Author: Agata Lisiak

In the first iteration of what aims to be a wider research project on the elicitation of culturally diverse memes through the use of digital technologies, Alda Terracciano focused on the rich cultural heritage of Moroccan communities in West London. In the course of her work with members of the Al-Hasaniya Moroccan Women’s Centre and Making Communities Work and Grow, Alda further developed the ‘Memory Session’ practice research methodology, which collectively connects sensory experiences of migrant community members to their own cultural heritage and makes it accessible to the wider public. This unique approach is the outcome of previous memory sessions with 70 members of migrant communities in London, where participants were asked to share feelings, thoughts and memories through video elicitation. This approach led participants to share traditions, daily rituals, urban life, as well as personal notions of home and cultural identity (Terracciano 2016). The Moroccan Intangible Heritage project saw the collaboration of a HCI designer and two olfactory engineers to develop a multisensory digital interface in the field of critical heritage studies and urban planning (Terracciano et al. 2017).  Collective curatorial experiences and democratization of decision making in urban planning are at the centre of this creative and participatory inquiry. The ensuing community-curated digital interactive interface is able to mobilise the senses to uncover the embodied experiences of both the communities represented in the interface and the wider public when using the sensory audio-visual installation. This work highlights the importance of supporting autonomy, identity and ownership when engaging migrant communities. In addition to this, the inclusion of local authorities in the design of the multisensory interface contributed to create a space where technologies can support a bottom-up and community-led civic engagement.

Researcher: Alda Terracciano (independent researcher and artist)

A one-day seminar funded by the International Journal for Social Research Methodology

Friday, 15th June, University of Surrey

Keynote speakers: Agata Lisiak (Bard College, Berlin) and Rita Chawla-Duggan (University of Bath)

Increasing use is made of both creative and visual methods in social research. Nevertheless, to date there has been very little discussion of the extent to which such methods can be used in comparative research. This seminar will explore some of the challenges of using these methods cross-nationally, examining the different cultural associations that may be brought to bear in different national contexts, and how these are accounted for in research design, data collection and analysis. It will also draw on the experiences of researchers working in this area, to explore how such challenges can most effectively be addressed. We welcome papers that address any aspect of using creative and/or visual methods in comparative research, or across spaces of difference more broadly defined (e.g. with groups from different ethnic or social class backgrounds).

Abstract Submission: Please send abstracts of up to 250 words by 14th April 2018 to Rachel Brooks at the University of Surrey: r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk. (There will be no charge for attending the seminar as all costs are kindly being covered by the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.)

Seminar Organisers: The seminar is organised by the Eurostudents research team at the University of Surrey (Rachel Brooks, Jessie Abrahams, Predrag Lazetic and Anu Lainio).

On 28 February 2018, Berlin’s American Academy and Staatsbibliothek are hosting a discussion on the function of the arts and sciences as platforms for integration. More details and program here.

In 2017 sociologist Elena Vacchelli and Digital Storytelling facilitator Tricia Jenkins conducted a pilot study with the Portuguese-speaking community in Stockwell. The workshop deployed the creative and collaborative method of Digital Storytelling (DS) to look at the life experiences of the Portuguese speaking community in gentrifying Stockwell and see how they connect to broader issues identified in Stockwell. A recent report by Nogueira, Porteous and Guerreiro (2015) suggests that the roughly 35,000 Portuguese speaking migrants in Stockwell (South London) span across different generations of migration and across different continents including Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. The report identified key areas of concern affecting the Portuguese speaking community ranging from immigration status for extra-European Portuguese speaking migrants; poor English; unsuitable housing; isolated elderly people and mental health; substance misuse; domestic violence. Whilst the community remains concentrated in and around the area known as Little Portugal in Stockwell, where we held the DS workshop, both the census and the growing number of cafes and bars ran by Portuguese Speakers indicate that members of the community now live throughout the borough. The Stockwell Partnership played a major role in facilitating the recruitment of the research participants for this pilot project.

The ‘social encounter’ of the DS workshop encourages participants to reflect on and share personal narratives which are borne out of a dialogical relationship amongst the group. DS aims for the realisation of a two to five minutes audio-visual clip whose imaginary is built on the recording of the workshop participants’ voice reading the story s/he wrote. The resulting clip is a combination of principally still images complementing the recording of the participant’s voice telling the story that s/he has developed through a series of creative writing type of activities. Digital Storytelling is achieved through a dynamic rapport of mutual support and co-production during the workshop aimed at helping participants to find their voice and tell a story which is important to them. Participants are also supported in transforming their story into an audio-visual clip that can be shared with the immediate group and disseminated further.

Researchers: Elena Vacchelli (University of Greenwich) and Tricia Jenkins (Goldsmiths, University of London)

In 2012 and 2016, Cigdem Esin and Corinne Squire, together with a number of colleagues, ran two interconnected projects in East London and Calais refugee camp using multimodal narrative methodology. The aim of these projects was to facilitate the creation of visual, written, verbal and process narratives of participants’ lives, to open up a space for storytellers to explore the interrelations between personal and cultural resources. Similar methods were used in both projects but the processes differentiated in response to the context and group of participants.

The first study was conducted in 2012 with a small group of young British Muslim women in a community school in East London. The study team ran weekly workshops over a few months in which the participants were asked to create visual images about any aspect of their lives. Participants were provided with a range of image making resources such as acrylic paint, coloured pencils, crayons and craft material. The study team facilitated the workshops by engaging in conversations with the group about various aspects of everyday life such as life at school/university, families and friends. The participants were then interviewed about their images, their participation in the workshops and their interaction with other workshop participants/study team. An article by Cigdem Esin analyzing some of the narratives from this study could be viewed here.

