Dr Agnes Czajka

Over the last decade, significant consideration and resource has been dedicated to attending to the complexities associated with internal and international displacement and livelihood insecurities generated by political instability and war. Displacement resulting from the protracted conflict in Syria has garnered significant media, academic and policy attention, at least some of which has focussed on agile, technology-driven education for mobile populations. Providing language, cultural, and to a lesser degree vocational education to displaced populations has been high on the agenda, as has been the development of technologies through which to enable the participation of diverse, non-sedentary and vulnerable populations in formal and informal education. Significantly less media, academic and policy attention has been paid to displacement, livelihood and food insecurities generated by a protracted crisis of a different kind: climate change. What is more, whilst the focus of educational capacity building and knowledge exchange among dispersed and vulnerable populations has been the development of mobile technology and the top-down dissemination of targeted content, fewer initiatives have focussed on the use of creative, art-based methodologies which enable a more collaborative, bottom-up approach to knowledge creation, cross-border exchange and dissemination, and which often enable the content to have greater, more poignant impact. The proposed network will bring together three small-scale arts and culture organisations across three distinct socio-cultural and physical geographies: Cuba, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Jordan. Riera Studios (Cuba). Most Mira (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Dourjan Foundation (Jordan) have been experimenting with the use of arts and humanities based methodologies to creatively and collaboratively address socio-political and environmental issues facing local communities. Facilitated by the Open University, the proposed network will: (1) Enable each organisation to extend their informal educational initiatives with local populations, building local arts and humanities based educational capacity around the effects of climate change on local communities and economies and the creative solutions developed to address these; (2) Enable marginalised and vulnerable communities at each location – including school-aged children (Cuba), rural young people (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and refugee communities (Jordan) – to acquire a variety of transferrable skills whilst developing and sharing their knowledge and experiences of climate change and food insecurity horizontally (across international borders, with other members of the network, as well as thorough co-produced, open-access online educational materials) and vertically (with local and national policy makers, researchers, and educational institutions) (3) Bring together Cuban, Bosnian and Herzegovinian, Jordanian, and UK-based researchers, arts practitioners, NGO representatives, and participants to facilitate an evidence-based reflection on the practical potential of arts and humanities based methodologies – especially participatory photography and narrative storytelling – to (a) facilitate the co-production and dissemination of knowledge locally, and across international borders; (b) ground the development of sustainable informal educational models in LMICs; and (c) generate measurable impact for marginalised communities facing protracted environmental crises and related food and livelihood insecurities in LMICs.

Artist in Residency looking at what makes home.

OU and Oxford researchers on migration, refugees and citizenship collaborate with the Migration Museum project and the International Organisation for Migration to curate and organise a month-long series of events and exhibitions focussing on the voices of refugees in Calais and the implications of the current refugee crisis for European/UK politics, society and law. The project is inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral aiming at giving a wide range of different and divergent voices a platform to discuss one of the 21st century's biggest challenge.