1.1 Introduction

“Understanding who we are”. These words are imprinted on the wall of the Vorarlberg Museum, located in Bregenz, the capital of the Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg, which borders with Switzerland. This motto implies that there is a clearly demarcated “we” whose identity and culture can be defined and that it is the task of the museum to contribute to such a definition. The artist, writer and activist Mohammed Ali Baş, born in Vorarlberg of Turkish parents, aims to change this motto by crossing out “who” and replacing it with “where” so that the sentence reads “Understanding where we are”. With this modification, the artist aims to highlight that culture is not an essence of a people but is constantly changing. Migration has been one of the most important factors of such changes over recent decades in Europe. However, this has not necessarily found recognition in large cultural institutions, cultural policies and the related official local, regional and national narratives. Mohammed Ali Baş’ motto defines museums as places that help individuals and communities to understand where they stand in this process of cultural change initiated by migration. Where do we stand between the exclusion of migrants as others from national narratives and traditions invented in the nineteenth century and the emergence of new narratives that include them and enable their social, political and cultural participation?

This vignette contains many of the ideas discussed in this volume. “Migration is, of course, change”, as Alejandro Portes once put it (2010, p. 1544). It increases the diversity of societies in terms of origins, languages, religions and cultural traditions. However, this does not automatically imply a change in how local, regional and national communities define, narrate and represent themselves and their cultures.Footnote 1 Rather, what we observe is a struggle between agents of change and those who oppose them. The agents of change adapt, transform or reinvent official narratives to reflect the fact that European societies have become migration societies – they have experienced immigration for decades and an increasing number of people, especially among the younger age groups, are the descendants of migrants. Those opposing these agents of change revert to the national cultural traditions invented in the nineteenth century. A third group is located, undecidedly, somewhere in between these two poles (Broadhead, 2018; Foroutan, 2019; see also the Chap. 10 by Erel in this volume). Such struggles are typical for post-migrant societies, i.e. migration societies where immigration is controversial and which are therefore still marked by discrimination against and the exclusion of migrants (Petersen et al., 2019). The above vignette documents that these struggles do not only take place in politics. Indeed, writers, singers, poetry slammers etc. have often countered the growing political mobilisation against migrants and have therefore come to be regarded as major agents of change. Cultural institutions, on the other hand, such as museums and theatres, which contributed to the invention and representation of national communities, cannot not take a stance in this struggle (Vlachou, 2019). Either they silently continue telling these invented traditions or they start changing them. What the outcome of these struggles will be remains to be seen. In fact, we do not even know where we currently stand. Researchers also seem to be split on how they assess what is going on. While some turn to migrants’ artistic and cultural practices as agents of change or use arts-based research methods to engender change, others point out that these laudable efforts will never lead to true cultural change because they do not affect the exclusionary structures (see Chap. 8 by Delhaye in this volume).

The present publication moves beyond this impasse. We argue that both poles need to be kept in mind if we intend to assess where migration societies stand in the process of cultural change. It is not enough to identify artists and cultural producers as agents of change. We need to consider that they act in structures installed in the process of nation-building and that they are confronted with actors whose habitus has developed in these structures in cultural fields and beyond. Effective change means transforming these structures as well as their in-built understandings of culture so that they more aptly represent the realities of migration societies. What makes assessing change in these terms even more complex is that we, as migration researchers, are deeply involved in this process. We also cannot not take a stance. Statistical evidence clearly shows that European societies have become migration societies. We must, therefore, take this reality as a starting point for our analyses in order not to perpetuate the exclusive community narratives invented in the nineteenth century. We must move beyond naturalising the divide between migrants and non-migrants (Dahinden, 2016). However, those who take these narratives to reflect reality or, even worse, intend to again turn them into reality, denounce this new stance in migration studies as not being objective. This observation has led to researchers moving beyond simply observing towards engendering change in and with their research. In this context, arts-based methods and cooperation with artists and cultural institutions have become very popular among researchers. Yet again, if we know little about the lasting effects of migrants’ cultural and artistic activities, we know even less about the effects of these new approaches in migration research.

