Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing from multi-sited (auto)ethnographic research with collective writing workshops in Belgium, Germany and Spain, this paper shows how writing can be a powerful tool for processing and expressing complex emotions connected to migration as well as creating new social and affective ties.

Paper long abstract

Migrating and creating a home in a new place are emotionally laden processes, yet the affective and embodied feelings that they elicit can be difficult to comprehend in oneself and communicate to others. Like experiences of migration, the emotions stirred by movement are not singular nor uniform but plural and complex: hope co-existing with fear, joy with grief, nostalgia with anticipation. Moreover, migrants navigate complex relationships to places and (imagined) communities, juggling multiple belongings as well as feelings of unbelonging. In this context, writing can be a powerful tool for processing and expressing emotions connected to migration as well as creating new social and affective ties. This paper draws from multi-sited (auto)ethnographic research with collective writing workshops involving migrants in Belgium, Germany, and Spain, from 2024 to 2026. Writing about their experiences of movement across diverse scales, geographies, and temporalities, workshop participants use creative writing to explore emotions both individually and together. While sometimes texts produced in workshops are kept private by the authors or preserved within the intimacy of the group setting, other projects and writers see the process of sharing them externally to be a valuable means of communicating emotional and embodied experiences of migration and exile to a broader public. At the same time, the act of writing as an affective, embodied, and relational practice can become a form of (co-)creative placemaking and community-building through which participating writers actively construct new spaces and imaginaries of belonging.