Description
Mainstream refugee assistance programmes construct women as victims devoid of agency and reinforce dependence on host societies; a narrative that is currently weaponised by the far right. In contrast, this paper recognises refugee women as active political agents who practice creative grassroots activism by engaging with emerging feminist scholarship that highlights how refugehood can foster political empowerment. In light of this, it explores how art-based participatory methods can support the activism and advocacy of refugee women in the UK within a rising anti-immigration and anti-gender context. Drawing on a collaborative project with the London-based NGO Women for Refugee Women, the study worked with twenty-five refugee women in an advocacy-focused collage workshop and a subsequent focus group for collective interpretation of the artworks. Through this process, refugee women produced and analysed artistic pieces that communicated experiences of refugehood, resistance, and belonging. The paper has three objectives: (1) to generate new empirical data by documenting and analysing artworks created by refugee women, thereby advancing the feminist literature on refugehood and empowerment; (2) to explore art as an innovative research methodology; and (3) to co-produce academic knowledge with migrant communities, positioning refugee women not as research subjects, but as active producers of knowledge and creative outputs on their own terms.
