(KE/Research Award) "Scotland, Our New Home: Participatory filmmaking with young refugees" (YPeople Charity, Glasgow Social Work Dep., Clyde College, Showmanmedia, Glasgow Life)

Scotland, Our New Home (SONH) was a participatory film-making project for young people, most of whom had arrived in Scotland as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ (Education Scotland, 2015). This legal term means that young people have often reached the UK (and, in this case, are now living in Glasgow), unaccompanied by adults, are under the care of the local city council, and are (or were) involved in the complicated and lengthy process of applying for refugee status in the UK.

The young people were part of the New Young Peers Scotland (NYPS) group, founded by their ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher and social worker, with the aim of training young people to become peer mentors for other new young arrivals in Glasgow. We got to know the NYPS founders in 2014, when working for a three-year research project that explored the role of arts-based pedagogies in multilingual education contexts (Frimberger et al., 2018; Frimberger, 2016). The ESOL programme, which many of the peer mentors had attended (or still were attending), had been innovated by the college’s ESOL teachers as a holistic educational response to the learning, social and psychological needs of newly arrived, unaccompanied, young people between 16 and 21 years old.

Our film project arose out of a later, voluntary collaboration between film-maker Simon Bishopp and some of the young people from NYPS in 2017 for an animation project that gave our film project Scotland, Our New Home its name (you can watch the animation here: https://youtu.be/tD--1v607Hs). The peer mentors wanted to create a resource to communicate the hopes and challenges that life in Scotland entails for an unaccompanied young person and crafted a voice-over script, which Simon translated into hand-drawn, animated imagery.

The young people took the animation to the Glasgow Southside Film Festival, and it has since been shown – by the peer mentors themselves, their social workers, teachers and ourselves – at a number of youth, social work and education conferences in the UK, Sicily and Greece. Our funding application for the SONH film project was motivated by the young people’s ambition to now make a film in their role as peer mentors, explicitly for other newly arrived young people, and with the aim of supporting them in the process of making a home in Scotland.

Scotland, Our New Home was a participatory film-making project with refugee young people. They wanted to give hope to other new teenage arrivals by telling stories in film as to how to make a home in Scotland. Our research reviews the process of making these films and looks in particular at the relationship between young people's 'utopian desire' (to make these films to support other young people) and the difficult, hands-on process of learning the craft of film-making.

Our research looked at the situated social practices and ‘moral deliberations’ (Nash, 2012: 321) that made up the ‘moral dimension’ (Nash, 2012: 318) of our film project. Our overall reason for exploring this interplay between our project ideals and the particulars of our project context is, as Chambers (2019: 45) formulates it, ‘to ask difficult questions about the fundamental goals and pedagogical philosophy’ that underpinned SONH. A project’s wider moral principles, explicitly stated or implicitly assumed, always rub against the complex social reality of a production process, taking shape in the minutiae of everyday social encounters, relationship building, and moments of negotiating aesthetic, social and ethical decisions (Thomas, 2017; Nash, 2011, 2012; Ruby, 2005). Aiming for a reflexive research practice, we want to make transparent the epistemological assumptions and various discursive moments that underpinned and shaped our ‘messy’, practical project ethics.