Research Creation: Forced Migration and the Arts

The project explored the way research-based art-making generated new kinds of knowledge about migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the visual arts, which pioneered at Bard College Berlin, the initiative progressively drew together students, professors, and artists from across the participating institutions over two academic years.

Faculty shared their research experience and thought together about how to best leverage the practicing arts to enrich teaching in the social sciences and humanities.

In a network class that explored regional and global institutions relating to the “modern refugee” and their impacts on the lives of forced migrants, participants collaborated on public-facing events, including a multi-site exhibition that offered student artworks from the class as transformative interventions into local and transnational debates about the global migration regime.