Framing
Precarious Arts-based research
Method
A Post-migrant Approach
Relevance
Bibliography
Framing
This is an arts-based research study and worker’s inquiry, based on my (Marc Herbst’s) work in refugee houses in Leipzig Germany that started in 2018. I had an at-will contract to provide puppet-building workshops in a settlement house in the city. The children there were then part of the refugee wave that began leaving Syria in 2015, which Germany initially greeted warmly. In summer and autumn 2022, I conducted interviews with other workers and did research. This website is a part of a project that will also include an illustrated book with more fictional texts. For more info, write marc (at) joaap.org
Though the work felt innately meaningful, as a foreigner myself in the country, my relationship to the job site was one of alienation. In my conception of this kind of work, it’d be a volunteer or community level organizations up and down the scale of work. But it was not like that at all, the refugees fleeing war zones who had made it to Germany were entering a bureaucratic system of governmental regulations and funding and mostly internationally known non-profit organisations. As Cassie Thornton and Max Haiven say, this is a system that provides a solid-care, as defined as, “Solid care-orism occurs when a rhetoric of care is used to justify, mystify, or rationalize something…typically in the the context of a system of domination and serving that system’s reproduction.” (1)
On precarious Arts-based research
With little understanding on how Germany and these non-profits manage the things for refugees, I had little understanding of how the whole system operated. As a precarious worker with no really meaningful relationship to the institutions that were employing me, I initially had little reason to figure out the layers of relation and possibility entangled in the work.
Arts-based research theorist Irit Rogoff, in her practice through the Freethought Collective suggests the importance of doing arts-based research from a perspective of a precarious researcher. This project is just that, it aims for a critical grasp of social processes facilitated by and through precarious labor towards three ends
1) to support the most vulnerable among us (asylum seekers)
2) to critically embrace the possibilities for precarious labor available in a wealthy country like Germany
3) to apprehend how systemic insecurity and precarity of migrants and care workers in the name of caring relations allows for systems that normalize mundane violence against vulnerable people worldwide.
Method
This is a worker inquiry because I interviewed ten workers with arts and culture backgrounds who are working directly with immigrants living in settlement houses. My interest primarily regarded those who worked with migrants whose asylum claims who had not been settled.
This is an arts-based inquiry because my exchange with kids that helped me develop a sense for the limits and best-practices of the work was through arts-based exchanges. Over the course of four years, we built puppets, sewed dolls and pillows, drew comic books, painted, drew, played drama games, made jewelry, sculpted in clay, went on hikes and so much more.
You will find at the bottom of this page a research bibliography of what I read in order to deepen my appreciation of the work.
The longer I worked in the homes, the more curious I was about research on this kind of encounter. I could not find any English-language resources and research around the reality of doing cultural work within settlement homes. I wanted to know if the difficulties at work were normal or if they were a result my own incompetence. The interviews I conducted confirmed that the difficulties were not just mine.
While I did find that there was plentiful resources around migrants, refugees and arts, there were scant resources around cultural work within refugee settlement homes- where asylum claims had not yet been settled. There was also little discussion around the precarious labor there responsible for delivering care through at will contracts.
A Post-migrant Approach
While I usually work within horizontal collectives within feminist-oriented institutions, I left my assumptions at the door in order to get familiar with what I hoped was a system that operated for the benefit of the children and others in the settlement houses. Inside the homes’ walls or beyond them when we went on field trips, I found the work to be far different then what I assumed it would be. This surprise about the actual work, and a critical reflection on the Institutional arrangements and funding that allow for this kind of labor drove the development of this study… over the course of four years. It took quite some time for my critical mind to catch up to the actually alienating experience of working in a large settlement home.
The house had its charms: some of the homes’ staff and especially the kids and teens and the parents we met were really welcoming. Overall, it felt like the kid’s rambunctious energy was a kick in the face to the difficulties that life had given them in their countries of origin and also in Germany. Me and my co-workers never discussed the kids as asylum seekers who might not be able to stay, rather, we treated them as possibly traumatized kids who deserved the best of care. Many of my interview subjects discussed with pride how happy they were to travel with the kids and show them the diversity of experience they would come to enjoy as residents of our town. Many also discussed the pride they felt caring for these kids in public, just like any other child and care-giver relationship visible on the street, streetcar, swimming pool or playground.
The assumption of this study is that all of us are in a post-migrant situation, reworking our relations in an always changing social and cultural world. No one is native, no one has more right than any other to claim their place in Leipzig.
Relevance
As climate change’s disruptions in the entanglements between natural and human created systems create ever more social disruptions and refugees (2), it is important to get a handle on all aspects of refugee encounters in so-called host countries. The experience of precariously working (short-term contracts) with these children is important. It is a scenario where those working with likely traumatized children have diminished resources and leverage to address and properly address the traumas. This study finds (published elsewhere) that all precarious workers have found, over time, ways to make the work meaningful while also not making situations worse for the kids is important. This, because, as research on trauma suggests- trauma is more likely cause by situations occuring between people rather than between people and nature. We often cause each other’s problems, not the changing terms for life (3). Precarious workers have learned to be part of a solution different than state practice to allow for cultural and arts education to be traumatizing.
