Refugee Week Arts
Multi-platform project comprising a series of co-curated exhibitions, poetry performances, site-specific art installations, films and workshops, investigating the challenges that refugee communities in the UK are facing today, as well as how such difficulties may be eased through creative interventions on a local level.
- Submitting institution
-
Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-26-0000
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton, UK
- Brief description of type
- Multi-platform project developed and materialised through a series of co-curated exhibitions, poetry performances, site-specific art installations, films and workshops, presented within gallery spaces and re-appropriated abandoned shops and warehouses.
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- May
- Year
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Refugee Week Arts (2015–19) is a multi-platform project by Nelson Douglas, which investigates the challenges that refugee communities in
the UK are facing today, as well as how such difficulties may be eased through creative interventions on a local level. The research developed
and materialised through a series of co-curated exhibitions, poetry performances, site-specific art installations, films and workshops,
presented within formal gallery spaces and re-appropriated towncentre abandoned shops and warehouses. The Refugee Week Arts
project drew on Douglas’s long-standing engagement with statutory organisations and charities that predominately represent people on
the fringes of society (young people excluded from education, exoffenders, disabled people and new communities). It also drew on an
earlier commission by the Museums and Libraries Association focusing on individuals that migrated to Whitmore Reans, Wolverhampton
(2006–07). Following this initial commission, Douglas was approached by third and voluntary sector organisations concerned about the
number of homeless and destitute refugees and asylum seekers in the borough of Wolverhampton, as well as by documented incidents of
hostility from residents and the media in 2014. Through Refugee Week Arts, Douglas put forward a distinct combination of artistic intervention tools, based on a model of long-term engagement. This gradual and multi-disciplinary participatory art approach has sought to challenge prejudice against refugees and negative stereotypes by empowering refugees to communicate their individual stories and experiences to their host communities through art. Douglas’ research was informed by policy reports on migration (UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency), theoretical analyses in political theory (Hall, 2012; Fine and Ypi, 2016), and by the examination of the representation of such issues
in popular media (Celik, 2015). During the six years of developing the Refugee Week Arts project, Douglas received support from local
housing associations, refugee charities in Europe, the Archdiocese of Birmingham, and local council departments.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
