Unsettle and be unsettled: How co-creation with refugees can help transform exclusionary societal and academic structures

In this dissertation, I explore the challenges and opportunities of co-creative civil society initiatives and academic research projects in the Dutch refugee reception and integration landscape. I show that the government’s struggle to deal with receiving asylum seekers in 2015/2016 in a timely and appropriate manner opened up new experimental spaces for co-creative endeavors within the refugee reception and integration landscape. Since then, civil society actors, academics and people with a refugee background have become increasingly involved in co-creating policies, practices and knowledge concerning refugee-related issues. My dissertation not only illustrates the emergence of such experimental spaces but also explores the challenges and opportunities of co-creative endeavors by civil society initiatives and academic research projects. Specifically, my dissertation engages with the following research question:

In what ways do co-creative civil society initiatives and academic research projects navigate within, challenge and transform exclusionary refugee reception and integration structures, thereby promoting societal inclusion?

To answer this question, I carried out four empirical studies between 2016 and 2021, two that looked at co-creative civil society initiatives and two that looked at co-creative academic research projects. 

Regarding the first part of my research question, namely, what role co-creative civil society initiatives and academic research projects can play in promoting societal inclusion, I argue co-creative endeavors promote refugees’ and the local community’s agency, transform exclusionary relations and structures toward more horizontal relations and inclusive structures, foster solidarity, advance societal and epistemic justice and bring sociological imagination into practice.

However, my dissertation highlights that the refugee reception and integration landscape is still permeated with hierarchical and (subtle) exclusionary mechanisms that impede the transformative potential of co-creative civil society initiatives and academic research projects. I therefore argue that if not developed and implemented in a reflective and purposeful way, co-creative endeavors can easily reproduce rather than challenge exclusionary structures. I therefore insist that for co-creative endeavors to live up to their potential of co-creating transformative knowledges and practices, it is necessary to acknowledge components that co-creative civil society initiatives and academic research projects do and have to consider when aiming to foster societal inclusion within the refugee reception and integration landscape: They (have to) stimulate inclusion both within their co-creative initiative/project (by stimulating critical internal reflection and unsettling exclusionary internal structures) and through their co-creative research/project (by stimulating critical external reflection and transformation, finding and making use of facilitating spaces, building a critical mass and engaging in a balancing act of playing the game while trying to change it). Moreover, they need to focus on process, make the initiative/project transformative in itself and adopt enabling techniques (these three components are important for stimulating inclusion both within and through co-creative initiatives/projects).