Project description
Learning from African refugee stories
Countless refugees have travelled from and through the African Great Lakes region to escape the insecurity of their homelands. Based on new methodologies and a unique emphasis on subjective experience, the EU-funded TMSS project will examine the life narratives of displaced Burundians, Congolese and Rwandan people traversing the Global North and Global South. It will investigate how life narratives change due to interactions between refugees and local populations, as well as between the refugees themselves. It will also explore the role preconceptions play in shaping relationships in different communities where they transit and settle. The project is designed to change policymakers' perceptions and encourage community projects that can help prevent the plight of refugees.
Objective
This project aims to map and examine to what extent, and under what conditions, the life narratives of the Africa Great Lakes Region (AGLR) refugees evolve, travel, and transform across time and space. It will explore how these narratives shape relationships among refugees and communities in countries of transition and destination. It examines how life narratives change as the AGLR refugees encounter preconceived notions about themselves and their communities in host countries. The study will rely on innovative methodological approaches that will include multi-spatial and multi-temporal oral narratives developed via an African orature- and arts-inspired approach. Respondents will include refugees from AGLR, in both the Global North and Global South. The project will produce new theoretical and methodological knowledge combining Memory Studies and Migration Studies. This approach is designed to overcome limitations in global scholarship on the neglected narratives of millions of AGLR refugees who continue to move through the Global North and South due to insecurity in their home countries. Through both academic outputs and those aimed at a general audience, TMSS study's findings will challenge policymakers to think differently when designing programs geared towards refugees. Insights gained from studying these narratives will inspire new community visions and projects that shape relationships between refugees and their host societies in countries of transition and destination. Life narratives of refugees have been an object of scholarly and policy studies before, but existing literature fails to engage with the subjective experiences of refugees as they navigate global contexts.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3000 Leuven
Belgium