Every summer, a community-based organization in Michigan hosts a five-week summer program for over 60 middle and high school immigrant- and refugee-background youth who represent more than 10 home countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burundi, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand) and 25 home languages (e.g., Amharic, Arabic, Bemba, Burmese, Chin, Dari, English, Farsi, French, Hakha Chin, Hindi, Karenni, Kibembe, Kinyabwisha, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish, Lingala, Malay, Masalit, Nepali, Pashto, Rohingya, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Syriac, Tama, Urdu, and Zomi Chin). This past summer of 2019, we collaborated with the organization to pilot a global civic engagement course aimed at addressing one of the most pressing questions of our time: How can negative perceptions of immigrants and immigration in the United States be changed?
There were 12 participants, ages 18 to 23, who were interns or young leaders in the program; they represented seven different home countries and eight different home languages. For five weeks, the youth and intern documented reflections upon their daily lives through their choice of media (e.g., video, audio, photography, and/or writing). Each Friday across the five weeks, we came together as a group to engage in reflective, arts-based dialogues. We now have a collection of multimedia artifacts—including interviews with youth, community cultural/language brokers, and interns—that will be compiled into a short documentary film, which will tell the story of our explorations. In this film, individual’s personal stories will be featured to emphasize how people’s assumptions, judgments, and stereotypes can be challenged and changed through sharing stories about who we are, the obstacles we have overcome, and the dreams we hold for the future.
As a 2019-20 national Re-Imagining Migration fellow, this project—Building Common Ground: Transforming Perceptions of (Im)migration—explores how storytelling in ‘super-diverse’ social contexts can open people’s hearts and minds and enable the realization of our shared humanity.
Photo cred: Leo Vosburgh, Media Producer, The Stories Project