Art-based, narrative research with unaccompanied migrant children living in Johannesburg, South Africa

Glynis Clacherty

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2021, vol. 36, issue 4, 547-563

Abstract: Migrant children are often represented through stereotypical narratives by media, governments and even researchers. These representations range from institutional narratives that reduce their experience to “pre-flight, flight, post flight” to psychological narratives that can represent them as traumatized victims of war. Using narratives collected over five years with unaccompanied migrant children, this paper shows that their past and present realities are perceived by the children to be much more complex and fragmented than the meta-narrative suggests. Additionally, their identities are so much more than “victim.” The narratives were collected through an art-making process with 27 children who had fled political conflicts in central and southern Africa and were now living in Johannesburg. Through a literal and internal “open space” created by the art-making, the children made some measure of meaning from the extreme events they had experienced. Often this meaning-making was done through the art alone, sometimes through stories told in metaphor and sometimes in small fragments that were pieced together over time. The narratives that emerged allow the children to be seen in their own terms and present us with what Chinua Achebe would call a “balance of stories” that move beyond the stereotypes that dominate our view.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08865655.2019.1621766 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjbsxx:v:36:y:2021:i:4:p:547-563

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjbs20

DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2019.1621766

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Borderlands Studies is currently edited by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Henk van Houtum and Martin van der Velde

More articles in Journal of Borderlands Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().