In line with these introductory thoughts, the guiding questions of this volume are: Does migration lead to cultural change? If so, what is the role of arts and cultural activities in this process of change? Moreover, how far can migration research contribute to this process of cultural change? The contributions take the debates on cultural change further in three respects. First, they develop new theoretical and methodological approaches that can be used to analyse cultural change. Second, they assess how the activities of immigrants and their descendants in a concrete local context bring about change beyond the local level. Finally, they discuss joint ventures for change between research, arts and cultural production. The authors provide insights into processes of cultural change in eight national contexts in Europe (Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom). The book not only includes a wide range of artistic and cultural practices – ranging from literature, film and music via carnival and national-day celebrations to data visualisation and digital storytelling – but also discusses processes of change in large cultural institutions, such as museums and theatres, which historically contributed to the representation of nations as homogeneous.

In the rest of the introduction, I first locate the volume in the wider debate on migration and change in migration studies. Subsequently, I explain in more detail where and how this volume moves beyond the state of the art before, finally, discussing our results in the light of recent changes in migration studies.

1.2 Migration, Change and Artistic and Cultural Activities

Does migration bring social and cultural change in migration receiving societies? This question has not, thus far, been at the forefront of migration research. This is surprising since many of the researchers working in this field come from disciplines such as sociology and anthropology that focus on studying social and cultural change. However, migration researchers have generally not analysed how societies change through immigration but more how migrants change in their host societies (Bojadžijev & Römhild, 2014). The transnational turn did not entirely modify this perspective because it linked migrants to their places of origin and looked at how these changed through migration (Levitt, 1998; Ullah et al., 2022). In other words, the researchers upheld the national borders that no longer existed by studying migrants and their descendants as distinct entities not belonging to the societies in which they lived (Dahinden, 2016). This has, to some extent, also been true for the humanities, as illustrated by the numerous literary studies that exclusively focus on the literary works of migrants and their descendants (Sievers & Vlasta, 2018). At the same time, the idea that migration may lead to more general cultural and social change in countries of destination first emerged in literary/cultural studies in the 1990s, with Homi Bhabha’s The location of culture, first published in 1994, becoming the most important work of reference for this paradigm change (Bhabha, 2004). However, this did not result in more studies on how these literatures, cultures and societies change. Rather, there has been a tendency to supplant national with transnational or global histories, such as histories of migration (Bade, 2003; Chiellino, 1995). These make visible the history of migration which is usually ignored in national histories. In parallel to this new approach, the emergence of right-wing populism and extremism became a phenomenon of change through migration in receiving societies that received ample attention, as illustrated in a recently published handbook (Rydgren, 2018). The current challenge is how to integrate into our histories of transnationalism the fact that nationalism persists (Triandafyllidou, 2022). Today’s reality in Europe is marked by both migration and the fact that European societies did not, for many years, tell their own histories in these terms. Instead, they perceived themselves as national communities which led to the exclusion and discrimination of all those turned into others by these narratives. There is no guarantee that these national narratives will be overcome. Telling histories as histories of change makes it possible to remember the violence of exclusion while moving towards a different future.

A revealing example of how little social change was at the forefront of migration studies is a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 2010 focusing on “Theories of migration and social change”. In his introduction to the volume, Nicholas Van Hear raises the questions: “Does migration change society? […] And how does social change in turn influence migration?” (Van Hear, 2010, p. 1531). Interestingly, only one of the seven articles in the special issue really attended to the first question, whereas the others all dealt with the second.Footnote 2 Moreover, that one article, written by Alejandro Portes, argues that migration to Europe and the United States after World War II has not led to fundamental social change in host societies. Central pillars, such as the political, legal or educational systems and, “above all, the distribution of power arrangements and the class structure”, remain intact (Portes, 2010, p. 1548). Rather, change becomes visible in two ways. Either the descendants of immigrants move up the social ladder and enter positions of power – not only in politics and the economy but also in arts and cultural production – or, alternatively, they face racism and other structural barriers and become marginalised communities. The latter developments lead to social tensions and bring to the fore nativist movements and right-wing populist parties mobilising against these marginalised groups. Clearly, this conclusion mirrors the state-of-the-art in migration research at the time. More-recent approaches, however, imply that it is not the lack of integration but growing integration that explains the emergence of nativism and right-wing populism. Aladin El-Mafaalani (2018) calls this phenomenon the integration paradox. He regards integration not as a teleological process of migrants adapting to their host societies but as a struggle that affects all members of a society and comes with backlashes. For instance, migrants who climb the social ladder and demand participation may come to be regarded as a threat by those who traditionally had the exclusive right to these higher positions in that particular society.

