• Deepen understanding of how solidarity is enacted across displacement contexts

To investigate the everyday spaces, relations, and practices through which refugee and citizen youth, as well as activists, create and sustain forms of mutual support in the UK and Turkey, tracing how solidarity emerges, transforms, and adapts within increasingly restrictive border and humanitarian regimes.

• Build a collaborative, multimodal digital archive of refugee–citizen engagement

To co-produce a dynamic digital archive that documents experiences of displacement, precarity, activism, and solidarity through oral histories, audio-visual materials, creative outputs, and ethnographic records generated by refugee and citizen participants.

• Advance multimodal methodologies for researching displacement

To develop and implement multimodal research approaches—including oral history, ethnography, sonic methods, digital storytelling, colloboratve filmmaking, photography, zinemaking, body mapping and walking-based practices that enable participants to become authors, documentarians, and interpreters of their own experiences.

• Strengthen community relations and cross-border collaborations

To foster sustained relationships among refugee and citizen youth, activists, NGOs, and academic partners in Turkey and the UK, creating infrastructures for shared knowledge, mutual support, and long-term community capacity-building across local, national, and transnational scales.

The project uses a participatory, multimodal approach rooted in long-term collaboration with refugees and citizens in the border regions of Turkey and the UK. Working through oral history, body mapping, zine making, sound ethnography, collaborative filmmaking—including practices such as passing the camera—photography, and walking-based methods, the research invites participants to document, interpret, and analyse their own experiences of displacement and solidarity. These techniques are integrated into co-designed workshops and collective fieldwork that foreground participants’ knowledge and experience while generating rich, multi-sensory material for the project’s digital and physical archives.

Long-Term Impact

• Innovative pedagogical practices:
  • A participatory research toolkit for ethical, collaborative multimodal research with displaced communities based on multimodal, collaborative, and co-creative methods (oral history, sensory ethnography, digital storytelling) adaptable across universities, NGOs, and community education settings.
• Sustainable methodologies for research and activism:
  • Establishment of a replicable model of community-led archival activism, enabling refugee and citizen youth to become long-term custodians of their histories.
• Enhancing community partnerships:
  • Durable partnerships between universities, grassroots organizations, refugee-led initiatives, and cultural institutions in the UK and Turkey.
  • A lasting archive that preserves cross-border solidarities and can be used for advocacy, education, and historical memory work.

Project Outputs

• A multimodal digital archive featuring oral history recordings, photographs, short films, creative writing, audio walks, and collaboratively produced keywords—co-created with refugee and citizen youth and activists.
• Documentary films and a suite of podcasts that foreground lived experiences of displacement, solidarity practices, and activist labour.
• Scholarly publications, including an edited books and peer-reviewed articles on solidarity, multimodal ethnography, archival activism, and youth experiences in border regions.
• Policy briefs (UK and Turkey) informing NGOs, policymakers, and legal actors on refugee-citizen solidarity dynamics and community-based responses to hostile environments.

Public Engagement

• Public exhibitions in the UK and Turkey, showcasing participant-generated materials and making visible alternative solidarities and historical memories often absent from existing archives.
• Community-facing workshops and mentorships (oral history, photography, digital storytelling) that equip participants with creative and research skills while strengthening civic engagement.
• Interactive storytelling portals, podcasts, and curated online features that amplify the digital archive, documentaries, research findings, and reaching stakeholders beyond academic circles.
• Public talks hosted with partner organizations (Kırkayak, KRAN, GDWG), acting as bridges between local communities, activists, and institutions.