What happens when immersive media technologies born in military labs are used by refugees to co-create and share narratives of war, loss, and survival?
In this paper, BeAnotherLab researcher Norma Deseke and Prof. Yafa Shanneik raise fundamental questions about the widespread idea of VR as an “empathy machine“ and how to overcome the familiar dynamic of powerless victims and privileged viewers. They argue instead that embodied VR can support narrative sovereignty: enabling refugees to shape how their experiences are told and understood is at the core of the methodology employed.
It is also a retrospective on BeAnotherLab’s fieldwork in Jordan in 2019, where we collaborated with Iraqi and Syrian women who had fled war in their respective countries. Through a participatory and co-creative VR process, they became not just subjects of representation but active authors of their own stories. This paper demonstrates the continued relevance of BeAnotherLab’s methodology after 14 years, showing how its embodied, participatory approach to VR remains a powerful tool for transformation when facing some of humanity’s most pressing challenges
