The concept of ‘conviviality’ has been widely used in research on race and migration. Following Paul Gilroy1, it refers to ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere’. Often racist discourse views cultural difference as an obstacle to equality, that is why understanding conviviality can be important for challenging racist exclusions.
While mostly applied to the peaceful co-habitation of members of dominant and subordinate ethnic groups, in our own research, we explore the complex ways in which conviviality helps understand how differences of age, gender, generation, class, education and others intersect. These differences do not necessarily lead to antagonistic relationships, but can be mobilised for communicating and sharing across differences.
Our research project on Participatory Arts and Social Action Research2 explores how participatory theatre and walking methods can help us understand how migrant families create belonging and engage with the places in which they live.
In the first phase of the project we worked with a group of 14 mothers and a group of 14 secondary school girls in North London, creating theatre scenes, maps of their everyday lives and undertaking walking interviews in their neighbourhood. We worked with each group separately and then brought them together in a workshop where they showed each other the scenes they had developed. One thing that participants in both groups valued was that our workshops became a space for building new forms of sociality. The participants developed new knowledges within each group across ethnic and other differences, and also across differences of generation.
Our research took place against the wider socio-political backdrop of policy, which expressly aims to create a hostile environment for migration3. In this climate, migrant mothers are blamed for potentially raising children who cannot integrate and share British values or who may even become home-grown terrorists, as articulated in David Cameron’s speech in January 2016. Our work with school pupils also took place against the backdrop of the Prevent strategy, which renders especially - though not only - young people of Muslim origin as always in need of surveillance to prevent radicalisation.
These socio-political developments are keenly felt by our participants, for example the girls shared experiences of being seen as trouble makers in shops, buses, on the streets, at school and sometimes by their parents: being black and Muslim made them a target of racism. The mothers on the other hand felt they were being looked down upon both by institutional agents and by their children because they spoke English with an accent and were seen as culturally Other.
The theatre and walking methods allowed participants to ‘play’ and be listened to; they enabled opportunities to interact in different ways and have control over their creations. The methods allowed them to express and reflect on emotional processes, including anger, fear, pain and hope as everyday interactions in their families, communities and wider society. This contrasted starkly with the non-convivial institutional practices of regulation and exclusion.
Participatory theatre and walking methods have the potential to intervene into wider social relations by introducing and deepening processes of convivial, dialogic knowledge creation.
References
1 Gilroy, P., (2005). Postcolonial Melancholia, Columbia University Press, p. xv.
2 https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/research/PASAR/
3 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/10/immigration-bill-theresa-may-hostile-environment