The second project was carried out in 2016 with the residents of Calais refugee camp as an impact project. The aim was to use multimodal narrative methodology in order to constitute a space for refugee storytellers to tell their individual and collective life stories with links to their past, to their membership in refugee communities and to broader socio-cultural contexts in which their stories were circulated for various purposes. The project involved visual storytelling workshops in which participants were asked to create visual stories about themselves, their journey or their life in the refugee camp. These were one-off workshops due to the material conditions of the camp. The project team was engaged in conversations with the participants and asked them to produce short narratives about their images where possible. Some of the images from one of the visual storytelling workshops in the camp can be viewed here.

Researchers: Cigdem Esin and Corinne Squire, University of East London, Centre for Narrative Research

Baynatna is the first public Arabic library in Berlin, opened on 18^th February 2017. “Baynatna” means “between us” in Arabic: this very popular phrase creates a special kind of intimacy between people who agree to share insights, thoughts or stories even if only just for second. In the process of establishing Baynatna, our international team relied on humor, trust, and sensibility to facilitate a space for dialogs no one knows where exactly they may lead us. An architecture class from Berlin’s Technical University designed and donated movable shelves and furniture that can be folded out to create a comfortable and warm space that remains open to everyone. The library continues to grow based on book donations and voluntary work. Baynatna provides as a safe space for a generation of readers who have lost not only their homelands, but also their books. Our book collection allows the readers to experience a taste of the home they have left and to become acquainted with worlds previously unknown to them. We use the power of stories to convey cross-cultural experiences and to foster an inclusive and progressive environment. On one hand, we provide literature to newcomers who, coming to Germany, are deprived of reading in their native language. On the other hand, we aim to have Arabic works translated into German and/or English so that people in Berlin can discover the long literary tradition that we have to offer. We spark discussions not only with the books on our shelves, but also through weekly live readings, music performances, and workshops. Baynatna is currently based at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek of Berlin, Breite str. 30-36, 10178. Welcome!

Project initiator: Muhannad Qaiconie, Bard College Berlin

Creating Hackney as Home (CHASH) used participatory video production to explore how young people experience a sense of home and belonging under conditions of rapid urban change; how they negotiate and manage these changes in order to maintain their sense of home; and to evaluate the effectiveness of visual research methods in portraying affective relationships within, and with, the city. Facilitated by cultural geographer, Dr Melissa Butcher, a team of five peer researchers from the neighbourhood spent a summer creating short films that captured their experience of living in the east London Borough of Hackney. From journeys through the city came reflections on the impact of gentrification, using fashion to demarcate belonging and being different, growing up and out of space, and managing everyday cultural diversity. Following the completion of filming, the videos were made publically available, via screenings, the website and social media, to invite a wider audience into dialogue on the issues raised. The research also collated ethnographic description of particular sites within the borough and incorporated the research team’s critical reflections recorded on flipcams throughout the project. Key findings included that while demolition of the built environment and existing social networks was evident, there was also an ambivalence expressed towards change. Crucially, young people were found not to be necessarily averse to change in itself but to those changes that they felt left them, and other residents, marginalised. Particular concerns centred on inequality, displacement and the speed of change. The transformation in the physical and socio-economic character of Hackney has led some young people to question whether they fit into the emerging urban landscape. Adapting to this context was for some at times seen as an opportunity but for others it was a more challenging process. Maintaining a sense of home did not necessarily require learning new ways of doing things, but instead required coming to terms with change emotionally.

Researcher: Melissa Butcher, Birkbeck, University of London

Conducted between 2013 and 2016, this research project uses creative and digital verbatim methods in poetry in order to explore expressions of identity and ideas of community in existence during the 2011 riots in Birmingham. Located in this context, United We Stand is a poetry collection (and the creative outcome from my PhD thesis) that explores both individual and group experiences of the events that took place in Birmingham. As a series of verbatim poems, this collection draws on data extracted from 25 semi-structured, life-story interviews with participants who lived or worked in the city during these incidents. As a collection, United We Stand (alongside the thesis it is taken from) critiques Benedict Anderson’s model of the nation as an imagined community (1983; 1991; 2006) by providing evidence for the existence of shifting imagined communities across various geographical, social and cultural scales within the context of the riots. Not only do the poems within the collection demonstrate that digital, verbatim methods are suitable for (re)presenting expressions of identity and ideas of imagined community in this context, but the collection (as a whole) transforms the voice(s) of ordinary people in Birmingham and is a direct engagement with the same fluid and emergent imagined communities that the research argues existed. You can read some example drafts of the poems featured in United We Stand and see a little more about the project here.

Researcher: Sophie-Louise Hyde, Loughborough University

Our mission at Migration Matters is to empower the public to have more nuanced and evidence-based conversations about migration. We produce bite-sized video courses that complicate commonly held preconceptions with original ideas, research, and solutions-oriented perspectives from leading thinkers in the field: researchers, practitioners, as well as migrants and refugees themselves. We are awardees of grants from The London School of Economics and Advocate Europe, part of the groundbreaking Erasmus + Virtual Exchange consortium, and a 1st place winner of the 2017 Migration Media Award from the International Centre for Migration Policy Development. Migration Matters is a non-profit organization that was founded in January 2016 in response to media coverage of the so-called “refugee crisis” in summer 2015. You can see all our courses here.