Reflexions: a co-operative, arts based study into the settlement of young humanitarian entrants from the Horn of Africa

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2010 Dr. Jill ParrisThis study begins by collecting the stories of settlement that emerge from participants within the Horn of Africa Arts Project and then moves on to investigate the use of drawing in mandalas, film, and theatre as cooperative data collection tools. It looks at the richness of the data collected and the impact of these tools on young participants who are humanitarian settlers from the Horn of Africa. In this study a mandala is a circle drawn on an otherwise blank sheet of paper in which participants are asked to draw. Of particular interest is the role of the interaction between participant and their artistic creation and between participant and researcher during the creative, data collection process; where the participant can become engaged with deep and implicit non-verbal material and the researcher is offered the opportunity to hear information not readily accessible through words alone. The findings that emerge are compared and contrasted with, and add to information gleaned from other research into settler experiences of humanitarian settlement policy for people who have recently arrived in Australia from the Horn of Africa. This research is a qualitative; arts based ethnographic study using a Kaupapa Mãori approach to the analysis of data, based on a relational view of “knowledge as something that is socially constructed by embedded embodied people who are in relation with each other” (Barbara Thayer-Bacon (1997) as cited by Bishop in Denzin and Lincoln 2005:118). An argument is built for drawing together understandings from the fields of psychology, traumatology and the Arts. Winnicott’s “good enough” psychological holding (1968), as demonstrated by strong activity in the right hemisphere of the brain (Schore, 2008), is generated and builds trust through arts based activities (Betensky, 1995). I suggest that artistic creativity can generate reflexivity between the participant and his/her creation or between the participant and the researcher. Here this activity may stimulate playfulness (OʼConnor, 2003) and a flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) that allows the participant to access and process unintegrated traumatic material trapped in the body as unexpended energy (Ogden, 2002). Once this has happened the participant is free to choose those aspects of his/her story they wish to share. • It is argued that the data generated using arts based activity is distinctly different from other research data in the field, reflecting the emotional effects of settlement policy on participants. This distinct difference is due to two factors: The qualities in data collection within this study focusing on emotional content extracted by inviting participants to first create their experiences and then talk about what they have seen; • The focus being fully on the settler rather than on a combination of service provider and settler as service user. Finally it is argued that profound, emotional and, sometimes, subconscious and traumatic material can be accessed and safely presented using the mandala, film and theatre to create reflexivity