Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting: "How much home does a person need?"

Helene Grøn

Jun 2023 · Springer Nature

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This book explores the notion of home in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. Where Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee ‘the figure of our time’, this study places the question of home among those who experience its ruptures. Veering away from treating the refugee as a conceptual figure, the lived experiences and creative expressions of seeking asylum in Denmark and the United Kingdom are explored instead. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process.

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Helene Grøn holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow and Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network, and is currently a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is also a writer and librettist, whose work has been performed and published. Helene's academic work has appeared in Research in Drama Education and Scottish Journal of Performance. She often combines research and politically engaged arts-practice around themes of refugees, asylum, migration and storytelling.