Day 74, Year of #Mygration: The Ethics and Politics of the Migration and Refugee Crisis

Written by Dr Giota Alevizou.

"An example of a prior collaboration among academics from The Open University, Oxford University and the Migration Museum Project, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and ACTREAL who together worked on the ethics and politics of the refugee crisis. We ran an exhibition with the Migration Museum, a theatre project with ActReal and recorded some of the activities with illustrations by Laura Sorvala.

"The aim of the exhibition was to represent the current migration crisis without being voyeuristic, sensationalising the experience or using it to make fairly easy political points.

"In order to empathise with different stories a series of events was organised. You can listen to different views and experiences of the exhibition on the Migration Museum website. The website gives you the chance to view images in picture galleries, to listen to stories from the Listening Hut installation. You can also see how the curators created a Twitter exhibition tour of the exhibition on Storify and an exhibition video.

"The exhibition was staged in June 2016 in London, where it had over 4000 visitors.

"A booklet was produced which shows the project teams’ reflections of the exhibition; they raise issues of how the exhibition and individual stories affected their understandings and perceptions and experiences as active audiences and participants. These thoughts were recorded after the end of the exhibition which happened to be days after the result of the EU Referendum. In the booklet, you can read these reflections, which were visualised by the graphic artist Laura Sorvala."

This post was originally published on OpenLearn on 21 August 2017.

Dr Giota Alevizou is a digital culture and social media scholar, with an interest on the intersections of politics, technology and collective expression. She has served as Research Fellow, and is currently a consultant visiting fellow, in the Strategic Research Area Citizenship and Governance.