Portes (2010) points out that the cultural capital of the migrants decides whether they climb the social ladder or become marginalised. He ignores that this also depends on the culture of the receiving societies. There is clear evidence that migrants’ opportunities to climb the social ladder and actively participate in their societies of residence differ between national contexts (Crul & Schneider, 2010). Researchers mainly explain these differences with institutional arrangements in legislation, education, the labour market, housing and religion (Crul & Schneider, 2010). Alba and Nee (2003) regard cultural change among the majority as equally important. They base this argument on the assimilation of the German, Italian, Irish and Eastern European immigrants who arrived in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. While many Americans regarded these groups as unassimilable in the early-twentieth century, attitudes changed during World War II when these immigrants and their descendants fought in the American army. There is little knowledge of how this change happened but the authors claim that cultural activities played a major role:

[W]hite ethnic groups were bathed in the cultivated warmth of a campaign for unity, which symbolically promoted the unification of Americans of different national backgrounds with festivals to celebrate the contributions of immigrant groups to America, an early form of multicultural ritual. (Alba & Nee, 2003, p. 115)

Ethnic diversity also played a role in popular wartime novels published at the time (Alba & Nee, 2003, p. 116). Alba and Nee (2003) assume that a similar process is underway regarding the post-1965 immigration to the United States. The mainstream will change again to include these immigrants mainly originating from Asia and Latin America. However, there is little evidence that this is what is happening. Drouhot and Nee still regard understanding the current remaking of American and European societies as “an important area for future work” in 2019 (p. 191).

One important area of change that needs more study is narrative change. This particularly concerns the boundaries drawn between self and other within the narratives underlying nation states and governing the daily actions of their members. It is in this respect that fundamental change is necessary because this concerns values instilled in Western societies in the processes of colonisation and nationalisation. The age-old image of “the immigrant threat” (Lucassen, 2005) can still be used to mobilise voters successfully today because this narrative draws on and conjures its alleged opposite, the grand narrative of the homogeneous national self. To overcome racism and exclusion and deprive nativist and right-wing political movements of their basis, we need to move beyond such narratives. As Robert D. Putnam put it:

In the medium to long run […] successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities. Thus, the central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of “we”. (2007, pp. 138–139)

There is a strong belief that arts and cultural activities have the power to initiate such a change. It is this belief that explains the artistic turn in migration studies. Researchers in the humanities and also, more recently, in the social sciences have come to regard artists and cultural performers as agents and means of cultural change.

History shows that arts and cultural activities have the potential to effectuate such a change. After all, they were essential for the building of the imagined homogeneous national communities that are the root cause of the exclusion of immigrants and their descendants today. Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that, in the nineteenth century, novels were as important as newspapers in instilling in individuals the idea that they are part of a national community. They not only circulated in the whole national territory and thereby created a community of readers sharing the same knowledge and beliefs but also contain the notion that people who do not know each other personally are nevertheless part of the same community (Anderson, 1991, pp. 24–26). At the same time, these narratives laid the basis for the distinction between self and others in these imagined communities. As Edward Said (1993) has shown with his method of contrapuntal reading, nineteenth-century English and French novels are structured by colonial patterns and thinking. Jane Austen only mentions in passing that the bourgeois family in Mansfield Park lives off the work of slaves on their sugar plantation in the Caribbean but it is exactly this side remark that assigns Blacks the role of the others in the white British imagined community (Said, 1993). In his book The location of culture, first published in 1994, Homi Bhabha (2004) draws on these arguments when he claims that the artistic and cultural practices of immigrants and their descendants can initiate cultural change in these imagined communities He argues: “Increasingly, “national” cultures are being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities” (2004, p. 8) and cites a close reading of Salman Rushdie’s The satanic verses (1988) that interprets the novel as providing an alternative vision of the British past, present and future as central proof for this hypothesis. Bhabha’s ideas have become very influential in literary studies that focus on the writing of immigrants and their descendants, as documented in a recently published overview of research in this field (Sievers & Vlasta, 2018). Many of the chapter authors in Sievers and Vlasta (2018) already stress in their titles that these writers challenge the myth of Japanese homogeneity, change Italian national identity, transnationalise the German literary field, force the Greeks to learn new languages and provide insights into a new transnational Swiss nation and a new Austria.

