Cheewit nay Israel is a web series produced by Matan Kaminer, GLV Productions and the Israeli workers’ rights organisation Kav La’oved. Within the series, Kaminer and his co-host Adi Bachar from Kav La’oved, provide answers to the many questions of Thai migrant workers who come to Israel to search for employment. These migrants take on the labour of a great portion Israel’s agricultural sector, and due to linguistic and cultural barriers, they are made vulnerable to isolation and the violation of their legal rights. What started as a light-hearted approach to spreading information became a mission when, after the release of the first episode, dozens of concerning enquiries came through. Thai workers had sent a range of pressing questions, varying from issues regarding wages, contracts, and changing employer, to the legality of requiring workers to take on non-agricultural related tasks. To further the understanding of these workers’ conditions, Kaminer began interviewing them, although he found that through Facebook it was easier to get more authentic responses. As a result, Kaminer and his production team, have continued the production of episodes to provide useful and relevant answers to the many concerns of Thai workers in Israel. Please find more details here.
Tag: video
Migrant Child Storytelling
Migrant Child Storytelling acknowledge that every child has a story to tell. Supported by the Rights and Opportunities Foundation, Migrant Child Storytelling gather and share stories submitted by migrant children from all around the world, whether in the form of pictures, photographs, video or text. It is a platform through which the child’s voice, too often ignored, can be heard, and the child’s vision of their world can be seen. The term ‘migrant’ is deliberately used in order to refer to all children who have been forced, or have chosen, to leave their home country for any reason, and who are trying to establish a life in another country. Anyone who is under the age of eighteen is welcome to submit material. If you are working with children under eighteen please encourage them to make use of this site. Guidelines for how to run a workshop with young people to gather materials is available here. The materials must be collected following UNICEF guidelines and with the consent of the child’s parents/caretakers if they are under 16.
Creating Hackney as Home: Five Reflections on a London Borough
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
Migration Matters: Bite-sized video courses with top academics and practitioners
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.