Paradoxical narratives of transcultural encounters of the “other”: Civic engagement with refugees and migrants in London

This report is an excerpt of a working paper on a civic engagement project that focuses on the oral narratives in which contradictory narratives of transcultural encounters of refugees and undocumented migrants in London are being illustrated. The project, entitled “Democratic Access or Privileged Exclusion? Civic Engagement through the Preservation of and Access to Refugee Archives,” was undertaken in 2015 by focusing on the preservation of refugees’ and migrants’ lived experiences in London. It sought to use existing archives held within the University of East London’s (UEL) Library as a basis to forge new partnerships between students, academics, archivists, and refugee community groups in order to deconstruct and preserve refugee-history. The aims and objectives of the project, among others, included: (a) to engage with local communities in an attempt to establish a Living Refugee Archive and to promote and enable accessibility and engagement with existing collections, (b) to incorporate digital content collected as part of UEL’s Oral History Project which would ultimately help facilitate continued discussions and civic engagement activities, and (c) to help encourage interaction between archivists, historians, NGOs, and the communities themselves as to how the refugee experience can be adequately collated, preserved, and documented. In this report we draw on the collated oral histories of refugees, in particular those in which paradoxical narratives of transcultural encounters of refugees and migrants from outside the European Union are obvious. By way of examples, we document that whilst refugees and migrants from outside the European Union bring in significant resources (such as culture, food, dress, language), their encounters with British residents in London are paradoxical. The report sought to substantiate the argument that in an era of global movement and global conflict the meaning of home to a refugee is “multiple, complex and in process” (Taylor, 2015, p. 11), while the home they hope for is often denied to them, and they are being constructed as “others.” The report also demonstrates that experiences of refugees and migrants vary based on their ethnicity, nationality, and geopolitical situation, and lived experience of EU and non-EU refugees and migrants can be different.