Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees: Forced Displacement, Creativity, and Agency by Lisa Gilman

Forced migration is an international problem impacting global powers as well as smaller resource-constrained countries. The rhetoric, globally and locally is rife with a confusing tangle about war, violence, persecution, vulnerability, victimhood, thievery, welfare leaching, and economy recking. Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees (Berghahn Books, 2026) is a narrative-driven book based in global multi-site research about the arts and cultural dimension of refugee “crises” in discrete geographic and social-political contexts. The stories highlight agency, creativity, pleasure, celebration, entrepreneurship, friendship, and community because we typically don’t associate these things with refugees. They emphasize how refugees contribute to their own communities and their host countries, contrary to stereotypical and often xenophobic anti-refugee assumptions.

Lisa Gilman is Professor of Folklore and Director of the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University, former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore, and former Fellow with the Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Arts Initiatives by Refugees for Refugees is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License with support from Knowledge Unlatched.