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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
- Introductory Article
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Creative engagement with migration
Authors: Laura Jeffery, Mariangela Palladino, Rebecca Rotter and Agnes WoolleyThis article introduces a special issue on arts-based engagement with migration, comprising articles, reflections, poems and images. The introductory article starts by exploring the ethical, political and empirical reasons for the increased use of arts-based methods in humanities and social sciences research in general, and in migration studies in particular. Next, it evaluates participatory methods, co-production and co-authorship as increasingly well-established practices across academia, the arts, activism and community work. It then considers how the outputs of such processes can be deployed to challenge dominant representations of migration and migrants. The authors reflect critically upon arts-based methodological practices and on the (limits to the) transformative potentials of using arts-based methods to engage creatively with migration. Sounding a cautionary note, they concede that even collaborative artistic expressions have limits in overcoming unequal power dynamics, conveying experiences of migration and effecting long-term change in a context in which discourse on migration is dominated by short-term political decision-making, and punitive policies force migrants into precarious forms of existence. While the prospect of influencing the political sphere might seem remote, they advocate for the role and power of the arts in instigating, shaping and leading change by inspiring people’s conscience and civic responsibility.
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- Poetry
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- Articles
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Creative engagement with migration in Morocco: An ethnographic exploration of photographic encounters
Authors: Sébastien Bachelet and Laura JefferyThis article examines the contentious topic of participation through the lens of a collaborative arts-based project on migration in Morocco. We call for the ethnographic exploration of photographic encounters: that is, participant observation of the processes of shooting, selecting, editing, preparing and exhibiting of photographs and films. First, we explore the need to identify barriers to participation and reflect on the role of researchers. Second, we stress how participatory arts-based workshops can confront Othering stereotypes amongst participants from diverse backgrounds. Third, we challenge social scientists’ tendency to prioritize process over product by considering public encounters as integral to participatory processes.
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Giving contours to invisible figures: Post-reflections on Migrations. Narratives. Movements. exhibition at Villa des Arts, Rabat
By Yvon LanguéNoticing the growing precariousness of migrants in Morocco, ‘Giving contours to invisible figures’ is a commentary on the lessons learned from my collaboration with ‘Arts for Advocacy’ on Migrations. Narratives. Movements., an exhibition held at Villa des Arts, Rabat. The article engages with migration in the broad sense, and how it is addressed by curatorial practice. It discusses the display’s theoretical apparatus in the light of bold uncertainties due to the invisibility of the figure of the migrant, and the apparent disjuncture of my expectations with regard to the Moroccan context. I argue that the subject of migration calls for a widening of the borders of curatorial practice, at least in Morocco, precisely because of the geographies of mobility, heterogeneous ideas of globalization and common sense overlap.
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- Poetry
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- Articles
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Making murals in the Marshall Islands and Hawai’i: An exploration of the possibilities and limits of artistic agency in a community arts education project
By Shari SabetiThis article explores the painting of two murals as part of a community arts education project aimed at understanding Marshallese children’s experiences of displacement and belonging. It describes the process and outcome of mural making workshops conducted in two schools: one in Honolulu attended by migrant Marshallese children; the other with a community of Marshall Islanders, internally displaced as a result of the effects of nuclear testing on their home atoll. Engaging with anthropological approaches to art, the article seeks to address important questions around the agency of these murals in the context of community arts education. What do these murals do, both in the process of coming into being, and as finished products? How did the images depicted on them take shape? In what ways were the artist’s intentions, and the children’s input, enabled and limited in this process? Paying detailed attention to these questions, the article argues for a nuanced understanding of what a successful community mural-making process might look like.
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- Poetry
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- Articles
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Understanding the ‘bigger picture’: Lessons learned from participatory visual arts-based research with individuals seeking asylum in the United Kingdom
More LessThis article presents reflections from a participatory visual arts-based research study with individuals seeking asylum in the north-east of England. This study invited participants to represent their lived experiences through biographical and visual methods. In doing so, they engaged in a process of ethno-mimesis, accomplished through the production of images that function as sites for meaning making, self-representation and social critique. This article demonstrates how an arts-based approach can stimulate change and transformation in individuals’ lives by supporting meaningful participation in the knowledge production process and providing a safe space where participants are empowered by sharing stories that challenge, subvert and reimagine what it feels like to be an asylum seeker. Furthermore it suggests that in contrast to interview settings, through the process of ethno-mimesis participants were offered the time and space to consciously engage with their experiences and invest in their creativity and storytelling capacities in order to render their worldviews visible. Although the findings from this study reinforce an existing rich body of ethnographic work on lived experiences of asylum seekers, this study recognizes that the identified themes highlight the enduring impact of immigration policies on individuals asylum-seeking trajectories and focuses instead on how such experiences are creatively negotiated by participants.
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Border-crossing: These deaths are not inevitable
More LessThis article is situated in my own work in poetry. It falls into two parts: the first takes off from my own work to explore different practices of bordering; the second part continues that exploration by reference to recent work by Caroline Bergvall and Jeff Hilson. The first section explores my sequence, ‘the war against tourism’. These poems were written between December 2003 and July 2006 in the environment created by the US Patriot Act 2001 and the Homeland Security Act 2002. The Homeland Security Act both foregrounded the protection of borders and introduced ‘homeland’ into US political discourse. The first section will focus on my sequence of site-specific poems (written on flights), which explore ‘homeland security’, refugees, terrorism, profiling, border interrogations and identity. It will consider border-crossings and how identity figures in these poems in the context of mobility. The second section, ‘these deaths are not inevitable’, focuses on Caroline Bergvall’s volume Drift and its engagement with the ‘left-to-die’ boat within a longer history of migration by sea, going back to the Anglo-Saxons bringing their culture to Britain in the fifth century. The article concludes with a brief examination of Jeff Hilson’s conceptual poem, ‘A Final Poem with Full Stops’, and how deaths in the Mediterranean relate to recent treatment of borders, refugees and migrants.
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Borders, risk and belonging: Challenges for arts-based research in understanding the lives of women asylum seekers and migrants ‘at the borders of humanity’
Authors: Maggie O’Neill, Umut Erel, Erene Kaptani and Tracey ReynoldsThis article critically discusses the experiences of women who are seeking asylum in the North East of England and women who are mothers with no recourse to public funds living in London to address the questions posed by the special issue. It argues both epistemologically and methodologically for the benefits of undertaking participatory arts-based, ethno-mimetic, performative methods with women and communities to better understand women’s lives, build local capacity in seeking policy change, as well as contribute to theorizing necropolitics through praxis. Drawing upon artistic outcomes of research funded by the Leverhulme Trust on borders, risk and belonging, and collaborative research funded by the ESRC/NCRM using participatory theatre and walking methods, the article addresses the questions posed by the special issue: how is statelessness experienced by women seeking asylum and mothers with no recourse to public funds? To what extent are their lived experiences marked by precarity, social and civil death? What does it mean to be a woman and a mother in these precarious times, ‘at the borders of humanity’? Where are the spaces for resistance and how might we as artists and researchers – across the arts, humanities and social sciences – contribute and activate?
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- Poetry
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On digital crossings in Europe
Authors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
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