by Dr. Elisabeth Kirndörfer, Lea Haack & Munaf Al-Dulaimi
In times of the Covid-19 pandemic, Leipzig seems strangely calm. Usually this city, as the fastest growing metropolis of Germany, is cherished for its vivid culture, alternative spaces and music scene – its overall pulse and variety. But how do newcomers experience the city? Do they share this view or rather contest it? Which places open up for them when approaching and appropriating the city? The aim of our three story-mapping workshops that took place in September 2020 in the context of a research project (see below) was to re-map Leipzig from a perspective that is mostly underrepresented within urban narratives: the perspective of young refugees and asylum seekers.
We, that are Elisabeth – a researcher with a background in social and cultural anthropology working for the HERA-funded project “The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public spaces” that aims at exploring refugee youth’s stories of home-making, their interaction with arrival infrastructures and their negotiations of inclusion and exclusion in public spaces at the University of Bonn – and Lea, former intern in the project and geography student currently working on her thesis. Both of us share an understanding of research as a dialogical process that is, however, embedded in hierarchical social relations. We feel committed to engage in self-critical and productive reflexivity that can contribute to rupturing and re-appropriating discursive orders that marginalize particularly young urban residents with histories of forced migration.
The following questions were central to our workshops: “Which places in Leipzig are important to me?”, “What have I experienced there?”, “Which smells and/or tastes do I connect with these places?” and “Which feelings do these places evoke in me?”. We were inspired by the method of “collective biography” (Hawkins, Al-Hindi, Moss & Kern 2016) that aims at generating narrations sensitive to the spatial and emotional dimensions of experience.
Collective Storytelling: Experiences – Impressions – Stories
The very basic observation we made is that the sharing of stories around personal landmarks in the city engendered a space of solidary and empathetic listening. The value of this atmosphere marked by sensibility and attention towards the others’ stories was even increased by the fact that our participants’ length of stay in Leipzig was ranging from six weeks only to six years: Especially when taking into consideration the particular challenges of newly arriving during a nation-wide lockdown, conversations around pathways towards and across the city have an empowering dimension.
Very generally, the stories shared indicated a tension-filled relation between multiple experiences of racism on the one hand and the high relevance many attached to the support network of socio- and intercultural associations and initiatives based in the city on the other. While experiences of racism have in one way or another accompanied and constantly hampered the processes of emplacement of our participants from the beginning, the discovery of Leipzig’s rich socio-culture – often appropriated time-delayed – seems to constitute a safety net for many newcomers. However, the stories that have been shared were various: We had the chance to take part, imaginatively, in a not entirely legal visit of a ruin in the east of Leipzig which – with its distinguishable smells and sounds – reminded its narrator of endlessly long afternoons on a playground in Syria. In another story, biographical moments and spaces converged: Visiting the monument of the Battle of the Nations (the “Völkerschlachtdenkmal”) and enjoying the view over the city from its top reminds the narrator of his schooltime in Cameroon where this colossal building was pictured in a class book. Leipzig’s famous “Sachsenbrücke” is evoked as a flourishing meeting point, where distinctive styles of music, convivial practices and voices create an incomparable collage of sounds. Overall, the classical division between “informants” and “researchers” has been blurred during these workshops as exchange rather took place among the protagonists themselves.
From storytelling to mapping
After our story-circle, the individual accounts were located on a blanco map whose only structure was the indication of a few of Leipzig’s main streets, parks and rivers. Stories have been visualized by the means of sketches, icons and writings. The practice of situating the narratives onto the map rendered a deeper examination of the meanings of particular situations and encounters possible: Where does “everyday bordering” (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss & Cassidy 2017) take place and how does it feel? Where do I have access or where have I experienced key support in the context of my personal arrival? The outcome of our three workshops, a collective, yet geographically unprecise map, re-shifts the focus from “official” arrival infrastructures towards the more informal, everyday or “hidden” urban spaces where attachments are forged but also fractures emerge (Meeus, van Heur & Arnaut 2019): This can be sales counters or even police offices where, unexpectedly, settings and situations that discriminate and racialize are counter-balanced by acts of solidarity. It can be spaces of protest, activities of feminists of color – but also the sofa in a sociocultural center that during a weekly open meeting becomes the padding for first connections and affective ties, for curiosity and exchange. Informal spaces of encounter, conviviality and support, and especially those founded by newcomers themselves, provide young refugees and asylum seekers moments of ease, of connection and personal articulation, in a living situation structured by restrictions, boundaries and severe incisions into the personal autonomy. Leipzig from the perspective of newcomers brings to the fore a variety of these micro-spaces of arrival where biographic experience overlaps with the re-imagination and re-designing of public space. But it equally tells the story of everyday racisms – in workplaces, schools or on the university campus – of spatial segregation and the struggles with “bordering” practices executed by authorities and bureaucracies. In sum, “doing arrival” refers, on the one hand, to the daily efforts young newcomers are compelled to by the restrictive and marginalizing policies of European asylum systems: the asylum procedures, strenuous communication with the authorities, finding accommodation, work, building social networks. On the other, “doing arrival” creates new infrastructures, it mobilizes coping strategies and brings into being new linkages and translocal connections.
Our map moved across the city, from workshop to workshop, and so have the stories which by that were picked up, continued and retold. The result pictures the process of arrival as a rhizomatic process, characterized by connections, twists and ruptures.
Why story-mapping?
Through the combination of storytelling and mapping we could capture the complexities, ambivalences, commonalities and the individuality that characterize processes of arrival. The exchange of stories fostered an open and safe space, dynamized by creative possibilities, for our protagonists. We could observe that the map itself did often serve as an important impetus for engaging in the narration. Accordingly, when we held our workshop on a rainy day at a festival – which has forced us to withdraw the map and instead collect the stories on extra papers – participants usually found it more difficult to start the conversation. The presence of the map alone triggered space-sensitive narrations.
Finally, what can we conclude from our workshops? Firstly, combining these two methods turned out to be an appropriate ground for active, attentive and solidary listening. Secondly, the collective map highlights the enormous work done on an informal scale to enhance newcomers’ arrival processes – but most importantly the “doing of arrival” enacted by newcomers’ themselves – which deserves to be further explored, represented, and credited.
Literature
Hawkins, R. / Al-Hindi, K. F. / Moss, P. / Kern, L. (2016): Practicing Collective Biography. In: Geography Compass 10(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12262
Meeus, B. / Arnaut, K. / Van Heur, B. (2019): Arrival Infrastructures. Migration and Urban Social Mobilities. Cham: Springer International Publishing
Yuval-Davis, N. / Wemyss G. / Cassidy, K. (2018): Everyday Bordering, Belonging and the Reorientation of British Immigration Legislation. In: Sociology 52(2). DOI: 10.1177/0038038517702599
Authors
Dr. Elisabeth Kirndörfer has very recently moved from the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig to the University of Bonn where she is currently employed as a researcher in the working group “Cultural Geography” led by Prof. Dr. Kathrin Hörschelmann. In her academic work, she focuses on (post)migration phenomena, translocal biographies and (urban) citizenship.
Lea Haack is studying geography at the University of Leipzig. She has worked as an intern for the HERA-funded project “The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public spaces” led by Prof. Dr. Kathrin Hörschelmann (see above). In her thesis she focuses on participatory research methods to study “Soft” Urban Arrival Infrastructure.
Munaf Al-Dulaimi has discovered his passion for photography more than ten years ago. What is most important to him, in his pictures, is to capture and preserve special moments.
