Digital arts – refugee engagement

ABSTRACT Digital Arts – Refugee Engagement (DA-RE) is an exploratory research partnership between refugee youth, academics, practitioners and community activists. Arts-based activities were combined with digital literacy to develop the capabilities of refugee youth in Turkey and Bangladesh. DA-RE’s participants co-created digital arts and connected with one another across the two settings in a digital third space to share narratives from their situated perspectives and lived experiences. In these ways, they developed skills of engagement and agency through the project, but at the heart of DA-RE was the intention to explore the links between refugee youths’ own creative agency, harnessed in new contexts enabled by the project, and their existing digital literacies. DA-RE sought to identify, with a theory of change, potential opportunities for refugee youth to both use this capability in the host community and provide a platform for their digital arts to offer a counter-narrative to ‘othering’ discourses at work in both their host communities and in the UK, where the project was coordinated, in so doing converting (digital) literacy into capability with positive consequences for social good.