Since the late 2000s, migrants’ artistic and cultural activities have also gained significance in migration studies. Researchers in sociology and political sciences have come to understand these as forms of political mobilisation (Martiniello & Lafleur, 2008) or cultural citizenship (Zapata-Barrero, 2016) that may lead to wider cultural and social change. Scholars in media studies have come to regard artistic works as a means to move beyond the misrepresentation of migrants in the media (Leurs et al., 2020). Last but not least, there has been a trend in migration studies towards working with arts-based methods that enable research participants to raise their voices through art, storytelling and performance not only to increase awareness, challenge stereotypes and hegemonic practices but also to bring about real change (O’Neill, 2010; O’Neill et al., 2019). These latter approaches take up the democratisation attempts in the arts that emerged in many European countries in the 1970s to move beyond the elitist understanding of art and make available to everyone the use of artistic practices for expressing themselves. Arts-based approaches are therefore closely related to the turn to migrants’ artistic and cultural activities in research. While the latter discuss these activities as expressions of change, the former use artistic and cultural practices to engender change. All these approaches have been important steps in moving beyond mere criticism of the existing hierarchies and the exclusion of immigrants and towards airing ideas of how these circumstances can be changed.

However, the fact that a growing number of artistic and cultural activities and arts-based research results challenge the myth of homogeneous national identities does not necessarily imply that we are witnessing a process of lasting cultural change. It is only when they alter structures and institutions that these new narratives of community will gain wider acceptance. Studies analysing the link between individual agency and structural change in this area are few and far between. Some researchers have found evidence of cultural change in post-migrant urban settings. A study on Philadelphia’s cultural economy, for instance, observes that the presence of immigrant artists and cultural participants changes “the social organisation of the arts and culture in the United States” (Stern et al., 2010, p. 23). This says little about the issue of whether the content of these artistic and cultural activities influences the ways in which communities are imagined in Philadelphia and beyond. More-recent studies claim that there is a link between the growing visibility of migrants’ artistic and cultural activities in Cologne and Vienna and the adoption by these cities of diversity policies that include migrants in their imagined communities (Çağlar, 2016; Salzbrunn, 2014). This leads Ayşe Çağlar to describe “these artists and cultural producers as active agents of city-making processes” (2016, p. 964).

On the other hand, studies measuring whether national artistic and cultural fields have become more open towards immigrants and their descendants find that, even within these fields, cultural change is a slow process and has a limited effect. This holds true for Pauwke Berkers’ (2009) comparative analysis of ethnic boundaries in the US, Dutch and German literary fields between 1955 and 2005. He finds that the boundaries in these fields can, to some extent, be explained with the response to immigration in the respective context. Thus, there is almost no change in the German literary field. However, even in the Dutch and the US literary fields, change is a slow process. It took several decades before Moroccan immigration had any impact on Dutch literary policies and criticism and at least half a century for cultural change to find its way into textbooks used in university education in the US. Koren and Delhaye (2017) further confirm these observations. Even in the Dutch literary field where Berkers found indications of more-inclusive narratives, mainstream publishers still consider ethnic-minority writing as having relevance only for the minority in question and as lacking in literary quality. In other words, they are unaware that what they regard as objective statements on the aesthetic quality of literary writing are rooted in exclusion and discrimination: “In short, literary values and gatekeepers’ practices are depoliticised, while diversity as a practice and policy is politicised, and thereby discredited” (Koren & Delhaye, 2017, p. 197).

1.3 Studying Cultural Change: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Approaches

The present volume offers ideas of how we can move beyond this impasse. Instead of focusing either on migrants or on the larger structural and narrative frameworks, we suggest always bearing in mind both dimensions by focusing on cultural change. The past has shown that narrative change is possible. So, there is no reason to believe that such major changes cannot happen again in the future. However, it is not enough to observe migrants’ individual artistic activities or to engender artistic activities among migrants. We need to understand whether and how these activities contribute to wider change among non-migrants too. This volume takes up these challenges. It proposes theoretical and methodological approaches that highlight how ideas of change expressed in artistic and cultural practices spread and lead to wider cultural change; it also looks at the slow processes of change in large cultural institutions that emerged at a time when culture was nationalised. It explains how individual and group activities can have an impact beyond their immediate surroundings. Finally, it discusses how migration researchers have co-operated with arts and cultural producers and used artistic means to inspire change with their research participants in a wider public. For this purpose, it combines two approaches usually not discussed together: (1) the analysis of artistic and cultural activities in cultural studies and migration studies and (2) the turn to arts-based research in migration studies. Together, these two approaches constitute what I describe as the artistic turn in migration studies. That they are usually not regarded as being linked goes back to the long-standing distinction between what is considered art and all other artistic and cultural activities. What is considered art has changed over recent decades, with popular cultural products, such as music and comics, having come to be considered worthy of being studied as arts (Sievers, 2014). However, this has merely implied an expansion of this distinctive boundary. There are still many artistic and cultural activities denigrated as mere pastimes, personality-building activities or social work. We believe that this distinction is irrelevant when we focus on processes of cultural change. All artistic and cultural activities as well as collaboration with the arts may contribute to such a change.

Part I of this volume provides theoretical and methodological input into how to conceive, measure, research and describe processes of cultural change, both within artistic fields and beyond. Clearly, we are only at the very beginning of understanding these processes and still in need of exploring not only how to observe cultural change but also how to explain the lack of such change. Bourdieu’s (1996) field theory is an ideal point of departure for such an endeavour because it sets out to combine structure and agency in one single approach. However, as Wiebke Sievers shows here in Chap. 2, it is necessary to overcome the methodological nationalism of Bourdieu’s thinking if we intend to apply field theory to migration. While Bourdieu long ignored migration in his social analyses, migrants are present in his studies on culture, albeit he regards them as being incapable of bringing about cultural change. What he ignores is that this is due to the exclusionary mechanisms that were installed in the process of the nationalisation of cultures. If this dimension is taken into account, then Bourdieu’s field theoretical approach is an ideal tool with which to analyse diachronic processes of change initiated by migration because change is a central dimension of his approach. In Chap. 3, Michael Parzer and Ana Mijić develop a method that provides in-depth insights into the ambiguity of cultural change. Many studies on migrants’ artistic and cultural activities unquestioningly assume that these aim for a more multicultural and multilingual understanding of communities. Parzer and Mijić argue, by contrast, that cultural change involves both opening and closure. They apply Wimmer’s (2013) boundary-making approach to the field of music to make visible change as a contradictory process that involves both the blurring and the reinforcement – as well as the contraction and the expansion – of ethnic boundaries. Their focus on ethnic boundaries automatically implies that they move beyond discussing migrants as a separate entity. The drawing of ethnic boundaries is per se a process of negotiations between self-ascriptions and the perceptions and expectations of others. In other words, they overcome the divide between structure and agency by showing that each individual positioning is always already an indication of the wider structures in which it evolves.

The following two chapters put structural change centre stage by focusing on cultural institutions, such as museums, theatres and cultural administrations. Chapter 4 uses a reflexive approach to discuss the methodological difficulties of analysing change as researchers embedded in museums. Rikke Gram, Lars Bädeker and Antonie Schmiz show, in two contrastive case studies, that such researchers are never simply analysts but are part of the process of change. In one of their cases, the researcher was embedded in a museum and city administration that have an interest in opening up towards migration and a long-term relationship with the researcher’s institution of origin. This led to the researcher being drawn into the process of change as an expert. The other researcher, by contrast, entered a museum that does not fully endorse cultural change as a necessary adaptation process and is located in an urban context where the debates on migration are highly polarised. Moreover, it has no relation of trust with the researcher’s institution of origin. Consequently, the respective researcher met with distrust and was only granted very limited insights into the museum’s structures. In such a context, observing structural change is made almost impossible. In fact, as Joanna Jurkiewicz and Jens Schneider argue in Chap. 5, structural change is still rare in cultural institutions, at least in Germany. They trace this non-change back to the lack of narratives that help to grasp the reality of migration societies. Rather, the representatives of cultural institutions still revert to the idea of internationality when they try to figure out how to adapt to the fact that Germany has become a migration society. In other words, they continue to locate migrants outside rather than within German society. The two authors show this to be true for some very different cultural institutions, namely a long-standing and well-established theatre in Hamburg and the cultural administration as well as several festivals in a small Southern German town.

The chapters in Part II of the volume analyse concrete examples of how immigrants and their descendants bring about cultural change. Their joint interest is in the wider local, national and international implications of such individual and group activities. However, there are differences in how these actors achieve such wider effects. Artists may create alternative narratives in literature, film and music and spread these through events and the internet, as Chaps. 6 and 7 indicate. In Chap. 6, Annalisa Frisina and Sandra Agyei Kyeremeh discuss how Black and Muslim writers and filmmakers attempt to change the nationalist and colonialist Italian community narrative that racialises them. They analyse narratives and films that identify the colonial past in the Italian present and reimagine Italy in the stories of characters who transgress the existing narrative borders. Their case studies show that this narrative change goes hand in hand with structural change, as the artists themselves straddle the borders of the respective artistic fields by making use of social media and recently installed distribution and streaming platforms to spread their reimaginations of Italianness to a wide audience. While some authors, such as Igiaba Scego, have found national recognition, other artists point out how difficult it is to change the narrative and structural borders in these established arts. By contrast, the bottom-up process of changing narratives and structures seems to be far easier in popular culture, as Monika Salzbrunn and Birgit Ellinghaus illustrate in Chap. 7, in their case study of the carnival and music scene in Cologne. The process of change began in the early 1990s when local musicians openly criticised racism in Germany in response to racist attacks in several German cities. Since then, the carnival and music scene has massively changed: new musical platforms emerged to open the carnival to a wide variety of musical traditions; alternative carnival sessions featuring diverse artists were installed that have become more popular than the traditional events; and songs on immigration have become part of the standard carnival tradition. However, this has not led to an increase in public funding, which was always low compared to the amounts granted to classical music. In other words, popular culture has changed but the underlying structural division between popular culture and art has not, with only the latter being considered worthy of public funding.

The next two chapters differ from these first two examples in Part II in one respect: they discuss change that automatically affects national narratives. Their case studies show how individuals and groups address the national institutions relevant for the building of the imagined homogeneous communities – namely, museums and national-day celebrations – and thereby achieve change at the local and the national level at the same time. In Chap. 8, Christine Delhaye analyses the process of change that led to the Amsterdam Museum finally abandoning the term Golden Age in 2019. The term is used in the Netherlands to refer to the seventeenth century. It contains a narrative of a time when the Dutch were a global power, extremely wealthy and excelled in the arts, sciences, literature and philosophy. However, this wealth and fame was based on the occupation and exploitation of foreign territories and people for whom this was most certainly not a golden age. While the museum finally decided to change the term when one of their posters advertising a Golden Age portrait exhibition was adbusted by an activist, Delhaye shows that this was only the last step in a very long process of structural change in the Dutch museum scene. What is more, this process is part of a larger struggle about Dutchness currently taking place in the Netherlands. In Chap. 9, Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła, on the other hand, discusses how national-day celebrations in Norway are changing in the micro practices of their participants. These changes range from migrants and their descendants celebrating national day in the traditional Norwegian way via those who follow most of the traditions but adapt the Norwegian traditional dresses with hijabs or eat ethnic food – among whom, many non-migrants – to those who use the day to celebrate their nation of origin. The author stresses that all these practices change national-day celebrations. However, only a very limited range of these existing practices finds public recognition in the official narrative of the national-day celebrations as presented on TV and social media in pandemic times. So wider structural change is only just beginning to happen.

Part III of the volume focuses on joint ventures for change between research, arts and cultural production and assesses the effects of such approaches. All the chapters draw on participatory arts-based research methods that use artistic approaches to involve the research participants in producing knowledge. Such approaches not only consider migrants as experts on their own experiences but also aim to make the knowledge produced relevant to them. Additionally, in many cases, the researchers combine participatory arts-based approaches with specific formats of public engagement that aim to spread the knowledge produced to a wider public. In other words, such research projects involve cultural change and social transformation in their methodology. The chapters contain good practices and recommendations on how to use arts-based approaches in migration research. Umut Erel’s Chap. 10 provides insights into how the co-operation of researchers with artists, artistic institutions and activists can contribute to overcoming the polarisation we see in public debates about migration. That joining forces can make a difference has been shown by the post-migrant movement in Germany. Erel presents similar initiatives in the British context, introducing formats such as pop-up profs or researcher-artist-activist symposia that aim to spread research results beyond academic fora. Such innovative interactive dialogues do not necessarily lead to a change of views. However, they move beyond making migrants the objects of public debate by bringing them into the debate. Moreover, they involve a respectful exchange of views between all participants and inspire non-migrants to critically reflect public migration debates. Such interactive dialogues also play a central role in Chap. 11. Martina Kamm and Lhamo Meyer present a complex methodological approach and the results of a long-term project that aimed to raise awareness of the traumatic consequences of war, persecution and flight among the Swiss public and among professionals – such as teachers and social workers – who work with refugees. Dialogue was essential both in the phases of gathering the stories of the refugees and their children and in sharing these stories with the wider public. The project created a safe space in which refugees and their descendants could tell their stories and thereby intervene in the polarised debates on migration. Arts-based approaches, such as a photographic exhibition, a film and an interactive Video-Box facilitated the exchanges between the refugees and the wider public. Moreover, the Video-Box prompted the further storytelling of pupils watching the refugees telling their stories. The many testimonials gathered during the project show that this not only raised awareness of the problems of refugees and their descendants but also strengthened the self-confidence and self-esteem of the participating refugees, who gradually began to act as refugee ambassadors in national media. In other words, they overcame the role as outsiders projected on them and began to actively intervene in the debates on migration in their new home country, telling their own stories of migration.

In Chap. 12, Melissa Moralli and Pierluigi Musarò discuss the results of the action research project “Atlas of Transitions”. In the project, theatres and artists, together with migrants, refugees, researchers and activists, co-created artistic and cultural activities that contained new narratives on migration and included the audience in the performances in order to overcome the traditional division between migrants and non-migrants in artistic practice. The authors explain how these aims were translated into practice in Bologna in several artistic activities presented at three international festivals. For instance, an association of second-generation migrants, together with asylum-seekers, created a collective urban itinerary that links specific spaces in the city with emotions ranging from fear to happiness. This itinerary tells the story of how migrants and refugees experience the city – telling these stories is a means for them to claim the city space as their own. The itinerary ended in a theatre where the creators discussed their maps with experts and activists. Again, migrants were given the opportunity to reflect on how exclusionary hate speech affects them and to discuss a possible language of inclusion that may lead to changes in living together in the city. A similar city-mapping activity also features in the final chapter of this volume. Matteo Dutto, Francesco Ricatti, Luca Simeone and Rita Wilson, in Chap. 13, focus on how digital storytelling can be used to empower young people with multilingual and multicultural backgrounds to take over leadership roles in the superdiverse city of Prato in the future. The authors argue that these youths have the potential to bridge divisions between migrants and non-migrants, rich and poor etc. in their cities but that low self-esteem and discrimination often prevent them from becoming central actors in their communities. The project “Our Prato” provided 48 high-school students from Prato with the opportunity to learn digital storytelling methods and create their own digital narratives of the city and to present their results, in a pop-up exhibition, to policy-makers, teachers, families and friends as well as members of the wider public. The last step in the process was the creation of a website that tells the multicultural and multilingual history of Prato and presents the ideas of the 48 students on how to recreate the city in the future. The students themselves described the project as a means of learning how not to be strangers in their city. Moreover, the way in which they presented their results to their audiences – not only at the exhibition but also on the radio and in the later online launch of a website – documents their increased self-esteem and interest in becoming actively involved in future processes of cultural and social change.

1.4 Migration Studies as Change

It should be noted that there always have been approaches in migration studies that were critical of rigid migration policies and social hierarchies that infringed upon the rights of migrants and their descendants. There are also many examples of researchers demanding change in receiving societies. Important impetuses for such approaches to emerge were the transnational turn and the overcoming of the “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) in the field. The new perspectives led authors to demand that states adapt institutions, such as citizenship, to the new transnational reality (Bauböck, 1994) or that plural democracies, such as Germany, live up to their promises of equality (Foroutan, 2019). A central precondition for such political and social change is cultural change. Bauböck (2002, p. 2) observes: “How migration changes citizenship depends to a large extent on how states and their citizens perceive migrants”. In other words, social change is inextricably linked with cultural change that involves the re-imagination of communities in new narratives moving beyond the idea of homogeneous national identities invented in the nineteenth century. Such new narratives are not merely a means of providing a more apt description of the reality in many European states that have become countries of immigration since World War II. Rather, they are “ways of worldmaking”, as Nelson Goodman famously put it in 1978. They are not narratives of who we are but of who we want to be. They structure our understanding of reality and underlie our attempts to change it (Nünning, 2013, p. 32). They provide the basis for social and political change.

Arts and cultural activities are themselves “ways of worldmaking”: “They are particularly well suited for reimagining our communities in new narratives that move beyond the idea of homogeneous national identities and cultures” (Sievers, 2021). Such narratives do not strictly distinguish between European selves and foreign others who have to be kept at bay. Instead, they contain a vision of a plural Europe that is closely interlinked with the rest of the world and accepts its responsibilities in global crises. This worldmaking capability, which has found expression in many articles, is central to several chapters in this volume. Annalisa Frisina and Sandra Agyei Kyeremeh read Igiaba Scego’s (2020) novel La linea del colore (The colour line) as a utopian vision of a post-racial world in which there are no colour lines that prevent people from travelling. Monika Salzbrunn and Birgit Ellinghaus interpret the carnival and popular music scene in Cologne as a universe that no longer differentiates between migrants and non-migrants. Christine Delhaye highlights how activists use this worldmaking capability to induce change and how such activism has eventually led to the Amsterdam Museum telling Dutch history in new narratives that take into account the violence of the Dutch colonial past. Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła analyses how migrants and non-migrants institute a more-inclusive version of the national in their practices of celebrating the Norwegian national day.

