Refugees and Public Space – Newcastle University

This research dissemination animation, titled “Refugees and public space”, was commissioned by Professor Peter Hopkins at Newcastle University and funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) as part of the project “The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public space”. It draws on the project’s findings to explore the challenges and opportunities that refugees and asylum seekers face in accessing and belonging in public space in the UK.

Public space sounds like it should be open to everyone, but for people seeking asylum it can feel watched, restricted or unwelcoming. Parks, libraries, high streets and transport are where a sense of belonging is either built or quietly denied. This animation sits with those everyday experiences and asks what genuine inclusion in shared spaces would actually look like.

The stories were fictionalised from the research and voiced by actors, a deliberate choice that let us stay true to the realities participants described while protecting their identities. As an empathic piece of research dissemination, the animation combines hand-drawn animation with 2D motion graphics and professional sound design. Turning rigorous social science into something a general audience can feel as well as understand is the heart of my animation work with academics and researchers.

The project itself was notably competitive. Under HERA’s “Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe” call, just 20 teams were funded from more than 200 applications across Europe, and this was one of only two led from Newcastle. It ran transnationally across Newcastle, Leipzig, Brussels and Amsterdam, led at Newcastle by Professor Peter Hopkins with Dr Robin Finlay (now at Durham University) and Dr Matthew Benwell, then all of Newcastle’s School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. The companion film I made for the same project, “Refugee arrivals”, explores the experience of arriving in the UK.

If you’re a researcher or organisation working on migration, asylum, urban inclusion or social justice and you’d like to turn your research into animation, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.