ARENA: Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives
"Storytelling is an act of profound hospitality. It always has been; story is an ancient form of generosity, an ancient form that will tell us everything we need to know about the contemporary world. Story has always been a welcoming-in, is always one way or another a hospitable meeting of the needs of others, and a porous artform where sympathy and empathy are only the beginning of things. The individual selves we all are meet and transform into something open and communal. […] We will tell it like it is, and we will work towards the better imagined." (Ali Smith)
ARENA was spawned by the so-called ‘European refugee-crisis’ in 2015 and the often one-sided accounts of forced migration that have been shaping the dominant refugee discourse ever since. Its aim is to seek modes of interaction and narration able to augment new informed ways of seeing involuntary migration and to do so in collaboration with refugees. To this end, a teaching initiative has been developed that brings together students of English and refugees over a period of four months during which they put into narrative form their exchanges on involuntary migration. The resultant journals are gathered in ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives) and shall eventually be housed in DAM (Dokumentationsarchiv Migration Tirol) and thus made accessible to an international readership.
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Contact
ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Helga Ramsey-Kurz · Department of English · University of Innsbruck · Innrain 52/III · A-6020 Innsbruck · E: ARENA@uibk.ac.at