Home away from home: A visual participatory project exploring what young people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds communicate about their everyday lives in London.

Abstract

This thesis concerns the ways in which young people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds navigate new places, negotiating conflict and creating paths to peace in London. Those with the most proximate experiences of migration are often excluded from peacebuilding processes. Coloniality entangled into the praxis of peace and conflict fashions a dogma in which Global North understandings of peace are hegemonically adopted, meaning research paradigms are often detached from the communities they are working with. This study seeks to reimagine the dynamics between researchers and researched, embracing a collaborative approach. Through a visual participatory approach, seven young people with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds participated in a two-week-long participatory photography project. Through workshops, the study taught participants skills of photography and communication which led to them participating in a weeklong photography task in which they had to capture their everyday experiences of living in London. After this week, participants collectively reflected on the task and identified key patterns across the data in relation to notions of conflict and peace in the space of London. Key findings suggested how conflict still existed within the space of the city as conflict became experienced corporeally. But peace was also found in the city through third places and social networks. The results of the project did not only present findings that could be utilised in top-down approaches such as policies, but they also reimagined the audience of peace as participants addressed the issues of migration from the bottom-up.