- See Haiven, Max & Thornton, Cassie. “Care-Orism Round 2”. Lecture at Care-Orism, A Study Day. 2022: Berlin.
- The war in Syria, and thus the facts of its refugees has been connected to climate change. See for example, https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-war-in-syria/a-56711650. Additionally, the so-called “migrant caravans” at the Mexican/American boarder have also been connected to changes in climate in Central America. See for example, https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/09/how-climate-change-catalyzes-more-migration-central-america
- “In general, acts of violence such as rape, torture, and armed conflict have far more devastating effects on their victims than do natural disasters or accidents.” in Fegert et. al. 2018.
Bibliography
Alves, Ana & Jakob, Antonia. “Re-voicing the unheard: Meta-study and arts-based interventions for social inclusion of refugees and asylum-seekers” Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 2_2021, pp. 93-112.
Bettini, Giovanni, Nicholas Beuret et. al. “On the Frontlines of Fear: Migration and Climate Change in the Local Context of Sardinia, Italy”. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(3): 322-340.
Cobo-Guevarra, Paula & Herbst, Marc & Zechner, Manuela. Situating Ourselves in Displacement. 2018: Leipzig, Minor Compositions/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest.
Couronne, Celiine. What Can Art Teach us about Integration? 2015: Sweden, MA ThesisLinköping University.
Culbreth Mejia, Carolien. Examining the Therapeutic Process with Refugee Youth, MA Thesis, 2019: University of Miami.
Fegert, J.M. et. al. “Psychosocial problems in traumatized refugee families: overview of risks and some recommendations for support services” Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health 12:5, 2015.
Geiger, Jordan. “An Adaptive Architeture for Refugee Urbanism”, ACADIA, pp.179-182. 2013.
Greater Forms. Work Book, Zu kultureller Teilhabe und künstlerischer Kollaboration, 2022: Leipzig.
Guruge, Sepali et. al. “Refugee Youth and Migration: Using Arts-Informed Research to Understand changes in Their Roles and Responsibilities” Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol. 16, No. 3, Art. 15. 2015.
Haiven, Max & Thornton, Cassie. “Care-Orism Round 2”. Lecture at Care-Orism, A Study Day. 2022: Berlin.
Hansen, Christina. Solidarity in Diversity. 2019: Sweden, Dissertation Malmö University.
Holert, Tom. Knowledge Beside Itself. 2019: Berlin, Sternberg.
Holm-Hadulla, Rainer M., Maland, Kimberly & Sabina Pauen. “Discovery of primary communicative creativity Playing with children in a refugee camp” Creativity Conference (poster) 2019; Ashland, Oregon.
Lenette, Caroline. Arts-Based Methods in Refugee Research, 2019: Springer, Singapore.
Lewson, Brigitte et. al. Praxishandbuch, Konstrucktiv handeln in der Migrationsgesellschaft. 2021: Germany, NeMO.
Mahiey, Rilke & Van Caudenberg, Rut. “Young refugee and locals living unde rthe same roof”, Comparative Migration Studies, 8:12, 2020.
Martiniello, Marco. “Researching arts, culture, migration and change: a multi (trans)disciplinary challenge for international migration studies”, Comparative Migration Studies (2022) 10:7.
McGregor, Elaine, & Ragab, Nora. The Role of Culture and the Arts in the Integration of Refugees and Migrants: Member State Questionnaires, 2016: European Expert Network, Maastricht.
Mijic, Ana & Parzer, Michael. “The Art of Arriving: A New Methodological Approach to Reframing ‘Refugee Integration’ “. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Volume 21: 1–9, 2022.
Mrazova, Lucia et. al. “Pilot Action Conclusions (Work Paper)” Leibniz Institute of Regional Geography, 2021.
Nunn, Caitlin, “The participatory arts-based research project as an exceptional sphere of belonging”. Qualitative Research, Vol. 22(2) pp.251-268. 2020.
Rogoff, Irit. “Becoming Research”. The Contemporary Journal 2, December 10, 2019.
Ortan, Liz. “Photography and Integration”, in Participatory Arts with Young Refugees. 2009: London, Oval House.
Schinkel, Willem. “Against ‘immigrant integration’: for an end to neocolonial knowledge production”, Comparative Migration Studies (2018) 6:31.
Toll, Mary & Halley, Rebecca. “The Role of Arts-Based Research in Creating Safe Spaces for Newcomer Refugees”. The Morning Watch: Educational and Social Analysis, Vol 46. No 1-2, Fall, 2018.
Tuul, Willkommen ohne Paternalismus, 2019: Glokal.
https://www.glokal.org/publikationen/willkommen-ohne-paternalismus/
UNHCR. Teaching About Refugees. 2019: UNHCR, Austria.
Zechner, Manuela.”Childcare commons: Of feminist subversions of community and communie in Barcelona”, Ephemera Journal 22(2), 2022.