Participatory Action Research as a decolonial method

'I was not interested in writing a step-by-step instruction manual to reinforce the myth that research methods are linear, simple, and neutral tools,' argues Prof. Caroline Lenette in this blog describing some of the motivations, thought processes, and challenges she encountered in writing her book Participatory Action Research: Ethics and Decolonization. Writing from her "perspective…

Women as hybrid hosts: Challenging the myth of host communities

The term 'host' is widely used but often unquestioned in relation to it's meaning in displacement and migration discourse and practice. 'Hosts' are often assumed to be the long established communities in to which refugees arrive, and yet, as we have been exploring in Refugee Hosts, this is not always the case. In this blog,…

‘Behind each work there is a story of pain’: Nedhal’s art makes her happy

Nedhal uses art not just as a method of recovery from trauma and pain, but as a means of showing solidarity and welcome to new arrivals, a way of connecting with people who have experience of displacement and loss, and to bridge the gap between people from different cultures, countries and generations. These are all…

The value of everyday resilience

In this post, Caroline Lenette draws on her experience of co-producing research with refugee women with diverse backgrounds and lives. Lenette argues that resilience is not an extraordinary phenomenon embodied only by those refugees in the public eye, but something that is played out in the everyday, often mundane, and sometimes violent, lives that refugee…