Author: Agata Lisiak

FLAX is a network for cultural networking and collaboration, which promotes cultural exchange and cooperation for local and newly arrived cultural workers, artists and institutions inside Germany. We do not exclude any nation, color, legal status (as, for example, a refugee status) or religion. We are open and accessible to everybody. We are supporting and organizing interdisciplinary and intercultural artistic projects. We support artists in developing their individual artistic position or obtaining cultural education in Germany. A strong part of our program is a mentoring program established for newly arrived artists and cultural managers from all different parts of the world. We provide support and, if possible, access to university education, scholarships, residencies, information, proposals, and workshops. Our mission is to bring people from the cultural world in contact to each other. We would like to support you as individual arriving newly to Germany. We will try to accompany you through the complexity of the German Cultural Systems. We believe that a strong network is a chance to develop artistically as an individual and that mixing disciplines and backgrounds are a key to creativity and intercultural competency.

The Brexit vote engendered a sense of fractured nationhood in Wales. Wales voted to leave the European Union, however, the regions of Ceredigion, Cardiff and Gwynedd voted to remain. A key point of persuasion in the media and Brexit campaign was migration. This project explored representations of migration in Wales, both historically and in the current climate, in these three remain regions. There was an analysis of local print press media around migration to examine the positioning of migrants and the dominant competing discourses. Interviews with migrants explored how they felt they were positioned by wider Welsh society and how the temporal shift between pre- and post-Brexit have impacted on their everyday experiences. Interviews involved pre-tasks where participants worked with a pictorial timeline to reflect on these shifts and created a metaphor to represent their experiences. There was also a photo elicitation activity where images from recent media reports leading up to Brexit were introduced and explored. The findings from the study are presented in multi-modal forms, including an animated short film and two posters, to increase their accessibility and address issues of impact and engagement. You can see an animated film reflecting on the project here.

Researchers: Dawn Mannay, Cardiff University; Rhys Dafydd Jones, Aberystwyth University; Gillian Jein, Bangor University; Sioned Pearce, Cardiff University; Angharad Saunders, University of South Wales

Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, in 2013-2015, this network brings together academics, practitioners and users to improve our understanding of how migrant mothers bring up their children. When migrant mothers raise children in a new society, they bring with them bedtime stories, nursery rhymes and games from their country of origin, but combine these with those in the new country. Migrant mothers are often seen as guardians of an ethnic tradition, but they are also important in enabling their family members to make a home for themselves in a new country. In this way, mothers bring up future citizens who can relate to the country of residence, the country of their parents and their own neighbourhood. Crucially, through their work of caring for their children and negotiating cultural difference, as well as the social changes involved in migrating, migrant mothers make themselves as citizens. Public debates and policy often present migrant mothers as near the margins or boundaries of the nation they live in; they are seen as recipients of social services, in need of integration. This network brings together contributions of academics, artists, family and migration practitioners. On this website we present some of the key work on these issues through videos of academic presentations, practitioners’ roundtable discussions and migrant mothers’ theatrical enactments. We hope this will be of use to teachers, students, policy makers and practitioners working with migrant families, and all who are interested in these issues.

PI: Umut Erel, The Open University; CIs: Tracey Reynolds, University of Greenwich; Consultant: Erene Kaptani, The Open University

Funded by National Centre for Research Methods/ Economic and Social Research Council, UK, this 2015-2016 research project addresses the UK social science community’s need to gain a better understanding of how participatory action research approaches engage marginalized groups in research as co-producers of knowledge. Funded by the National Centre for Research Methods/ Economic and Social Research Council, it combines walking methods and participatory theater to create a space for exploring, sharing and documenting processes of belonging and place-making that are crucial to understanding and enacting citizenship. Participatory Action Research, based on the principles of inclusion, valuing all voices and action-oriented interventions allows for engaging marginalized groups into research as a citizenship practice. The project creates a model for bringing together practitioners and marginalized groups to engage with each other through creative methods and innovates by developing a toolkit for training social researchers in participatory methods, specifically walking stories and theatre.

PI: Umut Erel, The Open University; CIs: Tracey Reynolds, University of Greenwich, Maggie O’Neill, University of York; Research Fellow: Erene Kaptani, The Open University

This Spring 2017 course at Bard College Berlin is a continuation of the Fall seminar In Search of a History: Migration in Germany from World War II to the Present, focusing on students’ individual projects that seek to give visual, verbal, spatial, musical, and general aesthetic and sensory expression to previously collected knowledge of migration history and experience. The projects need not have the ambition of entering the realm or category of “art”: we consider them “notations,” recording our perceptions and thoughts in the modes of articulation that suit us best. First, we will review the historical data, tools, and concepts of migration history that allow us to achieve an analytical distance and conceptualize as well as historicize our material. Subsequently, we will work on a collective visualization project. The major part of the course is dedicated to developing and completing the individual projects and findings solutions for exhibiting them. We will cooperate with a number of renowned artists who will add creative, formal, and practical input and advice to our historical and linguistic framework. The project will be exhibited as part of an international conference on migration history. One panel has been reserved for us to present the projects and to reflect on the relations between migration, research, education, and creativity that we will have uncovered through our work.

Professor: Marion Detjen

In the 2013-2017 research project Immigrant Mothers As Agents of Change conducted within the TRANSFORmIG framework at Humboldt University Berlin, I inquired into everyday mothering practices performed in urban contexts and the norms that influence said practices. I investigated how immigrant women do mothering locally and transnationally and how they navigate various nationalized, classed, and gendered ideologies of motherhood. My research in Berlin, Munich, London, and Birmingham centered on everyday encounters, observations, and displays of mothering performed by women who recently moved to these cities from Poland. Aside from semi-structured and narrative interviews and participant observation, I also worked with creative methods and visualizations. In 2015 and 2016, I met individually with Polish mothers of young children living in Birmingham and Munich, respectively. We met in community centers, playgroups, and in private homes. Each conversation started with the
question “How is it for you to be a mother in Birmingham/Munich?” to which each woman responded visually. This creative exercise, conducted with colorful felt-tip pens on white sheets of paper, has yielded most interesting narrations on migration, childrearing, and the urban everyday. You can see the drawings accompanied by excerpts from image elicitation interviews here.

Researcher: Agata Lisiak, Bard College Berlin