This worldmaking capability of artistic and cultural activities has been a central motivation for researchers to study novels, poems, music, films etc. They allow us to move beyond observing inequalities and towards imagining a world in which these can be overcome:

It’s by integrating the images, sounds, words and lived experience that we can finally elucidate the idea of community that extends far beyond national borders, and links us to peoples, all peoples, in our collective quest to be our best selves, protected, rather than persecuted, harassed or incarcerated, by home and host countries. (Barsky & Martiniello, 2021, p. 3)

What is more, migrants and their descendants are the ones who air these ideas. They are no longer objects of study but subjects who intervene in the debates on migration. We, as researchers, take up their ideas and interpret and disseminate them throughout the research community and beyond (Sievers, 2021). The same holds true for researchers working with arts-based methods. They also aim to overcome the hegemonic relationship of researchers towards their objects of study. Arts-based methods stimulate the worldmaking capabilities of research participants, providing them with the means to air their views, tell their stories, imagine different futures and spread these to a wider public, as Umut Erel explains in detail in Chap. 10. The resulting interventions into public debates on migration take different forms. Migrants counter the idea that their high regard for family values and religion are signs of their alleged Oriental backwardness, as often assumed in the Occident, by telling how their families and faiths provided refuge and hope during persecution, flight and the traumatic consequences of these experiences (Kamm & Meyer, Chap. 11). They move from being on the receiving end of integration courses to developing a “school of integration” where they are teachers of their skills and knowledge, often not accepted as such in the respective receiving societies (Moralli & Musarò, Chap. 12). They develop visions of a future Prato as a sustainable city characterised by exchange and co-creation (see Chap. 13 by Dutto, Ricatti, Simeone & Wilson). They claim space in and thereby become part of the societies in which they live.

Migration research then, as presented in this volume, is cultural change. Cooperation with artists and activists can be a tool to augment this effect (Erel, Chap. 10). At the same time, all authors are aware that individual artistic and cultural activities as well as arts-based research projects are only small steps in a long and winding process of wider cultural change. This process is in progress, even in the artistic and cultural fields. Different fields have changed to different extents. Popular culture seems to have managed best to overcome the divide between migrants and non-migrants that characterises political and media discourses up to the present day, as Chap. 7 by Monika Salzbrunn and Birgit Ellinghaus illustrates. Carnival as a feast of change is open to change when it comes to migration and globalisation. At the opposite end of the scale are cultural institutions, such as museums, theatres and cultural administrations, where “the traces of old ways of thinking and doing […] are left in the bricks and mortar of today” (Levitt, 2015, p. 3). They may have taken up migration as an issue in individual exhibitions, plays or funding programmes but they take much longer to abandon the national perspective that places migrants outside the nation (Chaps. 5 and 8 by Jurkiewicz & Schneider and Delhaye in this volume). Literature and film are located somewhere between these two extremes (Chaps. 2 and 6 by Sievers and Frisina & Kyeremeh in this volume). In other words, whether fields change depends on two factors: (1) the closeness to the field of power and (2) the malleability of the structures. At the same time, change in popular culture only has a very limited effect compared to change in museums when it comes to the distribution of power in societies. Popular culture is important for spreading new ideas of community to wider publics but it has less of an impact on rewriting the histories and narratives of communities than literature, theatres and museums, with their much closer relations to the field of power. It is this closeness that explains why national-day celebrations that are closer to popular culture than to the arts may change in popular practice but not in the way in which they are publicly perceived.

That cultural change is a slow process, however, does not mean that it will never happen. Delhaye’s analysis of change in the Amsterdam Museum clearly demonstrates this. In fact, the invention of the nation was a process that started in the eighteenth century and only really led to a world divided into nation states in the second half of the twentieth (Osterhammel, 2014, pp. 404–407). This was also the time when this division was first officially questioned in documents such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention for Refugees. These constitute the beginning of what Will Kymlicka (2012, p. 5) has called a “human rights revolution” that involved a struggle for minority rights in the Global North. So we have another century to go if institutionalising new narratives of a global community takes as long as institutionalising the narratives of homogeneous national identities in nation states.