Keynote speakers:

Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL
Dr Esa Aldegheri, University of Glasgow

How have creative practices been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century? This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which have been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex. These evolving geographies encompass precarious infrastructures of asylum with a proliferation of camps, detention centres, and ‘contingency’ accommodation in hotels, military barracks, ships, and islands. Meanwhile, new dispersal policies have led to refugees and asylum seekers increasingly being settled away from urban centres in depopulated or rural areas in many places, including Europe, the US and Australia, sometimes in marginalised and remote localities. In these shifting geographies of asylum, displaced arts – creative practices defined at once by the absence or loss of place and their located nature in a new environment – can offer strategies of resistance, tools of documentation and mapping, or means to cultivate new senses of belonging, community, and integration.

Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as the social sciences, which has emphasised the importance of creative practices and methodologies in migration studies, the symposium will focus on the situated nature of displaced arts as it asks: How have displaced arts and indigenous knowledges been used as creative placemaking practices to navigate unfamiliar environments? How might they render obscured or hidden geographies of asylum more visible? How can creative initiatives facilitate integration in new (and sometimes unlikely) sites of refugee resettlement? What cross-cultural artistic practices have emerged from these evolving geographies? And how might these practices form new socialities and solidarities which transcend or challenge the sovereignty of national borders asserted through asylum regimes?

This will also be an opportunity to consider methodological questions and tensions around how we engage with the arts in migration studies. How might creative methodologies facilitate collaborative research practices in migration studies which disrupt hegemonic power dynamics and forms of knowledge production? What burdens do we place on these arts when using them to navigate geographies of asylum? And what can be gained by focusing specifically on representations of place in these arts?

Papers are welcome from scholars or creative practitioners working across disciplines relating to migration and the arts, including: migration studies, literary studies, visual arts, film studies, cultural geography, and the environmental humanities. In addition to conventional academic papers, we welcome other presentation formats appropriate to the topic (such as practice-based outputs).

We especially welcome papers from PGRs, ECRs, and scholars working on Global South contexts or based at Global South institutions.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Creative encounters and exchanges between refugees and receiving communities in contexts of North-South and South-South migration.
- The relationship between artistic practices and infrastructures of the asylum-industrial complex.
- Representations of border crossings, border ‘spectacles’, and internal borders of exclusion.
- Creative initiatives emerging in the context of new dispersal policies extending across urban and rural/remote areas.
- Creative practices in response/relation to hostile environments.
- Arts and asylum advocacy.
- The spatial politics and aesthetics of displaced arts.
- Place-based creative initiatives for asylum seekers and refugees facilitated by local government, charities, and NGOs (e.g. community performances, exhibitions, art installations, festivals, and storytelling projects).
- Multilingualism, translation, and language acquisition in/through displaced arts.
- Evolving public policy on creative strategies of refugee integration.
- Collaborative and creative methodologies in migration studies.
- Connections between contemporary geographies of asylum and histories of colonialism, de-industrialisation, and austerity.
- Transnational creative solidarities across geographies of asylum.
-Technologies of asylum and forms of digital storytelling.
- Creative engagements with the temporalities of asylum.
- Future imaginaries of asylum.

Please submit abstracts (250 words) for fifteen-minute papers and a short bio (100 words) to displacedarts25@gmail.com by 15th January. Speakers will be notified by 31st January.

The symposium is being organised by Dr Annie Webster (University of Edinburgh) and will take place in-person at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.

Please send any queries to displacedarts25@gmail.com