The Art of Storytelling for Refugees in Britain
This lecture/seminar will use the performance poetry of the Women for Refugee Women drama group to examine the asylum process from a literary perspective.
The act of claiming asylum is an act of storytelling. Each and every asylum seeker tells the ‘who, what, where, when and why’; of their life stories to an immigration official, in the hope that their claim will be believed and accepted.
Understanding why certain ‘asylum stories’; are more successful than others has been a major contribution of literary scholars to the field of forced migration over the last few decades. Scholars in the humanities have also examined what impact the ‘asylum story’; as had upon representations of refugees within the creative arts.
This lecture/seminar by Dr Hari Reed (Policy and Advocacy Coordinator, at Asylum Welcome) will use the performance poetry of the Women for Refugee Women drama group to examine the asylum process from a literary perspective.
This event is part of the Dialogue in Migration and Refugee Studies lecture and seminar series hosted by the Migration and Refugees Research Network at Oxford Brookes University. It has received funding from Jean Monnet Actions, run under Erasmus+ by the European Union.
The programme will continue running this semester with talks including History, Sociology, English Literature and a special session by an NGO practitioner.