A small neighbourhood house in East Vancouver, full to capacity with people from various migration statuses, sharing a meal, talking, drawing, gesturing, and introducing themselves. Adults and children switching between languages. Frontline service workers, migrant workers, refugees, youth and seniors making art together. Syrian dishes made by refugee women piled high on a table for an evening meal. Thinking about what it means to feel at home. Connecting threads over a map to see where we come from and trace lines of connection.
These were some of many memorable moments from a community meal event that brought together migrant workers, people with precarious migration status, frontline staff, and graduate students on February 19, 2018. We gathered at a neighbourhood house space in East Vancouver, which represented a mid-point between our places of work. Over the hours we spent together, we held space for individuals from different backgrounds and neighbourhoods to reach out to one another and learn about one another’s lived experiences. This three-part blog series presents our reflections as graduate students and co-organizers of this event. In this series, our intention is to share points of learning in order to inform future efforts to develop and deepen community-university partnerships.
Our process of planning this event unfolded over a number of months, involving the input and values of various collaborators. Members of the Liu Migration Network (LMN) began to generate ideas for this event in July 2017. Over the summer we collaboratively wrote a funding application to the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. The success of our funding application presented us with an opportunity to think about our multiple roles and identities as researchers and community members. As a network of graduate students engaged in migration-related research, we were interested in becoming more actively involved with the local community beyond the walls of the university. Reflecting on these intentions, we decided to host an event focused on fostering relationships outside the researcher/researched type of academic interactions usually expected from university students, frontline service workers from immigrant support organizations, migrant workers, and other people with precarious migration status. As graduate students in the LMN, we began meeting with members of the immigrant and refugee communities, including settlement and services organizations that work with the migrants in the local area.
Initially, the LMN members, in consultation with a diverse consulting committee, realized the need for providing a space for migrant workers to get together and have conversations. The objective of the initiative was to build bridges between individuals from migrant communities with various backgrounds and migration statuses. The idea for a community meal event developed from our discussions about the experiences of migrant workers employed in low-waged occupations and the labour that they bring to local communities. We saw potential for the university community to build a reciprocal relationship with migrant workers and members of the wider immigrant community. Initially, the intention was to plan and cook a meal representative of the multicultural groups participating in the event and to prepare a photo cookbook as a product to document the transformational learning we might experience. We hoped to share copies of the cookbook with all participants and others to raise awareness about the importance of building bridges between university and migrant communities, and to contribute to a wider conversation about the ways in which the labour and the experiences of migrant workers is often not made visible, although it is through their labour that many people have access to food from the local area.
Through our educational experiences, we also realized that relationships between university and immigrants and refugees had been based in research, often without relationship building that is meaningful and sustained. With the intention of establishing relationships that could be based on mutual learning and spending time together outside the context of research activities, we decided to move forward with planning an event that would allow for these kinds of interactions. When we reached out to collaborators who work with migrant workers in the local area, we were conscious of the importance of communicating that our work was not connected to research and that there would be no data collection involved in our work. Although we communicated that our work was not connected to any research, we still received questions around whether we were collecting data or would be reporting on findings of a study. It was clear to us that although we hoped to work towards shifting understandings of what community–university relationships can look like, collaborators still expressed some reservations about how they would be asked to join us for the event. Throughout this project, we were aware that such relationships tend to be short-term and research oriented, and aimed to envision alternative ways of building relationships.
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The LMN members worked collaboratively to reach these goals and implemented the community meal event with committed and energetic volunteers from the community and university. A narrative reflection on the event is presented in the second part of this blog series.
Authors: Angela Contreras, PhD Candidate (Educational Studies), Nasim Peikazadi, PhD Student (Educational Studies), and Saguna Shankar, PhD Student (Library, Archival, and Information Studies), on behalf of the Liu Migration Network.
Acknowledgements: Our deepest appreciation to fellow Liu Migration Network members and organizers, Nicole So, M.A. Student (Public Policy and Global Affairs), and Neila Miled, PhD Candidate (Educational Studies). We would also like to thank our collaborators, attendees, and volunteers, without whom this event would not have happened. Your support was invaluable, and your insights motivated us to continue learning and engaging in community-based work.
