General Information:
PhD Candidate in the Arts
Research Unit-Image (Gent)
Associated Faculty in the Arts
LUCA School of Arts and KU Leuven
Dissertation Working Title:
Negotiating at the Gates of Flemish Belgian “Migrant Integration”: Rhetoric, Bodies, and Performance
Abstract:
My doctoral research investigates how migrant precarity is produced, framed, and embodied within Flemish Belgium. It examines how rhetoric around “integration” shapes everyday relations between local and non-local bodies. The project is anchored in my positionality as a migrant, using reflexive ethnography as one of the guiding methodologies. Since 2021, I developed an interdisciplinary artistic documentation universe titled Making Sense Within/Along/Against Precarity. This universe gathers diaries, sound recordings, poetry, video, and collaborative experiments on migrant integration precarity. The research engages universities, workplaces, and government agencies (but not limited to) as key sites of negotiation.
Concepts such as embodied knowledge, emotional truth, rhetoric, and performance guide the analytical and artistic processes. Two pivotal works—Being with the Birds and An Attempt to Not Lose Flight—materialize core questions of becoming, flight, and active kindness. Methods combine artistic immersion, reflexive ethnography, and collaborative performance-making. Altogether, the project reimagines how migrant bodies navigate, resist, and reshape the gates of Flemish Belgian “integration.”
Significant milestones of the doctoral project are the following (selected):
- Publication
- Feature
- Conference Presentations
- Collaborations