Author: Welcoming Spaces

Welcoming spaces picked up by local news in Soria, Spain

From 27 September to 1 October, the International PhD School on Migration and Socio-ecological Change took place organised by Utrecht University´s Focus Area on Migration & Societal Change and the International Development Studies Group of the Human Geography and Spatial Planning department at the Faculty of Geosciences, in collaboration with Fundación Cepaim in Soria and the partners of the Welcoming Spaces Consortium.

How to contribute to fair and sustainable development of European localities other than large metropolis while at the same time offering a welcoming space for non-EU migrants to pursue their life projects?

It led to many inspiring discussions and field visits to the deep rural, where migrants became part of new future perspectives in an area marked by severe depopulation and social innovation.

At our last day the local news visited the closing symposium. #nuevossenderos

DAMR PhD event – Exploring Migration in Rural Areas

A large part of research in migration studies focuses on urban centers. Context-specific social processes surrounding international migration to and diversity in rural regions, small villages and marginalized, or downscaled, areas have been widely omitted by scholarship and policy. However, the often specific social make-up, community structures and spatial developments in those areas, may bring about dynamics that are different from those in big cities.

In this workshop, the Dutch Association for Migration Research (DAMR) invites early career researchers, PhD candidates, post-Doc researchers and master students, who are keen to shift, decenter or broaden the focus on international migration into rural areas to come together.

The workshop consists of two parts: a first co-creation session in which we will explore topics/questions on conceptual and methodological issues of migration research in rural areas. The outcomes of this session will provide input for the second part, a panel discussion with notable rural scholars: Prof. Michael Woods, Prof. Birgit Glorius, Dr. Marlies Meijer, Prof. Sarah Neal and Dr. Rosario Sampredro. The panel will be followed by small-group workshops with the speakers, and provides the ability for the participants to further dive into a specific question or issue.

Practicalities:

The event will consist of two sessions, the first takes place on 2nd June 2021, 10-12.30h and the second meeting is on 16th June 10-12 and 14-16h.

Sign up:

To apply and prepare for the event we ask you to fill in the following form on or before Friday, May 28th.

More information:

For content questions contact Jana Finke: j.c.finke@uu.nl or Rianne Hadders: r.hadders@uu.nl. For practical questions, please email Jana-Sarah Hönnige: j.s.honnige@students.uu.nl.

Call for papers on Migrations/Mediations – Promoting transcultural dialogue through media, arts and culture

Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies has announced a call for papers for their special issue:

Migrations / Mediations. Promoting transcultural dialogue through media, arts and culture, eds. Pierluigi Musarò, Nikos Papastergiadis, Laura Peja (n. 1/2022, due in April 2022)

This special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali intends to invite international scholars, artists and practitioners to discuss through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives 1) the role of media, arts and culture in the management of policies and practices devoted to migration phenomena; 2) the ways and the degrees in which media, arts and culture have been considered as critical tools for transcultural dialogue; 3) the ways in which media, arts and culture have been used in processes of artistic creation within the framework of the “aesthetic cosmopolitanism”; 4) ways through which models of action in territories oriented toward bringing host populations into contact with migrants and refugees can be developed; 5) the specific set of tools and methodology that have been developed to assess social, cultural and economic impact of multi-, inter- and transcultural dialogue activities through arts, media and culture.

More information on the topics and submission details can be found here.

Call for papers on the legacies of forced migrations

Society Register would like to announce a call for papers on the legacies of forced migrations. The issue will focus on social, cultural, political and economic transformations brought about by forced migrations or displacements in different regions of the world. From the end of World War II to the present day, millions of people have been forced to flee because of armed conflicts, civil wars, border changes, violence, persecution, development projects, natural disasters, environmental degradation and trafficking of people. Forced migrations brought about multifaceted social change for people who left their homes, those who had lived with them before and for those who met them later.

We encourage you to send articles on the social, cultural and political legacies of forced displacements. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are welcome. The analytical focus may fall on recent displacement events and the long-term consequences of forced migrations in the past.

