Refugees and migrants rarely have ownership over the narratives produced about them in public discourse. In narratives and public discourse in Europe, migrants and refugees lack agency and are constrained to participate in tokenistic roles. With this project, we advocated for the importance of engaging newcomers as active participants rather than passive subjects in public debates. Through storytelling as advocacy tool, they will be enabled to reclaim the ownership of their own stories.
A great challenge in migrant and refugee self-representation is that narratives about migrants and refugees are mainly shaped, framed and shared by mainstream media, voices and people that don’t represent the migrant and refugee community or people with lived experience. In order to take ownership over their own stories, refugees and migrants need the means, capacity and opportunities to unite, reflect, exchange and co-design new pathways to amplify their voices and demand ownership and authorship over their own narratives. This project was aimed to enable a group of migrant and refugee activists to reclaim the leadership, ownership and authorship of their own stories and narrative and amplify their self-advocacy through creative tools such as storytelling. By implementing this project, we have been able to create inclusive learning environments for migrants and refugees and opportunities to exchange best practices, capacity building and creating and strengthening new networks. As a refugee-led initiative, this project also helped to address the unequal power relationship in which migrants and refugees are continuously approached and identified as beneficiaries, and not as agents of power and change.