Citizen Studies Seminar Series - Covid Chronicles From the Margins

Covid Chronicles From the Margins

This seminar investigates how forced migrants from around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic via creative and artful resistance to marginalisation.

Covid Chronicles from the Margins The Project - COV19 Chronicles exploits the creative potential of smartphone tools. Migrants share pandemic experiences in poems, songs, music, photos, short videos, written testimonies, diaries, artworks and blogs.

In chronicling experiences COVID-19, we are building solidarities and belonging, promoting a better understanding of the problems being faced, campaigning for the recognition of rights and social justice, and facilitating self-representation, civic engagement and community participation.

With the help of arts-based methodologies and smart phones we are beginning to understand how this pandemic unfolded among people whose lives, voices, talents, hopes and dreams often go unnoticed and undocumented in the mainstream media and academia.

ABCDE is a shorthand for this novel experimental digital ethnography where young people set the agenda and represent experiences: from attacks on LGBTQ youth in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to fires and floods in camps among Rohingya refugee youth in Bangladesh.

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Prof Marie Gillespie

Marie joined The Open University in 2001 as Senior Lecturer in Sociology. Since 2007 she has been Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Prior to that, from 1995-2001 she was Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, University of Wales Swansea, from 1993-95, Lecturer, Centre for Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Wales Cardiff, and from 1992-93 Lecturer, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University.

An anthropologist and ethnographer by training, the focus of her research and teaching has been on migrant cultures and communication, with a particular focus on South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas. Recent research includes projects on forced migration and digital exclusion among Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees.