Refugee Month Special - June 2024 Conversations/Indaba

Join us for a series of Refugee Month Special conversations looking at work refugee and non-refugee artists, academics, activists and art spaces are doing at the intersection where forced migration and the arts meet.

In light of how June 17-23 is Refugee Week and June 20 is World Refugee Day, the conversations are taking place on Thursday, June 6, 13 and 27 and are scheduled to run from 6pm till 7.30pm (UK time) on each of the three days.

Attendance and participation are free and open to all.

SCHEDULE & REGISTRATION LINKS

●  6 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Children & Young People in Focus, with Dr Doroty Sato (University of Louisville), and Dr Anna Skeels (Cardiff University) (Zoom registration link) 

●  13 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Theatre, Solidarity, Connection & Deep Listening, with Kate Duffy-Syedi (Phosphoros Theatre), and Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz (University of Ottawa) (Zoom registration link), and 

●  27 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Palestine in Focus, with Dr Maiada Aboud (Zoom registration link)

Themes and art forms that will be discussed include children's drawings, video, poetry, theatre, and art as a vehicle for solidarity, care, deep listening and political liberation.

THE SESSIONS

6 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Children & Young People in Focus, with Dr Doroty Sato (University of Louisville), and Dr Anna Skeels (Cardiff University)

Dr Doroty Sato has a background in psychology, and has worked in organizations as a human resources professional in different industries until she volunteered for refugees in Houston, which changed her perspective on life. She then decided to change her career and applied for a PhD in Social Work to study child mass migration. Her dissertation focused on Latino children crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, in particular, and examined the intersection of their journey with religiosity and spirituality depicted in their drawings. Doroty Sato likes to say that she is a storyteller about these children

Dr Anna Skeels is a Research Fellow in the Social Science Research Park (SPARK) in Cardiff University.  She has a PhD from the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University on the participation in protection of Congolese refugee children in Uganda. Her personal research interests include children and modern slavery, refugee and migration studies, children’s rights and protection, conducting research with potentially vulnerable groups in low income and challenging settings (including humanitarian settings overseas) and the use of participatory and creative methodologies. She has worked in the humanitarian sphere, for example as a Consultant for UNHCR (in Kenya, Jordan and Nepal) and as the lead for Save the Children on an academic-practitioner collaboration measuring the separation of children in emergencies in Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of the conversation, Anna Skeels will be showing and discussing a short 5-minute video based on the poems created by a group of young people affected by human trafficking who migrated to the UK. These ten young people formed a young people's advisory group to help steer Skeels' research evaluating support for children affected by modern slavery in England and Wales. They were supported to develop and perform poems related to the research findings by a community-based artist and performance poet.

13 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Theatre, Solidarity, Connection & Deep Listening, with Kate Duffy-Syedi (Phosphoros Theatre), and Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz (University of Ottawa)

Kate Duffy-Syedi is an artist academic based in London, UK. She is co-artistic director of Phosphoros Theatre, who create nationally touring productions and community drama projects with refugees aged 16-25. She is awaiting the viva for her practice research PhD (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) which explores refugee performance, care and solidarity with a focus on the experiences of unaccompanied minor youth. She is a visiting lecturer at Royal Central, focusing on applied theatre and migration. She has worked with unaccompanied minor refugees in London for over ten years. During Refugee Week Phosphoros Theatre will be putting on a week of drama workshops for refugee youth in schools, colleges, charities and adult asylum seekers living in hotels. In this session, Duffy-Syedi explores the thinking behind these workshops, which speak to this year’s Refugee Week theme ‘Our Home’. Using drama, poetry and visual art, the workshops will culminate in the creation of a public art piece reflecting radically hopeful futures, outside of conceptualisations of hope bound by linearity. Co-led by 10 facilitators and assistants with lived experience of displacement, these workshops offer relevant insight into how arts based practice can provide opportunities for solidarity, connection and deep listening.

Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz is an actress, theatre director and professor. Her research expertise is focused on diversity and intercultural dialogue in performance arts. In her theatre performances, she explores the intimacy and the political aspect of the testimony, with a specific interest in the aesthetic and theatrical narrative of that style. She is a professor at the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa. She is a PhD scholar in the Études et pratiques des art programs at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. She has a master’s degree in interdisciplinary theatre from the Department of Theatre at the same university (UQAM,) as well as a bachelor’s degree in acting and theatre pedagogy from the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático, in Lima, Peru. Her PhD research, "Laboratoire des Sorcières" (Laboratory of Witches) is an artistic research about feminine intercultural cohabitation in Montreal French performance arts and she works with the travel concept of praxis of decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) to question, inquire and reframe the classical canonical feminine Shakespearian characters of Lady Macbeth and the Three Witches. The notions of glottophobia or linguistic xenophobia, agency, and borderland are approached throughout feminine immigrants' presences and voices in this research.

27 June 2024 (6pm-7.30pm UK Time): Palestine in Focus, with Dr Maiada Aboud 

Dr Maiada Aboud's work deals with ways that social, religious and political structures interconnect and influence the individual. Using endurance art, Maiada's interest in social and political issues draws on a unique and personal perspective. She was born in Palestine (Christian Arab Israeli), graduated from Haifa University, and received her education in the UK where she completed her Masters at Coventry University, and her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. Her study attempts to connect cultural and political analysis to the individual’s experience by way of using performance and relating it to culture, memory, pain and social life. In this session, Dr Aboud will be exploring questions that include: How do Palestinian art deal with the fact that Palestinians are inherently invisible/Ghosted? How can art allow voiceless people to voice themselves and their Nakba (catastrophe)? and, How does art allow dead artistic agency to be reborn? 

NETWORK NOTES

[1] Forced Migration and The Arts is an international network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics, activists and art spaces from around the world. The network encourages mutual support and collaboration and hosts monthly discussion panels around forced migration and the arts. A playlist of videos of conversations we have had so far is accessible here.  

[2] We continue drawing attention to Sunday Lawrence's appeal for support. Lawrence, a refugee from South Sudan and a second year Law student at the International University of East Africa in Kampala, Uganda needs to raise €5,256 for tuition and sustenance. So far, he has raised €3,742 and needs to raise the remaining €1,514. Perhaps you can spare Lawrence a fiver (€5)?