Narratives of Agency: Understanding the Refugee Experience through Paintings at the EU’s External Borders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite a burgeoning interest in the “visual” in migration and border research, refugees’ own perspectives of how they represent their experiences of struggles with/against borders through paintings remain underinvestigated. This article seeks to fill this gap by providing a close and contextual understanding of refugees’ perceptions and their first-hand experiences of their struggles with borders with reference to critical border studies and visual approaches. Drawing on qualitative analysis of the paintings produced by en route refugee artists at the Hope Project on the Greek island of Lesvos, the article dissects the emerging visual narratives and practices. The article exposes three common narratives from the paintings regarding how the artists recount the perilous journeys of refugees from home toward the European Union, their everyday life constrained in Lesvos, and their future aspirations in a tide of freedom and uncertainty. These common narratives illustrate a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future of refugees’ migratory and life trajectories interrupted by the European border(ing) regime. As the article illustrates, the paintings reveal how refugees as socio-political agents challenge the state borders built against their mobilities and, in doing so, they also defy the symbolic borders fabricated against their identities. Despite a burgeoning interest in “visual” migration and border research, refugees’ own representations of their experiences of struggles with/against borders through paintings remain underinvestigated. In this article, I provide a close and contextual understanding of refugee perceptions and their first-hand experiences of struggles with borders, while highlighting the political significance of refugee-produced artworks in borderlands. Inspired by critical border studies and visual approaches, I draw on qualitative analysis of 70 paintings produced by en route refugee artists at the Hope Project on the Greek island of Lesvos, dissecting the emerging visual narratives and refugees’ creative practices. Analysis exposes three common narrative themes of the paintings: the perilous journeys of refugees from their homes toward the European Union, their everyday life constrained in Lesvos, and their future aspirations in a tide of freedom and uncertainty. These themes illustrate a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future of refugee experience, interrupted by the European border(ing) regime. These narratives reveal that even seemingly depoliticized spaces, namely art workshops and paintings, can become hyper-politicized, recounting how refugees as socio-political agents challenge the state borders constructed to manage refugee mobility and defy the symbolic borders targeting their identity and political subjectivity. Keywords: refugee artworks, migrant agency, European border regime, bordering, Greece, Moria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".