Tag: visualization

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

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