Listening to Hamra: Ethical Considerations

In this post, Refugee Hosts Researcher, Leonie Harsch discusses a soundscape recorded in Hamra, Beirut and reflects on the ethical considerations associated with producing and disseminating recordings of displacement and its responses.  You can listen to the soundscape that accompanies this post below.  If you found this piece of interest, you can visit further soundscapes…

The Active Citizens Sound Archive

‘A critical mass of articles and incendiaries, reflections and rallying cries, has skewered the notion that refugee storytelling is somehow inherently useful, and that ‘giving voice’ is a benevolent practice.’ In this piece, Tom Western, argues that within these reductive narratives of ‘refugeeness’ the ‘complexities, creativities, histories, humour, ambiguities, and political struggles go missing’ and…

Sounding Stories, Telling Sounds: Listening with Displacement and Emplacement

This presentation was given by Tom Western at  the Refugee Hosts International Conference as part of Panel 1:  Disrupting Humanitarian Narratives. The presentation puts sound and listening at the centre of forced migration, asking how they inform experiences of displacement and practices of emplacement. Sound is an access point to the agency of people who have crossed borders:…

ΤΣΣΣΣ ΤΣΣΣ ΤΣΣ ΣΣΣ – Summer in Athens: A Sound Essay

This soundscape of Athens, Greece, offers an evocative and immersive insight into sounds of everyday life in the city. Athens has become home to many refugees from Syria and elsewhere, who have brought with them new sounds documented in this piece. Engaging with spaces of refuge through sound is a method that can help us…