The Art of Arriving: Reframing 'Refugee Integration'

Migration and integration are not only the subject of sociological research, but also a main topic in artistic practices that aim to challenge established views on (forced) migrants, to provide forms of representation beyond ethnic ascription or even images of alternative (and utopian) social realities.
Exploring the art’s transformative potential for the sociology of migration and integration is the main objective of the transdisciplinary research project 'The Art of Arriving: Reframing "Refugee Integration"'. Therefore, a so-called 'real-world laboratory' will be implemented, where sociologists accompany artists with creating and recipients with interpreting aesthetic expressions. It is the aim to provide a space where scientific and non-scientific actors cooperate in the joint production of knowledge by researching, experimenting and learning from each other. The main idea is to ask artists (from the areas of music, painting and photography) to translate their experiences and perceptions of arriving – understood as a long-lasting process – into aesthetic expressions. Three artistic teams will be recruited, each consisting of one artist who has experienced recent flight (e.g., migration from the Middle East, 2010–2020), one artist whose refugee experience lies in the past (e.g., migration from the former Yugoslavia, 1990–2000) and one artist without any refugee experience. In a further step, groups of participants will be invited to interpret the resulting artworks. It is the aim to examine, if and how the meaning-making processes involved in creating and interpreting of art can foster reframing 'refugee integration' concepts and provide alternative views on the arriving of refugees.
The findings might contest and revise the traditional sociological toolkit for understanding integration, which was developed in the 20th century and shows limitation when applied to contemporary societies. The concepts of 'assimilation', 'acculturation', or 'integration' for instance, are of limited analytical value in research on 'postmigrant societies', characterised by 'super-diversity' and new majority-minority relations. However, by also focusing on the different logics of knowledge production in science and the artistic field and by shedding light on the challenges of mutual translation between sociology and the arts, the chances as well as the limitations of this transdisciplinary approach will be discussed.