Those were some very inspiring and productive days! Between 8-10 September the HERA “Refugee youth in public space” research team visited Hitdorf to catch up and work together on new ideas. Taking up residence in the lovely Open Sky House, we were pampered with good food, enjoyed great views of the Rhine river and relaxed…

Logo copyright: Simone Fass, Julia Rademacker and Sylvia Drevin   As part of the Intercultural Weeks, the interactive window exhibition “(Not) My City: Scopes and Boundaries in Urban Space” was ceremoniously opened on 2 October with a street party at Pöge Haus, a cultural centre in Leipzig. The findings were visualised for the exhibition by…

  A festive conclusion on the 10th of October marked the closing of the exposition Thuis in De Molenwijk (Feeling at home in De Molenwijk), a photo and story project around homemaking from the perspectives of newcomers with a refugee background. The event caught the interest of many enthusiastic people who wanted to have a…

The 24th of June, the Dutch team and BOOST Amsterdam organized a local workshop at BOOST Amsterdam to present the findings of the first part of the Dutch case study. After a delicious buffet, Mieke Kox shared the results of 210 hours of participatory fieldwork at BOOST, 18 interviews with youngsters and informal conversations with…

9 to 11 June, NIAS organized the conference ‘Studies of Beloninging. Mapping Belonging as a field of study and establishing future networks’. We organized a panel session on ‘Refugee Youth and Place Attachch ment in Public Space’ in which we presented some of the findings of the four countries represented in our research project.

HERA funds several interesting and innovative research projects. The 8th of June, participants of three of these research projects (‘Everyday Experiences of Young Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Public Spaces’,  ”Moving Marketplaces’ and ‘Cemetries and Crematoria’) had a dialogue. They discussed what the mobilities framework brings to the understanding of public space and migrant and…

Experiences of lockdown for asylum-seeking and refugee women is exacerbating their already challenging circumstances and further damaging their wellbeing and mental health. The gendered responsibilities of parenting and caregiving compounded with a punitive asylum system and the impacts of lockdown have resulted in a distinct crisis, often concealed from mainstream news coverage. That is what…

‘Feeling at home in De Molenwijk’ This is the title of the photovoice project that Karine Versluis (Picture Bridge Foundation), Framer Framed and Mieke Kox and Ilse van Liempt (Utrecht University) will organize for refugees and asylum seekers in the Molenwijk. Participants will be asked to take pictures of private and/or public places in the…

Ilse van Liempt has been interviewed for the Cities of Refuge podcast on the meaning of public space for refugee integratio‪n. She discusses some of the findings of our research project. She addresses aspects such as the difference between formal and informal spaces of encounters, the everyday expressions of integration, the ways refugees claim public space,…

5 March 2021, we had a meeting with all stakeholders and researchers. The researchers discussed their preliminary findings and the stakeholders shared inspiring examples of art-related projects for young refugees and asylum-seekers.  We exchanged all kind of needs in terms of the project and ideas for our planned knowledge sharing activities. This brought about all…