For the 3rd year in a row, the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts team are organising a large international knowledge exchange festival for anybody working with integration through creative and/or linguistic methods. This is a free event, open to all.

This year's theme is: MayDay

We’ve borrowed language to make the international radio distress signal

The dictionary tells me that Mayday comes from the French: m’aider

English gained the word from the French speaking helpers.

Help – Hilfe - it gained from German speaking assisters.

Charity came via the Romans.

There are ironies here. Multiple ironies. Multilingual ones.

We have invited artistic, academic, artistically academic and academically artistic contributions to our third spring school which connect with this theme of ‘MayDay’- of the ‘International Radio Distress Signal’.

Be prepared for three days of workshops, performances and presentations, which...

♫ explore the ways in which the arts are used to express distress and in the questions of efficacy which are raised when artists engage in applied work or align their work with groups. Is this work exploitation or is it mutuality?

♫ address how we affirm dignity when dignity is stripped. What is the role of the arts and language and culture in dignifying human beings and their environments?

♫ explore multilingual dimensions and origins of words for ‘help’ or ‘aid’. How do we avoid sentimentalising care or aid or hospitality? We are especially keen to open out critical discussions of humanitarianism and aid to human-centred understandings of the ethics of care.

♫ provide reflections and stories from those who help and have been helped in the creation of refuge, from those who understand their stories as those as people seeking sanctuary and those who understand themselves as aligned to and connected through critical reflection and practical or artistic work to the movements of people saying ‘Refugees Welcome’.

♫ provide policy discussions of what help looks like pragmatically when delivered through services, councils, NGOs, and the absences around assistance.

♫ tell the many stories of those engaged in volunteering, art making, academic research who are ambivalent about the place of help, of ‘white saviour complex’ and humanitarianism and those who are focused on legal remedies. For more info see the Manifesto of RISE setting out guidelines for arts engagements with those seeking refuge.

For information on Keynote speakers, Workshops, panels, performances, presentations and discussions see the UNESCO RILA Spring School 2020 FULL PROGRAMME

Places are limited! Register via Eventbrite: bit.ly/2Tncp2L

First published: 28 February 2020

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