Pilar Orrego-Gañán will give a talk about a project that focused on collaboration between the Human Activity Laboratory-Identity, Health, and Social Change group at the University of Seville in Spain, and several local organizations dedicated to migrant reception. These organizations include Sevilla Acoge, Fundación CEPAIM, Alianza por la Solidaridad, and Fundación Triángulo. The project involved art workshops for refugees from Latin America and North Africa during the spring of this year.
Lauri Pynnönen, Senior Education Specialist at World Bank and Doctoral Researcher, SEDUCE doctoral program (Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki) and Professor Annalisa Sannino (Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere Universityi) will give their comments before a general discussion of the topic with the seminar audience.
When: Monday 9.12.2024 at 10.15-11.45
Where: Room K108 (Minerva Building)
Abstract
Experiencing critical conflicts about asylum seeking through art workshops: An activity-theoretical analysis
Every year the lives of millions of people are shaken by conflicts, persecution, insecurity or human rights violations. In not a small number of cases, these people are forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in another country. Since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, these cases have been rising steadily.
These numbers represent the magnitude of a problem that materialises in the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Having the strength not only to achieve flight in conditions of extreme risk, but also to try to rebuild daily life in an unfamiliar place, is a characteristic of the life’s trajectory of these people. While it is still necessary to point out the real trauma they have to face, it is also important to give visibility to the constant creation of intelligent and creative solutions that asylum seekers come up with in order to move forward.
This work is the result of a collaboration between the Human Activity Laboratory-Identity, Health, and Social Change group (University of Seville, Spain) and several migrant reception organisations in the same city (Sevilla Acoge, Fundación CEPAIM, Alianza por la solidaridad and Fundación Triángulo). It deals with an experience of art workshops with refugees from Latin America and North Africa, which took place during the spring of this year.
In the workshops, called “Stories that Matter”, a combination of visual arts and storytelling techniques was used to talk about the most striking moments of the participants' asylum-seeking journey. The use of artistic techniques was based on the principles of narrative therapy and was central to the intervention as a way of enhancing the creativity of the participants. The aim of the intervention was to address the most crucial moments in their stories and explore collectively how they found possible pathways to healing.
This present work draws on the concept of experiencing to examine how the participants reflected on critical conflicts related to the asylum-seeking process during the workshops. Using a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory framework, the analysis examines the refugees' discourse and the use of creative tasks in the process of experiencing their trauma in the conversations that took place.
Bio
Pilar Orrego-Gañán is a student on the PhD programme in Psychology at the University of Sevilla (Spain), in the line of research on psychosocial processes, diversity, citizenship, and culture. She is part of the research group Human Activity Laboratory-Identity, Health, and Social Change. Her thesis aims to better understand the process of reconstructing the identity of refugees and to analyse how it can protect their psychological well-being.