DPhil, Associate professor, Docent Lyytinen Eveliina ja työryhmä (The End team)

Endings – Refuge, Time, and Space

Tieteellinen tutkimus ja taiteellinen työ / niihin pohjautuva työ | Kolmivuotinen

One of the most urgent issues related to forced migration and refugeehood is how to end it. Examining endings is also significant in that an ending is often a prerequisite or enabler for a new beginning. But does refugeehood ever end? If so, how, when, and where? With the Endings project, we seek answers to these burning questions by combining research and arts through four case studies, on 1) the end of refugeehood as an experience, 2) the end of refuge as a legal status, 3) the end of reception centres, and 4) the end of life in refuge. The Endings project addresses both theoretical and empirical gaps connected with refugeehood, time, and endings. Through research and arts, this project explores possible closures, ends, finishes, cancellations, afterlives, ‘post-’s, ‘no more’s, or terminations – and the spaces related to them. To do so, Endings draws on critical research into spatio-temporal facets of forced migration, with emphasis on emotional, legal, and material aspects of the endings. By combining scientific and artistic explorations of endings, we aim to co-create new methodological and theoretical openings and creative textual, audio, and visual expression of them. To capture the broad range of human experiences and interrogate legal categorisations, this project focuses on various groups of people who have self-identified as a refugee, whether this has been formally recognised through a legal status or not. Our working methods include interviews, participant observation, document analysis, and visual, audio and textual arts. The main outcomes of the project consists of book integrating all main elements of the project, poetry book, four peer-reviewed articles, two art exhibitions, two co-creation events, a podcast episode, and texts for popular consumption.