Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TMSS (Exploring Life narratives of Violence Among Refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region (AGLR))
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2025-04-30
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 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 documented and undocumented refugees from the 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.
The TMSS team has achieved important milestone in the past two years. These including hiring PhD students, appointing an advisory board and refugee research affiliates in all the countries where TMSS is working in East and Southern Africa, Europe and USA. The team has collected diverse data, ogranized trainings on ethics and data protection, trained refugee reseachers, co-led fieldwork activities with the refugee artists, organized workshops for skills transfer in Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, South Africa, Belgium and USA. TMSS has also established international scientific networks bringing together multidiscilinary teams from political science, sociology, anthropology, pyschology and linguists. The networks also include policy makers and artists. We have established strong relationships with folklorists that priviledge indegenous knowledges and languages in research on life narratives on displacement on the African Great Lakes Societies.
The TMSS project is pushing traditional methodologies by combining multi-sited ethongraphy with arts based approaches has led to both expected and unexpected findings. Through creating spaces that bring together refugee and hosts communities, we have been able to allow emergence of life narratives that are rich and multilayered.