Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees: Forced Displacement, Creativity, and Agency

Addressing forced migration as a global challenge, this book draws on multi-sited research to examine the arts and cultural dimensions of refugee contexts. Through narrative-driven accounts, it highlights refugee agency, creativity, and community-building, challenging reductive stereotypes and foregrounding refugees’ contributions to both home and host societies. Forced migration is an international problem impacting global powers as well as smaller resource-constrained countries. The rhetoric, globally and locally is rife with a confusing tangle about war, violence, persecution, vulnerability, victimhood, thievery, welfare leaching, and economy recking. My Culture, My Survival is a narrative-driven book based in global multi-site research about the arts and cultural dimension of refugee “crises” in discrete geographic and social-political contexts. The stories highlight agency, creativity, pleasure, celebration, entrepreneurship, friendship, and community because we typically don’t associate these things with refugees. They emphasize how refugees contribute to their own communities and their host countries, contrary to stereotypical and often xenophobic anti-refugee assumptions.