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Olczak, Susie 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9615-5514
(2025)
Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum.
Symposium
Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 June 2025
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh
Supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
In: Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum Symposium Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 June 2025 Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh Supported by the Leverhulme Trust, 23-24 June 2025, University of Edinburgh.
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Slideshow (© Susie Olczak 2025)
Susie Olczak Raft Presentation for Displaced Arts Conference in Edinburgh Susie Olczak (15 Minutes).pdf - Presentation Available under License All Rights Reserved. Download (5MB) | Preview |
Abstract
How had creative practices been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century? This interdisciplinary symposium explored the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which had been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex. These evolving geographies encompassed precarious infrastructures of asylum, with a proliferation of camps, detention centres, and ‘contingency’ accommodation in hotels, military barracks, ships, and islands. Meanwhile, new dispersal policies had led to refugees and asylum seekers increasingly being settled away from urban centres in depopulated or rural areas in many places, including Europe, the US and Australia, sometimes in marginalised and remote localities. In these shifting geographies of asylum, displaced arts – creative practices defined at once by the absence or loss of place and their located nature in a new environment – offered strategies of resistance, tools of documentation and mapping, and means to cultivate new senses of belonging, community, and integration. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as the social sciences, which had emphasised the importance of creative practices and methodologies in migration studies, the symposium focused on the situated nature of displaced arts as it asked: how had displaced arts and indigenous knowledges been used as creative placemaking practices to navigate unfamiliar environments? How might they render obscured or hidden geographies of asylum more visible? How could creative initiatives facilitate integration in new (and sometimes unlikely) sites of refugee resettlement? What cross-cultural artistic practices had emerged from these evolving geographies? And how might these practices form new socialities and solidarities which transcended or challenged the sovereignty of national borders asserted through asylum regimes? This also provided an opportunity to consider methodological questions and tensions around how we engaged with the arts in migration studies. How might creative methodologies facilitate collaborative research practices in migration studies which disrupted hegemonic power dynamics and forms of knowledge production? What burdens were placed on these arts when using them to navigate geographies of asylum? And what could be gained by focusing specifically on representations of place in these arts? Olczak's paper presented the thinking around an exhibition held at the Royal Overseas league in London December 2024- March 2025 which Olczak curated. The focus of the exhibition built on time spent in the Darién Gap in 2022 which is now facing an influx of migrants through the treacherous jungle.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Creative arts; asylum; refugee resettlement |
| Related records: | |
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR |
| Divisions: | Schools and Research Institutes > School of Arts, Culture and Environment |
| Depositing User: | Susie Olczak |
| Date Deposited: | 01 Apr 2026 10:04 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Apr 2026 12:00 |
| URI: | https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/15959 |
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