MEinART
The project “Creative Multilingualism: from practice to
research to education” (MEinART) focuses on two socially
critical aspects of inclusion and social cohesion:
multilingualism in relation to refugee communities in Greece
and women's search for identity through creativity and the
use of modern technology and communication media.
MEinART project bridges creativity and multilingualism
focusing on gender mainstreaming. The research team of Greek
Language and Multilingualism Lab that consists of members
working in different places of Europe as a result of the
so-called 'brain drain', in cooperation with scholars from
the UK, experts in the field of multilingualism and
arts-based methodologies undertook cutting edge research to
shed light on underresearched and underprivileged aspects of
women’s multilingual identities.
During the first half of the project’s lifetime, a thorough
and multilateral review of literature and relevant practices
has been undertaken, and arts-based and technology-based
techniques have been developed, and in the framework of
MEinART alternative educational spaces have been designed
and implemented. Employing participatory arts-based and
ICT-based methodologies, the project MEinART provides
alternative educational spaces of empowerment, where women
with a refugee background working together with local women
are going to self-narrate, contest dominant discourses and
representations imposed on them and finally rediscover
themselves, reimagine their lives through artful and
creative artworks and individual or group performances.
The project offers alternative ways of thinking and doing
research especially when working with target-groups that
have been silenced and undermined. In this context,
arts-based research and educational praxis as well as the
potential of the digital spaces that question conventional
concepts of time and place and give prominence to creative
thought processes, serve as anti-opressive anti-meters
towards a social justice change for all the participants in
this project, and in particular towards valorizing women’s
multilingual and multicultural identities shaping finally a
“reverse discourse” that ensures ‘care of the self’ for
every woman.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the request for
a 6-month extension of the project, as well as a partial redesign
of the research protocol. The pandemic brought about major changes
in all areas and highlighted or exacerbated inequalities that
already existed. Complex challenges, related to the constraints of
the pandemic, but also the stereotypes and discrimination that
these constraints (re)triggered, emerged in the research in order
to safeguard the rights and dignity of refugee women, but also to
maintain scientific rigor. Personal, face-to-face research became
particularly complicated. Part of the project's research
reflection shifted to the ethical and methodological issues of
qualitative research with the project's target audience, always
with a focus on culture and creativity as reflective processes.
From a methodological perspective, the reliability of more
flexible and remote approaches needs to be tested, as does the
management of risk and danger, and the acceptability of remote,
digital data collection.