Scotland Our New Home: Participatory Filmmaking (awarded £19,339 by Creative Scotland)

'Scotland, Our New Home' was a Creative-Scotland funded participatory filmmaking project for young refugees who wanted to make a film to peer-support other new young arrivals in the process of making home in Scotland.

The aim was to explore the wider moral dimension of our filmmaking project, with a particular focus on how young people's expressed wish to give 'hope' to other new young arrivals, was negotiated in concrete pedagogical, ethical and aesthetic decision-making.

- Education's moral aims and ideals, e.g. of young people asserting 'empowerment/agency 'or finding 'voice' through a project, never just neatly translate into practice and pedagogy, or can even be less conceptually presupposed. - Moral aims and principles take shape within situated pedagogical contexts. - The act of empowerment, asserting agency or finding a voice, for example, is not simply an independent, individual act, but is interdependent on and embedded in (complicated) social, aesthetic and pedagogical processes in specific, situated projects. - A disregard of our concrete, experimental pedagogical interactions, in favour of a universalising idea of empowerment (and social change), that glosses over the experimentation and risk of failure involved in e.g. arts-based education projects, can potentially run the danger of exerting 'a will to truth that colonises the discursive terrain according to its own perceptions, based as they are on the presupposed obviousness of their own moral privilege' (MacDonald & O'Regan 2012: 8) - A disregard of the situated moral dimension of arts education projects could then run the danger of erasing young people’s context-specific and ‘unique’ acts of asserting their autonomy and voice (in the name of a more universalising and abstract idea about, for example, the social change that is effected through the arts).