ARTS BASED MIGRATION INQUIRIES. Greetings from Madrid!

We are back! Last week we had a workshop in Copenhagen at the conference Nordic Migration Research, with five interesting presentation on The Everyday Politics of Undocumented Migrants (abstracts are published on website).This week I am visiting Madrid where the IMISCOE-conference is taking place. This year it covers the theme “Immigration, Social Cohesion and Social Innovation”. Together with my colleague Erica Righard I put together the workshop ARTS BASED MIGRATION INQUIRIES. Connections between arts and social sciences in practice and research. Starting point for the workshop was that migration in all its complexity should be studied from multiple perspectives and with varied approaches. We wanted to explore migration beyond the traditional boundaries of social science by integrating arts practice as a base for analysis of migration. Rolling (2010) has stated that “Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher’s practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the sciences cannot go”. Against this background, it is relevant to explore what we can learn about migration from arts-based research. Persefoni Myrtou in her presentation talked about a larger project in different European countries “Migrating Art Academies” which aims at transferring art and scientific knowledge production outside the academia. That way hierarchical structures among players and roles may be re-defined. I myself had a presentation about the No Border Musical in Malmö, drawing on Rancière’s notions of politics and police (paper was written in collaboration with Emma Söderman); and a third presentation concerned irregularity in the US. Carl Bagley talked inspiring about combining arts-based practice (performance, installation, photo, poetry, etc.) with social science analytical perspectives and methodologies (ethnography, visual sociology, etc.). Together with Ricardo Castro-Salazae, he published a book on this, using a Critical Race Theory approach. To conclude the panel included stimulating dialogues about arts-based research within the field of migration.