deportation, and not harming their livelihoods, are basic principles of “doing no harm.” Not sharing pictures of them and their environments is only one aspect of this. For example, I might also change some personal details, e.g., locations, when writing up my ethnography.

I also believe that pictures might not always be necessary evidence. Including a picture might feel like a more raw, immediate insight into my interlocutors’ lives. In reality, these ethnographic encounters are always, necessarily, mediated and curated by the ethnographer: readers see what I allow them to see, and I try to be transparent about this in my writing.

RTN: I see what you mean. The medium of photography is bound up with notions of evidentially, insofar as its “mechanical indexicality” (cf. Barker 2024) can obscure the work of framing undertaken by the photographer. I like how you draw an analogy to the work of writing, which likewise involves decisions around what goes in the frame and what’s left out of it.

I’m also intrigued by your remark (during our earlier conversation) that the majority of refugee brokers’ work occurs in domains that you cannot directly access as a researcher. It’s interesting to think about what’s visible to an ethnographer and what can only be intuited (like the myriad conversations unfolding simultaneously via Whatsapp). At the same time, you mentioned that refugee brokers’ interactions—and performances of Syrianness—often take place in semi-public spaces rather than behind closed doors. I’m very curious about the relation between performance (for a select audience) and secrecy! This play of visibility and invisibility would seem to pose a challenge for photographic depiction, even if the need for anonymity was not a factor. How has your research pushed you to explore different modes of visualization?

AZ: I became fascinated with brokers during my PhD with Syrian refugees in northern Jordan, and they have come up in my research ever since—because they are easy to find! The men and women I study provide vital services to displaced Syrians: they help them circulate remittances, find apartments, seasonal jobs, even aid and fiancées. I would like to avoid giving the impression that brokers are shady, secretive figures. On the contrary, they are often highly respected members, and even elders, of their communities. And as businessmen and -women, they want to be found by potential clients. For example, many male brokers I have met socialize in cafés where Syrian men drink coffee and play cards. While hanging out in public can be more difficult for female brokers, these are often very active on social media.

To complicate things even more, the brokerage practices I study run a wide gamut from invisibility to visibility. Some brokers I know have offices that I can visit, and a few have even opened their ledgers to me. Others work from their living rooms, or even cars. While brokers often encounter potential clients in spaces that are meaningful to their compatriots—say, Syrian restaurants or homes furnished with typically Syrian decoration—a substantial part of their businesses are conducted on their phones, which of course I do not have access to. As any good entrepreneur, my interlocutors are reluctant to share with me financial details—and not only because of potential legal implications. To get the conversation going, I always tell them that I am not interested in concrete money flows, but rather in getting the bigger picture of the circulations that they facilitate. Another challenge of my research is that brokers’ practices cut across scales; for example, a Syrian real estate agent may sit in a physical office in Gaziantep that clients can visit, while sharing videos of available apartments on Facebook that can be viewed by Syrian refugees urgently in need of housing in Gaziantep and elsewhere in Turkey, but also by more affluent members of the Syrian diaspora in Germany and the Gulf hoping to make an investment.

This means that rather than depicting the financial ins and outs of brokers’ businesses, I strive to describe, map, and visualize the (visible) mundane routines that go with them: the phone always in the broker’s hand, the handshake with potential clients, the Syrian signature food offered to business partners, endless driving around in cars… I also analyze digital content that brokers share through social media. Focusing on what is visible to me, and to potential clients, helps me understand how brokers market their services, and how these fit into the everyday lives of brokers and customers.

RTN: I’m struck by your method of visualizing the “mundane” through ekphrasis in order to illuminate larger processes and structures. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s reference to “image worlds” (2015 [1931], 68) that are crystallized in the physiognomies of everyday objects, but which tend to escape conscious perception. From this vantage, your work consists in presenting that which is see-able, but which nonetheless remains unseen.

This post is, in some sense, an experiment with digital illustration as a means of visualizing ethnographic situations while preserving participants’ right to anonymity. It tests out the hypothesis that illustration can provide the kind of circumspection that ethnographic writers achieve through pseudonyms and ethnographic composites. It was a pleasure to try to depict the metaphor of “human routers” and to incorporate some details of your ethnographic description: the slippers worn by Farhan in his empty office, the small cups of Arabic coffee prepared by Um Faisal, the key role of the cell phone in brokers’ interactions…

RTN: You’re also undertaking a project that will accompany your current monograph: an interactive atlas. Could you say a bit more about this project? How will it complement or extend the work of the book?

AZ: The reason I study refugee brokers and their circulations is because I would like to understand a form of bottom-up globalization that occurs (mostly) under the radar of policy-makers and humanitarian actors. Mapping how refugees’ money, jobs, etc. travel allows us to understand what holds displaced communities together, despite closed borders and hostile asylum regimes: the “social” infrastructure of displacement, made of current and past population movements, including through displacement, trade, marriage... To a reader, following the movements of a piece of makdous (a tiny stuffed eggplant, a Syrian signature dish) or a Syrian passport on a map gives you a sense of the embodied, tangible connections that refugees and their brokers uphold. Of course, brokers do not operate in a static world: market prices change, borders open and close, new travel routes may open up or get out of reach, for example during the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria. While my forthcoming book will document the lifeworlds and social relations that underpin brokers’ acts of circulations, the digital interactive atlas will give readers a sense of the dynamic nature of these practices. It will be playful! How do geographies of circulation change when brokers navigate chokepoints, rapid change, seasonal demand, etc.? The atlas is also an opportunity to juxtapose diverse material, including pictures from fieldwork, drawings, audio snippets… None of that would be possible without the help of my co-mapper, my husband Joe Zuntz. As an expert in data science and visualization (and an avid gamer), he helps me find technical and beautiful solutions to realizing the maps we would like to make: about a world and lives in motion.

RTN: The atlas sounds like a refreshing (and exhilarating!) departure from conventional maps and encyclopedias, which are bound up with projects of territorialization and classification. I also see the resonance between this project and your earlier remark about reflexively highlighting the mediations involved in ethnographic dissemination. How might such practices recast “the map” (and perhaps also the territory)?

AZ: In a European context, the maps that most of us will be familiar with are the standard migration maps produced by border agencies such as Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) and widely used by policymakers and mainstream media. These maps portray migration and displacement as a one-way street to Europe. Of course, we know that this is not true: most of Syria’s displaced people have remained inside the country and in neighboring states in the Middle East. The people in my research also move in more complex ways. For example, some of my interlocutors have joined existing Syrian diasporas in countries that policymakers only ever consider “transit countries,” such as Tunisia and Bulgaria, or have since moved on from countries widely considered “ideal” destinations because of their generous welfare policies, such as Sweden. Oftentimes, they remain mobile after they have first settled more permanently. On a basic level, adding all these ongoing, back-and-forth movements to “counter”-maps complicates the grand narrative of migration to Europe conveyed by the Frontex (and other hegemonic) maps.

One aspect of Syrian displacement that Joe and I are currently working on is how to visualize different types of uncertainty. Maps like the Frontex maps tell “certain” stories because they aim to convey clear narratives and inspire unambiguous policies, e.g., the curtailing of migration to Europe. In truth, my interlocutors’ stories contain multiple unknowns: sometimes they do not remember foreign place names or get lost, for example when crossing the Sahara on the back of a jeep. Sometimes they cannot (or do not want to) recall the exact timeline of their travels. As I said above, brokers are notoriously vague about the details of their business and how their commodities travel. This has consequences for mapping Syrian refugees’ circulations: the certainty level of maps is not just a technical problem, but at the heart of the power relations that shape cartographic messages. Uncertainties in migration data and their interpretation should be accounted for, and represented on maps, as ignoring unknowns might lead to badly-informed policy-making. This said, counter-mapping goes beyond filling in the blind spots on existing maps, as this would simply play into the hands of border agencies trying to turn mobile people into objects of governance. Rather, Joe and I are developing a visual language to push the limits of how the movement of refugees and their “stuff” can be represented. We’re experimenting with static and animated maps that grow and shrink as protagonists weigh up their movement options, maps whose edges curl when timelines become unclear, and maps showing fog hovering over areas that remain irrelevant or unknown to interlocutors.

RTN: Brilliant! I love the idea of animated maps that shift according to the options and knowledge of protagonists. In your view, do alternative kinds of images—that is, images that are neither photographs nor traditional maps—encourage different kinds of participation on the part of beholders? What kinds of interaction do you hope to encourage and why?

Ann-Christin Z: Let’s face it: most people don’t read articles (especially when they are written in a language that they do not understand). But they might watch a documentary, or a cartoon, or flip through a graphic novel. In one of my previous projects, we produced a graphic novel on Syrian agricultural workers’ experiences in farming during the COVID-19 pandemic. For another project on the role of Syrian refugees in the recycling and reconstruction industries after the 2023 earthquake, we are currently working with a visual artist to prepare a short cartoon animation. We chose these artistic approaches to present ethnographic detail while protecting highly vulnerable interlocutors.

But striving to do ethically sound research goes beyond protecting people’s anonymity—they should also be able to engage with the results of the research. I often conduct research together with Syrian academics and practitioners, and whenever possible, we try to translate artistic outputs into Arabic. This allows us to share results with the original interlocutors, but also with Syrians in widely different contexts. For example, we read the graphic novel, which draws on ethnographic material collected with Syrians in four Middle Eastern countries, together with older Syrian refugees now residing in Scotland. Seeing drawings of agricultural work reminded them of their lives in Syria before the war, leading to discussions with their children about the cultural heritage and memories they had brought with them. I hope that artistic work can inspire more sensory, empathetic engagements—with Syrians and other publics—and inspire solidarity.