Between April and September 2025, Archives of Solidarity organised three participatory workshops—two in the border cities of Gaziantep and Mardin, and one in London. Each workshop unfolded over three weeks as an immersive space of collective learning and creation, bringing together young refugee and citizen participants to explore how solidarity takes shape across the borders that divide and connect their lives.

22 April – 9 May, 2025

18 June – 3 July, 2025

19 August – 5 September, 2025

At the heart of these workshops was a shared commitment to thinking, feeling, and practicing solidarity in the borderlands. Participants worked with anthropologists, artists, filmmakers, and activists to experiment with creative and ethnographic methods including oral history, collaborative filmmaking, sound ethnography, zine-making, body-mapping, and creative writing.

These methods became tools for inquiry and relation-making. Through walking and listening, interviewing one another, mapping memory, and composing short films and zines, participants reflected on the textures of displacement and belonging. Each site developed its own rhythm and focus, shaped by the histories and urgencies of its border context, from the Syrian–Turkish frontier to the inner borders of the UK’s migration regime.

The workshops reimagined research as a shared practice of care and co-production. Rather than treating participants as research subjects, Archives of Solidarity invited them to become collaborators, researchers, artists, and archivists of their own experiences. This approach turned the process of fieldwork into an experiment in pedagogies of solidarity, where knowledge was produced collectively and reciprocally.

The workshops were organised in collaboration with Kırkayak Kültür in Gaziantep and Migrants Organise in London, together with the project’s core team based at SOAS, University of London. These partnerships anchored the workshops in local networks of activism and care, linking them to broader movements for migrant and refugee justice.

The materials produced, including sound recordings, oral interviews, zines, photographs, and short films, form the foundation of a forthcoming Multimodal Digital Archive of Solidarity. Many participants continue their involvement through a mentorship programme, developing independent research and creative projects inspired by the workshops.

Across Turkey and the UK, these gatherings became more than training spaces: they were acts of world-making in themselves—archives in motion, documenting how solidarity is imagined, practiced, and sustained in borderlands where movement is both restricted and redefined.