Integration Through Contribution Seminar III - Beyond Borders: Art, Refugee Integration, and the Co-Creation of Cultural and Local Knowledge

The seminar series is organized by the project "Nature Welcomes All" funded by Kone Foundation, in partnership with the Biodiversity Anthropocenes Research Programme and the doctoral research programme “Entanglements of Migration and Time in Post-industrial Urban Europe" (MITIME).

Welcome to join us online!

This seminar explores how migrants and refugees enrich cultural life through art, cultural practices, and the transmission of traditional and local knowledge. It highlights the role of artistic expression in fostering integration, intercultural dialogue, and social inclusion within host communities. The seminar views migration as a dynamic process that revitalizes cultural heritage and contributes to cultural diversity, creativity, and community resilience.

‘Kenmure it’: Hospitality, Cultural Justice and Everyday Bordering

Alison Phipps (University of Glasgow, UK) and Team UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts

Abstract. Attentive to the conventions of hospitality in the focus of the seminars, and following on from the work the UNESCO Chair team this presentation will focus on the arts and cultural work which has emanated from Glasgow and become a hashtag worldwide for solidarity, through the arts. On May 13th 2021, Eid the inhabitants of Kenmure Street and the wider city of Glasgow, undertook an ordinary act of neighbourliness and an extraordinary act of artful protest. Through their actions men who had been ‘dawn raided’ and detained under the administrative procedures of immigration and border enforcement of the UK Home Office, were released from the van in which they were held and the change of “These are our neighbours, let them go” reverberated around the city, and world-wide. The hashtag “#KenmureStreet” became synonymous with neighbourliness as protest and sanctuary the leadership of New Scots and is now the subject of an award winning crowd sourced documentary: Everyone to Kenmure Street. Butler says that “revolution happens when the home is made on the street”. The presentation will explore the acts of revolutionary neighbourliness that making belonging ‘stick’ in Karin Barber’s words, and return to questions of what limits and also surprisingly, eventfully extends, hospitality. This presentation looks at the arts involved in ‘kenmuring it’ – the phrase now coined to stand in for resistance and artistic forms of activism and their place in the work of welcoming people on the move and building multilateral forms of solidarity in communities which resign from the hostilities of normativity and the state.

Alison Philipps is a UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She was De Carle Distinguished Visiting Professor at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand 2019-2020, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia in 2016, Visiting Professor at Auckland University of Technology, and Principal Investigator for 3 separate multimillion pound awards: AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state’; Cultures of Sustainable and Inclusive Peace, and as Co-Director of the Global Challenge Research Fund South South Migration Hub 2019-2024. In 2025 she as promoted to the highest professorial zone by the University of Glasgow. She is an Ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council. She received an OBE in 2012 and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2023. In 2025 she was promoted to the level for Professors of the highest academic distinction. Working at this level denotes international recognition as one of a group of world-leaders in her field of study. In 2026 she was awarded a Lifetime Innovator award by the University of Glasgow. She is an academic, activist, educator, essayist and published poet and a member of the Iona Community.

Refugee integration through artistic and cultural practice: Cultural capital, co-creation and representation

Giorgia Doná (Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK)

Abstract. This presentation discusses the role of artistic and cultural practices in fostering refugees’ integration through an examination of forced migrants’ cultural capital - social, artistic and symbolic assets that function as a relational resource for society. Drawing from interdisciplinary research-based multi-media arts practices across sites and national borders, collaborative projects such as Reversing the Gaze on Fortress Europe and the exhibition Tallash reverse the gaze of, at, and across borders, thus visually challenging bordering processes that hinder integration. Our approach to co-creation of visual narratives among researchers and artists with lived experience of displacement illustrates the value of arts-based methodologies that centre refugees’ own representations of journeys, transits, host society, home, and belonging, and highlight their cultural participation to society. The projects, positioned at the intersection of migration, cultural participation and political solidarity, belong to a new visual practice that collaboratively shape the representation of displacement and integration beyond national borders.

Giorgia Doná is Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies and co-director of the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London (UK). She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Board of Trustees at the Stuart Hall Foundation. Her research focuses on arts-based participatory methodologies; refugee voices and representation; digital migration studies; conflicts and forced migration; child and youth migration. For more than three decades she has worked as a researcher, practitioner and advocate for the rights of displaced and refugee populations in Central and North America, Eastern Africa, and Europe.

From Access to Co-Creation: Migrant Agency and Public Cultural Spaces in the Helsinki Capital Region

Eurídice Hernández Gomes (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Abstract. How can migrant-led cultural initiatives contribute to reshaping the cultural spaces of a city? This presentation examines Kolibri Festivaali, a yearly festival for multicultural families initiated by the Ibero-American community in Helsinki and developed through collaboration between migrant-led associations, artists, and Finnish public institutions. Drawing on qualitative research, including interviews with organizers, volunteers, and participants alongside participant observation across three festival editions (2023-2025), the research explores how art and community-based networks activate and reshape libraries and cultural centres as spaces for cultural expression and belonging. The case highlights migrants not simply as participants in existing cultural infrastructures, but as cultural actors who bring languages, practices, networks, and knowledge into public spaces. Through the case of Kolibri, the presentation reflects on the institutional conditions that enable such collaborations and on the potential of migrant-led artistic initiatives to contribute to more inclusive and plural cultural spaces.

Eurídice Hernández Gomes is a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki. Her research explores the intersections of migration, public and cultural spaces, and belonging, with a particular focus on Latin American communities in Finland. Drawing on ethnographic and arts-based approaches, her current doctoral research examines how urban social infrastructures shape identity construction processes among cross-cultural children and youth of Latin American backgrounds in the Helsinki Metropolitan Region. Her previous research examined public libraries as spaces of transcultural embeddedness for Latin American migrant women. Alongside her academic work, she is actively involved in Kulttuurikeskus Ninho ry, an experience that informs her interest in migrant-led cultural initiatives, community spaces, and collective practices of belonging.

If you are interested in taking part in other meetings of this seminar series, please save the dates below in your calendar: Seminar 4: Refugees as Environmental Actors: Participation in Environmental, Climate and Nature-based Activities

December 2th 2026, 10.00-12.00, online