Translations-Generations: Representing and Producing Migration Generations Through Arts-Based Research

ABSTRACT

Migration generations play a central role in structuring and mediating relations in immigrant-background groups and are important conceptual categories for understanding how these groups change over time. Yet, in both research and practice, communicating the complexities of intergenerational relations and generational change can be challenging. Tacit, sensuous, affective and embodied aspects of generations frequently evade capture in conventional research approaches, while generational differences can impede understanding within immigrant-background families and communities. Arts-based research, through its engagement with alternative modes of knowing and understanding, and its capacity to reach beyond the academy and across generations, offers possibilities for addressing both of these challenges. Via an account of a collaborative arts-based research project exploring Vietnamese Australian generations, and focusing on two of the artworks produced, this article demonstrates the potential of arts-based research to contribute to producing and sharing knowledge about intergenerational relations and generational change in immigrant-background communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• generations
• arts-based research
• Vietnamese Australian
• refugee settlement
• intergenerational relations
• generational change

Acknowledgements

Translations-Generations was a collaboration between the author and Hoang Tran Nguyen, David Cuong Nguyen, Diana Nguyen, Thuy Vy, Hoa Pham, Dominic Hong Duc Golding and Helen Huynh. It was presented with support from The Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, Big West Festival, and Footscray Community Arts Centre. The author would like to thank Associate Professor Sara Wills and Professor Maggie O’Neill for their feedback and advice on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Caitlin Nunn is an International Junior Research Fellow in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. Her work focuses on refugee settlement, including in relation to youth; identity and belonging; cultural production and media representation and generational change and intergenerational relations. Much of her research is participatory and arts-based.

Notes

1. While it is worth noting the irony of attempting to write these artworks as text – and in doing so, to lose in translation much of what is unique in their contribution – it is a pragmatic undertaking that facilitates placing these works, and these forms of knowledge, in dialogue with those that dominate academic knowledge production.

2. The terms ‘immigrant generation’ (Rumbaut 2004) and ‘migrant generation’ (Skrbiš et al. 2007) have also been used to encapsulate this generational framework, though there is no consistently applied terminology across the field of migration studies. I have chosen to use ‘migration generation’ (Nunn 2012) in order to position people in relation to their migration heritage, rather than to the individual migrant: a modest attempt to work against the ascription of ‘migrant’ as an intergenerational identity.

3. While migration generations are further complicated by increasing practices of transnationalism, including multiple and return migrations, long-term intergenerational settlement is still common and warrants continued academic attention.

4. See Hickey-Moody (2011) for a different example of how ethno/mediascapes have been utilised in arts-based research to explore and represent identity in refugee-background cohorts.