About the Finding Home Project

Our international, SSHRC-funded project examines the meanings of home for those who have had to abandon their homelands, through arts-based methods used as a form of placemaking.

Between 2017 and 2021, we have developed a multi-modal approach that bridges research creation, visual studies, and traditional qualitative research methods . Our team of academics, artists, and migrant co-researchers have developed new standards of collaboration, representation, government policy and increased equity for migrants/refugees, particularly in relation to housing.

Our goal is to use research creation to understand the complex intersection between forced migration and new place-making strategies. How can art-based research engage homeless/underhoused refugees and asylum seekers, and how can these practices be mobilized and disseminated as new knowledge and public policy that can impact the host culture?

Through walking methods, participatory video workshops, and collaborative filmmaking, we have pondered the ways in which we as migrants, descendants of migrants, and hosts emancipate and make public and private space our own. We have found that place-making is determined by temporality, sensory experience, trauma, collective memory, relationships, and even food. We are inspired by the need for novel discourses on migration, especially ones that originate from point of arrival rather than point of departure. We are creating work from the POV of migrants/refugees but that also considers host cultures.

Through building Project Finding Home, we hope that our collaborative knowledge is easily accessible to community members who need it the most; not only academics, but also migrant communities, allies, and service providers.

– PROJECT FINDING HOME TEAM