Stories · Inside/Out: using storytelling to understand the politics of exclusion in Europe and South Africa

Inside/Out: using storytelling to understand the politics of exclusion in Europe and South Africa

Contemporary political narratives in the UK and South Africa are explicitly orientated around ideas about who does, and does not, belong. The UK and South Africa, while different, share trends towards inequality and the othering of migrants as responsible for social problems. Both inside and outside groups express a powerful sense of alienation and hopelessness. Political narratives around who belongs are constructed through a range of interacting and reinforcing mechanisms. Digital technologies have made it possible for negative political narratives to be spread and amplified more quickly. Recent research points to an increasing inability to encounter and listen to perspectives from the ‘other’, suggesting that people tend to seek out information that confirms existing biases, even when confronted with clear countervailing evidence that they are wrong. Taken together, these factors give to the rise of powerful political narratives of exclusion, and the reinforcement of narrow categories of belonging. Objectives: • Use storytelling to allow people categorised politically as inside/outside to surface and articulate everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion • Develop arts-based and creative techniques of storytelling as a process of co-generation and co-production of knowledge that moves between personal experience and narratives of exclusion and inclusion. • Evaluate how the research process can, itself, contribute to deepening the quality of dialogue across boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the UK and South Africa • In partnership with civil society organisations, to explore how digital technologies and communication can be used ethically and responsibly to create and share stories that build public engagement and trust between groups • Advance the understanding of trust, belonging and social cohesion, specifically in terms of how stories can help people to build new shared narratives in a context of powerful narratives of exclusion This project used storytelling to generate new bottom-up narratives with migrants from inside and outside groups. These stories have been used to to challenge dominant top down discursive politics of exclusion by challenging the existing stereotypes about migrants and creating new forms of dialogue across divisions. Through the research process and the stories it generated, research participants and other audiences have recognised how they are connected in spite of political narratives of exclusion. This had led to greater recognition of the commonalities between groups, and why these matter.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз