Archive of solidarity: precarity, creativity and shared future-making across closed borders

We are witness to the most dramatic asylum crisis since WWII. Ongoing wars, political conflicts, and environmental disasters have forced millions of people to cross borders and seek asylum in other countries. National governments have increasingly put refugees at risk by securing borders and refugee routes, erecting walls and barbed-wire fences, and using surveillance technologies. These security measures and the growing deportation and detention of refugees who have crossed borders are meant to produce a hostile environment for refugees. Whilst this hostile environment has deeply split societies along xenophobic lines, it has also given birth to solidarity movements around refugee lives with the aim of envisioning a different future. Our project will make visible and archive these solidarity movements.

Focusing on the border areas of Turkey and the United Kingdom (UK), The Archive of Solidarity is a collaborative project that involves local youth (refugees and citizens) and activists to investigate, document, and disseminate refugee-citizen solidarity practices that contribute to the future economic, social, and emotional well-being of refugee and citizen youth in particular. In co-creating and harnessing positive pathways forward for refugees and citizens at large, this project adopts the position of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Global Youth Advisory Council that the "talent, energy, and potential of young refugees are vital resources in global efforts to prevent and respond to challenges affecting all refugees." We will focus on the lived experiences of (1) refugee and citizen youth (18-30 years) living in UK and Turkish border provinces as they are the most precarious, mobile, and active communities, and (2) refugee and citizen activists from within and outside of humanitarian organizations who have been involved in solidarity work or refugee rights advocacy.

In collaboration with refugees and citizens, we will mobilize interactive and impactful archive-making practices to produce and make visible displacement experiences and local, multicultural, and transnational spaces of solidarity between citizens and refugees for a wide range of stakeholders. We will use oral history documentation, ethnographic fieldnotes, memory walks, creative writing, and digital storytelling, and, will organise training workshops for the participants to better articulate and analyse their lived knowledge of borders and solidarity practices. These workshops will bring together ethnographers, oral historians, visual anthropologists, photographers, and archivists with local youth and activists to build collaborative processes of knowledge and solidarity production. Archive-making practices will open a space for refugee and citizen youth and activists to build innovative co-operations and become the authors, artists, witnesses, and researchers of their own histories, presents, and imagined futures.

We will use a multi-medium strategy to disseminate our project's findings, which includes publications in high-impact scientific venues, policy briefs, and co-published stories told by youth and activists. To facilitate access to knowledge for collaborative research, the public will have open access to our archive-making workshops. We will create a Silk Road Refugee Walk, based on landmarks of border experiences and solidarity practices, that will include storytelling, creative writing, and semi-public readings in the Turkish border region. Finally, we will use online exhibitions, podcasts, and media outlets to share insights on archive-making practices to the broader public.