Submissions may pertain to the following topics:

• The consequences of displacement on the displaced and host communities
• Displacements and individual/social memory
• Social representations of the ‘displaced’ and ‘refugee’
• The protection of refugees
• Displacement and transformations of place, power and social ties
• Representations of displacement and forced migration in media and art
• Security and forced migration

We would like to invite you to submit your articles. The procedure is following:

The date for submission of the completed article is June 30, 2021. In order to submit the full paper authors must register on the “Society Register” webpage.

All papers will be subject to the Society Register review regime. The volume will be published in 2021. Please comply with the editing requirements of the American Sociological Association (ASA). While preparing your article please remember also about the Authors Guidelines. Shall you have any questions, feel free to write to Guest Editors:

Michał Nowosielski, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw michal.nowosielski@uw.edu.pl

Piotr Cichocki, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań piotr.cichocki@amu.edu.pl

Expected date of publication: December 2021

Welcoming Spaces European Meet-up

On the last Friday of March, the Welcoming Spaces team hosted initiatives, social organisations, businesses, policy makers, local authorities and researchers from all over Europe in a celebration of the first anniversary of the Horizon 2020 project Welcoming Spaces in Europe.

We celebrated our progress and cooperation over the last year and created a space for an exchange of practices, ideas and experiences between the different actors present – all from diverse international and professional backgrounds that provide them with different and important perspectives on the ways shrinking regions and migrants can become connected in mutually enriching ways.

The meet-up was opened with a few guiding words by the Director of Welcoming Spaces, Prof. Zoomers, before diving into the pitches by four organisations working on welcoming initiatives that shared their innovative strategies on how they connect people and places.

The first pitch was about the Spanish foundation Cepaim, presented by Carmen Ayllón, Welcoming Spaces project broker. She introduced the nuevos senderos projects (“new paths”) by which Cepaim is working on social and labour inclusion of migrants in rural localities. Their core focus is to engage both migrants and local communities to contribute to the revitalisation and development of the rural areas. To reach this goal, Cepaim guides the process of emplacements of migrants in rural areas from an early stage, working closely with not only the migrant but also the local residents, to involve the full community in the process.  She remarked on the importance of revitalisation of rural areas in the Spanish context by showing the example of Spanish Lapland. In the experience of Cepaim, successful relocation of migrations to rural areas depends highly on accurate and detailed information and decent housing and job offers.

The next pitch was presented by Claudia Schneider, project leader of the German NGO Ökoherz e.V. She described how the roots of the NGO lie in the region of Thuringia where they help farmers engage in social farming practices, facilitating for example the integration of intellectually disabled people. Later, she said, they asked themselves if they could also work with refugees and quickly realised that their context provided great conditions to do so: they noticed that for many refugees coming from rural backgrounds in their home countries the familiar activities and the home on a farm had a healing effect. They also found that the engagement in farming provided good informal language learning opportunities and further opportunities to train skills and competences. Lastly, they also saw that for many refugees the possibility of paid work was important, giving them the opportunity to send money to support family members. Claudia also added that this development benefitted both sides, as the additional manpower was desperately needed by farmers in these rural depopulating areas.

Next, the Italian initiative Miledù was introduced by co-founder and senior researcher at Euricse, Giulia Galera. Miledù focuses on the social and labour-market integration of newcomers, especially refugees and asylum-seeking people in the peripheries of lake Como, and on bringing the business perspective and the eco-perspective together in rural areas. Employing migrants, they are following a holistic empowerment model which is based on multiple dimensions: the social, work and cultural dimension. By pursuing strategic economic fields such as the management of common goods with activities that include the production of edible flowers, restoration of drystone walls and beekeeping they manage to combine the enhancement of social cohesion, economic stability and environmental protection. Giulia also mentioned that she sees a strength in their small size with opportunities to upscale through collaboration.

The last pitch was about the Dutch/Belgian/German project In de zorg, uit de zorgen (“Into care to be carefree”) presented by project coordinator Romy van den Akker. The initiative is a collaboration of eight refugee, care and labour market organisations that work together closely with the aim of supporting refugees in finding a job or internship in the care sector. The initiative facilitates a specific education path for refugees with the ambition to find employment in the care sector. Participants could join the programme without prior knowledge or education and find out during the course of the programme what healthcare position fit them best, from becoming a nurse to more social healthcare positions. Eventually, the completion of the programme provided them with the guarantee for a paid job in the healthcare profession, more specifically in elderly care. In this way the programme manages to benefit both parties involved, as many of the regions in the three countries involved are experiencing severe labour shortages in the healthcare profession and the initiative manages to address this need.

