News from Members

This panel aims to explore how migrants challenge normative standards and introduce alternative ways of living and belonging in particular contexts through their cultural practices, focusing on three main areas: art, health, and food. The panel will examine: 1) How do migrants use visual arts, music or performance to challenge dominant cultural narratives and forms of artistic production? How does migrant artistic production function as a platform for political engagement to challenge mainstream notions of citizenship, representation and inclusion? 2) How do migrants navigate health systems that may not be responsive to their needs and understandings of health and well-being? How do they adapt or create alternative health practices that integrate diverse knowledge with health norms in their host countries? 3) How do migrants’ food practices articulate with new environments and local discourses on food and health? How does food become a site of political action, from resistance to food insecurity to the creation of alternative food networks? Drawing on empirical research and initiatives from a variety of sites, we explore how these practices, developed in a field of opportunities and constraints and often from marginalised social positions, reshape broader forms of political participation and the (re)production of family and community. (Counter)cultures emerge as spaces for political action and collective struggle, for enacting agency and resilience, for fostering new forms of belonging, for contributing to place-making and social inclusion, and offer the possibility of thinking a more nuanced perspective on diversity and innovation beyond the dialectics of heritage/authenticity and hybridisation/fusion

 

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Social Sciences Faculty

Özyeğin University

Istanbul, Turkey 

 

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Social Sciences Faculty

University of Liège, Belgium