The Tassibee ‘Skin and Spirit’ project

This chapter discusses the Tassibee ‘Skin and Spirit’ project. The objectives were to work with a group of girls, aged between 7 and 19, with a focus on building their identity and confidence. The aim was to explore anti-bullying strategies through a range of group and individual art and creative activities for a three-month period. The project was able to meet its aims through the exploration of the perception of what our cover of skin is holding ‘within’, by creatively exploring what is valued and ‘precious’ and what is ‘perceived’, and through facilitating safe and open spaces to explore the girls' experiences, both negative and lovely.

Using poetry to engage the voices of women and girls in research

This chapter considers poetry as a creative or arts-based method within social research. It argues that poetry as a research methodology can elicit thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and can give a platform for marginalised voices, such as women and girls, as it enables those silenced voices to be heard — and heard loudly. Poetry offers one way to capture the knowledge held in communities, particularly among those whose voices have been traditionally marginalised, like young people and women. Poetry provides us with a different lens for making sense of everyday interactions, contradictions, and conflicts. Poetry allows us to express different perspectives of our lived experiences — a mosaic of autonomous voices freed through poetry.

Where I come from and where I’m going to: exploring identity, hopes and futures with Roma girls in Rotherham

This chapter discusses the ‘I come from’ project, one of the strands within the ‘Imagine’ project, which set out to work with a group of Rotherham's young women, defined as Roma by their school and the communities around them. The project aimed to explore their experiences and visions of an imagined future and their fused identities and shared sense of belonging. In the very midst of the project's creative activities, however, the Jay Report into child sexual exploitation was released, letting loose formerly suppressed fears and anxieties about the population growth and perceptions of Roma communities in parts of Rotherham, especially around the town centre. Immediately upon the report's release, Rotherham's once suppressed racial and cultural tensions came to the surface. Perspectives across the communities changed quickly and significantly, and the growing differences between ethnicities and cultures became the focus of both individual actions and media attention.

Identity

This chapter focuses on the identities of British Muslim young women from a writing group, and shares some of the themes that emerged during these writing sessions. Three specific themes related to identity came out of the girls' writing group: place and globalisation; religion; and language. In the UK, there is an increased focus on social cohesion and integration. Young people from minority ethnic communities experience a great deal of pressure in order to fit in with the national narrative of ‘Britishness’, and often feel that they should conform outwardly in their dress and physical appearance, and adopt British sociocultural practices. Those individuals who maintain their faith, language, and cultural identity are seen as segregating themselves and living parallel lives.

How can historical knowledge help us to make sense of communities like Rotherham?

This chapter addresses the question of how historical knowledge can help one to make sense of communities like Rotherham. It first considers what counts as ‘historical knowledge’, and examines the limitations of historiography in producing histories at a local level, where issues of class, gender, and ethnicity are played out in people's everyday lives. The chapter then explores how historians are expanding what counts for historical knowledge — in particular, the co-production of research, which can be defined as research with people rather than on people. It also provides some real-world examples of co-production in action. Finally, the chapter provides some arguments as to why historical knowledge matters.

Policy, practice and racism: social cohesion in action

This chapter considers some questions related to policy development, as policy impacts all areas of community life. In particular, it explores the concept of social cohesion in neighbourhoods, which is currently a key policy issue. The context for this includes internal conflicts between groups competing for the same scarce resources, structural inequality, housing and environment neglect, crime, and disorder, creating segregation and a culture of ‘us and them’. Moreover, this chapter finds that arts methodology is a tool for ethnic minority women and young people to negotiate boundaries and hostile territories and to engage in policy questions on community cohesion through photography, portraits, and poetry.

What this book can teach us

This chapter offers a sense of the legacy of this book and identify its key features, in order to provide a summary of what the authors have learned from doing the book. The central goal in writing this book has been to demonstrate that communities produce their own forms of knowledge, and that those forms are valid — and valuable — ways of knowing. The chapter articulates the value of this kind of research for community knowledge production that is emergent, situated, and future oriented. As such, this chapter identifies four key themes: thinking across difference, the arts as a mode of inquiry and as an agent of change, rethinking knowledge production practices, and hope and the importance of transformational change. The chapter then reflects on these themes.

Emotions in community research

This chapter argues that emotions help people with ‘meaning making’, and offer different experiences of the world through a different lens. It does so in the context of women's writing, as writing connects ordinary women and gives them the opportunity to articulate feelings not expressed or shared before. In academic social science, emotions have historically been associated with the irrational and quite opposed to the objective scientific search for knowledge. However, in the last decade or so, sociologists have recognised that ethnographic research cannot be clinical and detached from human emotions. We can say ‘emotions do things’ — they move us but also connect us with others.

Tassibee: a case study

This chapter present excerpts of writing and reflections by three participants who regularly attended the Tassibee (a local charity) programmes: Nasim Bashir, Fazelat Begum, and Mukhtar Begum. They detail the previous lives of the first generation of women who came to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s. These women's writing reflects memories of life prior to arriving in the UK, at which point everything changed for them. The different cultural lifestyle in the UK was not something that the women could ever have imagined. They found it hard to adapt to the British weather, and experienced difficulties with accessing services, including health and dental services, and social support in terms of provision (available only if you had the skills to access it).

History and co-production in the home: documents, artefacts and migrant identities in Rotherham

This chapter considers alternative histories of urban settlement through the intersection between family and neighbourhood. It proposes a form of co-production that connects specific small-scale communities not to meta-histories, but to documents that have a specific meaning within their own notions of narrative. The ‘stuff’ of such histories, because they are as much about the private, intimate, and familiar, is about stuff in the home — much of it undiscovered, perhaps only half-realised by families. Many historians have seen this as the ephemera of marginal oral histories. In extension of arguments about the role of oral history made elsewhere, this chapter argues that the connection between the intimate, which includes the material memorabilia and personal documents in homes, and the public community, helps us to explore the ways in which ideas of postcolonial citizenship are related to the idea of the home.