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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011
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Participatory methods and critical models: Arts, migration and diaspora
More LessThis article reflects on a ten-year trajectory of research, predominantly in the East Midlands, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The projects all employed participatory action research methods that involved working in partnership with forced migrants (those situated in the asylum–migration nexus) and community arts organizations to explore the connections between arts, migration and diaspora. The article considers the benefits and issues surrounding this kind of creative, participatory and arts-based work in relation to the transformative potential of art, narrativity and storytelling, and the processes and senses of belonging and place-making experienced by the participants. Key themes raised by the research include the tension between human rights, dignity and humiliation; the role of nation states in the production of refugees; the wider context of globalization and neo-liberalism; and the possibilities for a radical democratic imaginary in arts-based research with migrants.
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‘Voice’, listening and social justice: A multimediated engagement with new immigrant communities and publics in Ireland
Authors: Alan Grossman and Àine O’BrienThis article foregrounds the methodological and curatorial concerns of a cross-sectoral public media programme titled the ‘Forum on Migration and Communication’ (FOMACS), which produces film, photographic, digital storytelling, print media and radio stories on the topic of migration into Ireland. Framing two key FOMACS projects using animation and digital storytelling with young children and asylum seekers, this article centrally engages with an ongoing problematic situated across the nexus between participatory edia, the ‘politics of voice’, and the politics or ethics of listening. FOMACS’ deployment of participatory research methods – aimed at prising open a space for collaborative media production, facilitating the articulation of diverse immigrant and non-immigrant ‘voices’ – instantiates the problematic notion of ‘giving voice’, a practice associated with media advocacy and community development projects. This article addresses the question of how to negotiate a working dialectic between a ‘politics of voice’ and ‘political listening’, specifically within the field of participatory media production and in the context of challenges posed by the FOMACS mission, which aims to engage diverse audiences by creating a continuum between production, dissemination and reception, together with impact on public policy through the advocacy work of its migration NGO partners.
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The emporium’s new clothes? The New Zealand-based ‘World of Wearable Art’ as a mobile urban imaginary
Authors: Nick Perry and Ann PoulsenIn 1987 a young artist named Susan Moncrief first organized a ‘wearable art’ show as a means of publicizing a local art gallery located in the small provincial New Zealand city of Nelson. Both the origins of the concept (clothing as art) and its practical expression were very modest, but it subsequently became an annual event, growing in size and complexity and attracting ever more elaborate and ornate contributions. It is now officially designated as WOW, the World of Wearable Art, and features on government websites, attracting corporate sponsorship, prime ministerial patronage, and extensive media coverage and contributions from a dozen countries. In this article its development and trajectory is interpreted as mediated in and through its relation to the dominant urban imaginaries and cultural aspirations of Wellington and Auckland as, respectively, New Zealand’s political and economic capitals. For in 2005, the organizers determined that it had outgrown the infrastructural capacity of the location from which it had first derived. Thus, although Nelson now has a museum dedicated to the display of some of the works that have been featured over the years, the event itself has migrated to Wellington as New Zealand’s capital city, where it attracts an audience of around 35,000. In WOW, ‘globalization from below’ thus engages with ‘globalization from above’, via an event in which conceptions of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ are perforce both understood and contested.
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Beyond cultural reterritorialization: Rapping for Islam in London’s East End
More LessThis article explores the role of contemporary music in the lives of young Muslims in Great Britain. For this group, music has emerged as a powerful tool in the negotiation of personal and group identity, and is also a marker of the way in which Muslims have arguably come to be positioned differently to other diasporic groups, notably Afro-Caribbean, in recent times (Modood 2006). In contrast to recent (macro) sociological analysis that has compared Islamic life and culture in different European countries, and also that which has focused on specific, local communities (the ‘micro’ approach), the research reported upon here has operated at a ‘meso’ level: mapping the interactions between local Muslim social/cultural spaces (specifically, Tower Hamlets and Camden in East London) with the supranational expression of Muslim identity as represented by the ummah. More specifically, this article focuses on Islamic hip hop culture as a medium for articulating complex cultural representations at the individual and collective level.
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Performative belongings and dis/locations in between continents: The making of a children’s book
More LessIn this article I describe the ideas behind one of my Ph.D. texts, a children’s book entitled Mona’s and Sona’s Monday that I co-produced with the graphic designer Anu Merenlahti. The book was published in 2007 by All Our Children. The story begins in the morning when twin girls Sona and Mona wake up, and follows them through the course of their day: to the pre-school, to their friend’s kebab restaurant, to their mother’s shop and back home. On their daily journey the girls travel in time as well as space. They live in Finland, but their other ‘home’ country, Gambia, is present in their discussions with each other and with the rest of the characters in the book. Both in the written story and the illustrations, West African and Gambian elements are woven together through European and Finnish storylines. The ‘plot’ and layout of the book explore in-between experiences and hybrid realms as part of their aesthetic objective.
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Migratory words, migratory worlds: From Liverpool (United Kingdom) to Liverpool (New South Wales), and back again
More LessThis visual essay reflects on being caught up in the idea and process of migration, mutation and transplantation. Inspired by the postminimalist works of Robert Smithson, especially his transplanting of art outside the gallery, my art practice is intimately related to the earth, to deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the creation of earthworks. Through two sets of photographs I explore my own and my fellow Tasmanians’ special connection to the earth, first, in depictions of my own earthworks, and second, in a series made with women in a women’s prison around the theme of the ‘community garden’.
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REVIEWS
Authors: David Kendall and Luke McDonaghGLOBAL CHILDREN, GLOBAL MEDIA: MIGRATION, MEDIA AND CHILDHOOD, LIESBETH DE BLOCK AND DAVID BUCKINGHAM (2010) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 978023027344, Paperback, £20.99 CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS: PERSPECTIVES ON TRANSLOCATION IN A GLOBAL AGE, CHRIS PRENTICE, VIJAY DEVADAS AND HENRY JOHNSON (EDS) (2010) contributors: Andrew Barrett, Dan Bendrups, Diana Brydon, Vijay Devadas, Jacob Edmund, Alyth Grant, Philip Hayward, Henry Johnson, Mary McLaughlin, Brett Nicholls, Chris Prentice, Kate Roy, Simon Ryan, Paola Voci, New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi B. V., ISBN 978-90-420-3003-9, Hb, 76/$106
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On digital crossings in Europe
Authors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
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