How does arts practice engage with narratives of migration from refugees? Lessons from ‘utopia’

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.

Translanguaging space and creative activity: theorising collaborative arts-based learning

“…Positioning this work as a performative ontological project means that we consider the processes of 'knowledging' and focus on these as theoretically grounded and also as inductive. The kinds of research epistemologies embedded throughout LS-C are developed through co-production (Facer & Enright, 2016;Graham 2016;McKay & Bradley, 2016) and collaborative, cross-sector work within the broad paradigm of action research (Facer & Pahl, 2017). In the context of museum studies, Helen Graham (2016) fuses together two 'genealogies' of the concept of co-production to develop a concept that encompasses 'community participation' and 'more-thanhuman participation'.…”

Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research

“…Beyond the four stages in my research into street arts production, intense encounters with the worlds of the performers were embedded within the context of creating a series of collaborative projects with the organisation's artistic director (see McKay and Bradley 2016;Bradley et al 2018), therefore extending far beyond the five-month fieldwork period. I did not (and could not) train to do street theatre myself while undertaking my research.…”

Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics: Language, Communication and the Arts

“…Creative practitioners, including choreographer and dancer Rosie Kay (Rosie Kay Dance), Mohammed Ali (Soul City Arts) and composer Jonathan Dove collaborated with project researchers in a series of Creative Arts Labs through which they engaged with multilingual project data (the Creative Arts Labs process is captured as a project film www.tlang.org.uk). Additional arts-informed projects stemmed from TLANG research, including visual arts in contexts of migration and language learning in multilingual contexts (McKay & Bradley 2016) and poetry (Blackledge 2019). The third large project, 'Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures' (TML, led by Charles Burdett, University of Durham), examined forms of mobility and Italian diaspora, linking closely to the role of the arts in circulation of cultural objects.…”

“…But it also becomes something entirely new through collaboration and openness to bringing in new ways of approaching research. Within the broader heading of creative inquiry, arts-informed approaches are particularly used for investigating learning, community and belonging (see also Harvey & Vanden 2017;Huang 2017;McKay & Bradley 2016;Pöyhönen et al 2017). Research through the arts is transdisciplinary and aligns with practice-as-research methods, drawing from across disciplines.…”