These newly gained insights were then processed and discussed in small mixed teams giving everyone the chance to reflect on how these good practices could be adapted to their local contexts. Some interesting insights and further discussion points came out of this, as was revealed in the subsequent plenary harvest. The many great ideas voiced here were certainly inspiring and provided great food for thought that will be further discussed in future meetings.

Community of practice

Carmen Ayllón then introduced and invited everyone to join the Community of practice. The name stands for a broad network of stakeholders we aim to create as part of the Welcoming Spaces programme. Here, the focus is on local actors in the field, including local policy makers, those involved in the welcoming initiatives, and both newcomers and long-term residents, and broader, more overarching projects related to welcoming initiatives for newcomers and processes of revitalisation in shrinking region. The community of practice builds on the idea that despite the diversity in context everyone has the same shared goals and that a space for supporting each other and sharing thoughts could help the creation of solutions and possibilities on the ground.

Webinar WS Nederland – Matching: nieuwe kansen voor vluchtelingen en krimpregio’s?

Webinar 26 maart 2021, 11.00 – 12.30 uur

Sinds een jaar verkent het project Welcoming Spaces hoe nieuwe kansen kunnen ontstaan als internationale migranten en vluchtelingen zich vestigen in regio’s met bevolkingskrimp. Het goed matchen van personen en plekken blijkt echter niet zo eenvoudig. Toch zijn er in Nederland en daarbuiten succesvolle voorbeelden. Hoe lukt het hen wel? Dat verkennen we tijdens dit webinar. We nodigen burgerinitiatieven, maatschappelijke organisaties, lokale, regionale en nationale beleidsmakers, uitvoerders en bestuurders van gemeentes, provincies en nationale overheden, onderzoekers en andere geïnteresseerden van harte uit om hun uitdagingen en vragen voor te leggen, en ook om hun goede praktijken en interessante strategieën te presenteren.

Het programma bestaat uit twee onderdelen. In de ochtend organiseren we een Nederlandstalig webinar waarin de matching van statushouders en krimpregio’s in Nederland onder de loep wordt genomen. In de middag organiseren we een Engelstalige internationale meet-up over het matchen van zowel arbeidsmigranten als vluchtelingen met krimpregio’s. Hieraan nemen interessante initiatieven uit heel Europa deel. Zie programma onderaan.

Via deze link kunt u zich aanmelden voor het Nederlandse én internationale programma. https://www.formdesk.com/universiteitutrecht-geo/welcomingspacesnl

Voor vragen of meer informatie kunt u zich richten tot Rianne Hadders, welcomingspaces@uu.nl

Programma workshop matching van statushouders en krimpregio’s in Nederland

Welke kansen liggen er in de samenwerking tussen nationale instanties, gemeenten en maatschappelijke initiatieven om een goede match te faciliteren en zo de vestiging van statushouders te versoepelen?

11:00 – 11.05 Introductie door Welcoming Spaces onderzoekers

11.05 – 11.30 Praktijkvoorbeelden

1. Kansen en uitdagingen op lokaal niveau.
   Birgit op de Laak (burgemeester Nederweert):
2. Oplossingen op lokaal niveau.
   Voorbeeld: vluchtelingen integreren als medewerkers in de zorgsector, via een samenwerking van vluchtelingen-, zorg- en arbeidsmarkt-organisaties.
   Nicole Gijsbregts (Teamleider Maastricht, Projectleider In de Zorg – Uit de Zorgen (IDZ-UDZ)
3. Screening en matching van statushouders
   Joeri Kapteijns (bestuurder) & Paul Driest (beleidsmedewerker) – COA

11:30 – 12:15 Discussie: kansen en uitdagingen in matching statushouders en krimpregio’s.

Tijdens de discussie zullen we focussen op goede ervaringen en voorbeelden in matching. Wat werkte goed en wat minder? Hoe zou je dit op andere plekken kunnen aanpakken? Input voor de discussie kan ook worden gegeven in het aanmeldformulier.

12:15 – 12:30 Samenvatting en concrete volgende stappen