Creative refuge: art-based research workshops with children in Palestinian refugee camps
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 21
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Tadween Publishing
- ISBN
- 9781939067104
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- 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
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2
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Creative Refuge, an equal collaboration, documents the experience of three art-based workshops conducted with children at Burj El Barajne Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Exploring children’s dreams and play, the project responds to the camp’s dense living conditions and the political constraints of its residents’ refugee status, using its limited local resources to engender community participation. The key question is how the sense of belonging present among displaced social groups can be a touchstone for political change.
The book is a document of the social/spatial findings of the workshops; a catalogue of children’s stories, dreams, play spaces, and family histories; and a manual for educators using participatory processes and contextual/situated learning for children, focusing on issues of displacement, rights, and refuge.
Published in English and Arabic, and distributed in the UK, USA and Middle East (selling 1500 copies), Creative Refuge is a key reference book for practitioners, activists, NGOs and policy-makers on displacement in the Middle East and Europe. After using it during the Talbyeh Camp Development Project in Amman to train local facilitators in participatory methods, Muna Budeiri, ICIP Deputy Director, UNRWA HQ Amman, described Creative Refuge as ‘An enormous effort that expands our notions of what’s possible in the restricted spatial and social context of a Palestine refugee camp… brimming with creativity of thought and expression.’
Awarded an A.M. Qattan and Prince Claus Fund grant, Creative Refuge raises awareness of political refuge in the Middle East by documenting the lived experience of women and children. Policy on these issues is often imposed on displaced people with little experience of their circumstances. Creative Refuge aims to influence policy through highlighting these circumstances, suggesting that if, even within the constraints political refuge, creative community is still possible, so much more could be achieved with adequate funding and greater empathy.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
