McKay, S orcid.org/0000-0002-4232-1983 and Bradley, J (2017) How does arts practice engage with narratives of migration from refugees and asylum seekers? Lessons from ‘utopia’. Journal of Arts and Communities, 8 (1-2). pp. 31-46. ISSN 1757-1936
Abstract
In this article we draw on data from a co-produced transdisciplinary arts and language practice and research project. In this project, researchers, artists and creative practitioners worked with refugees and people seeking asylum. Together we developed and led arts-based workshops, which aimed to explore what it means to be ‘welcome’, how we ‘welcome’ and how we want to be ‘welcomed’. As researchers we approached the project from different disciplinary spaces: Sam from applied theatre and Jessica from sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. Through analysis of our co-produced artistic outputs, through ethnographic writing and through our reflections on the processes of collaborating, we consider how arts practices engage with narratives of migration in refugee communities. We take three elements of the project: visual arts products in the form of silk paintings, community voices in the form of vignettes and media documentation in the form of a project film. We suggest how these examples embody the processes and the community developed around the project and the different ways of working across sectors with displaced communities to engage with and enable spaces for voices to be made audible. We use ‘refugee’ throughout this article to refer to people who have been granted asylum, people who are in the process of granting asylum, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. We choose not to use the phrase ‘asylum seekers’ due to its often negative connotations in the British press.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Intellect Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). |
Keywords: | co-production; community arts; film; forced migration; linguistics; methodology; refugee studies; visual arts |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Education (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > Performance and Cultural Industries (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 May 2017 09:56 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 22:29 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Intellect |
Identification Number: | 10.1386/jaac.8.1-2.31_1 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:116623 |