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Article History

Received: 21 February 2025

Accepted: 9 March 2026

First Online: 23 March 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) Executive at UNSW Sydney (The University of New South Wales). Ethics approval number: HC220679. The ethnographic fieldwork reported in this study was conducted as part of a broader approved research project examining the camp experiences of gender non-conforming Rohingya individuals, many of whom participated in the arts-based initiatives examined in this manuscript. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research ( ). Ethics approval was granted on 25 November 2022, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. The approval period is from 25 November 2022 to 24 November 2027.

: Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to each informal conversation and ethnographic observation session conducted during the fieldwork period (February–August 2023). Given participants’ cultural discomfort with written consent procedures, (consistent with sensitivities documented in the literature on research with refugee populations), verbal consent was obtained. Prior to each session, the first author read aloud a structured verbal consent script translated into Bangla (the local dialect accessible to participants), informing them of the study’s purpose, procedures, potential risks, their right to withdraw at any time without consequence, and how their data would be stored and used. Verbal consent was documented through audio recording and supplemented by field log entries recording the date, time, and nature of each consent interaction. The three images used in this manuscript (Figs. 1–3) contain no human figures in any form. Figure 1 depicts the interactive wall installation at the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre; this image was taken by the first author and has been cropped to remove a partially visible child that appeared in the original foreground, ensuring no human presence remains. Figure 2 depicts the Quilt of Memory and Hope, an embroidered textile produced by Rohingya women participants in the AJAR quilt project (source: AJAR’s YouTube Channel). Figure 3 depicts an embroidered panel reproduced from AJAR’s publicly available Memory Quilt Photobook ( ). No personal consent for publication is required for any of these images.