Conference Agenda

This paper examines Singing Our Stories (SOS), a community-engaged partnership between York University and refugee service providers in Toronto. The project centers the narrative experiences of refugee children and youth living in temporary shelters during resettlement through weekly musical arts programming. In contexts of forced displacement, young people are framed through deficit-based narratives of vulnerability and integration. SOS positions musical arts as relational, world-making practices through which young people articulate and shape their experiences of displacement and belonging.

Through weekly music sessions, songwriting workshops, recording projects, arts festivals, and youth-led initiatives, participants engaged in singing, composing, storytelling, and collaborative creation. These practices enabled young people to express layered connections to home, culture, and memory while cultivating emplacement within shifting geographies. In shelter environments where access to kitchens, schools, and community spaces is limited, musical arts became a vital site for sustaining cultural practices, fostering memory, and building community.

The paper conceptualizes displacement not only as physical migration but also as disruption in access to cultural traditions and collective life. It asks how musical storytelling functions as a means of navigating geographic rupture alongside systemic marginalization. Drawing on applied, community-based ethnographic research, I argue that musical arts support thrivability: the capacity of young people and their cultural practices to adapt and generate meaning within inequitable conditions.

At a time when refugee policy in Canada and globally is shaped by securitization and polarization, SOS offers a youth-led model that insists on listening differently, inviting reconsideration of how settlement systems imagine refugee futures.

This paper interrogates the politics of visibility in refugee arts practice, asking what it means to see and to be seen within participatory music-making in contexts shaped by displacement and border regimes. Drawing on the work of bell hooks, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I examine how visibility functions simultaneously as recognition, exposure, and risk. In refugee contexts, where lives are rendered hypervisible through humanitarian spectacle yet politically invisible through organized abandonment, the act of witnessing through music and storytelling becomes fraught, unstable, and ethically charged. This analysis emerges from observational and participatory research conducted during a series of music and storytelling sessions at a refugee shelter in Baja California. Attending closely to sound, silence, lyric, and embodied presence, I consider how creative expression mediates the sharing of personal narratives while also reproducing tensions around representation and spectatorship. Through a hybrid form that interweaves analytic and lyrical writing, I critically reflect on my own positionality as facilitator and researcher, probing the limits of allyship and the complicities of community arts practices within broader structures of violence. Rather than claiming transformative impact, I argue that practices of witnessing through music may not materially alter participants’ precarious conditions. However, these practices can reconfigure relational space, deepening recognition, unsettling the researchers’ own assumptions, and opening fragile yet generative possibilities for collective imagination, solidarity, and resilience. In doing so, the paper contributes to ethnomusicological conversations about representation, ethics, and the responsibilities of scholars engaged in collaborative music-making across asymmetries of power.

This paper examines how refugee and newcomer children enact agency through participatory arts within Singing Our Stories (SOS). While displaced young people are often positioned as recipients of care or research subjects, this study approaches them as co-creators of knowledge whose artistic decisions shape both process and outcome.

Drawing on child-centered, arts-based research in shelter settings, the paper analyzes collaborative songwriting, creative writing, performance, and group reflection to examine how children negotiate identity, belonging, and memory on their own terms. Rather than treating participation as symbolic inclusion, the study attends to how children influence thematic direction, lyrical content, aesthetic choices, and collective meaning-making within the program.

The paper argues that participation reshapes how knowledge about displacement is produced, as understanding emerges through shared creative production rather than observation or interpretation alone. In these spaces, children do not simply recount experience; they actively shape relational understandings through sound, rhythm, and story. Musical collaboration becomes a site for articulating belonging and asserting voice within the research process itself.

By closely examining processes of co-creation, this paper demonstrates how participatory arts practices unsettle hierarchical research relationships and resist portrayals of refugee youth as passive or vulnerable. Instead, they position young people as contributors to knowledge production and to the social worlds that research seeks to understand.