Lucy Hunt is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education – as well as a qualified teacher and proponent of bringing the arts into research as both a process and product. In her current studies and wider professional life she focuses on issues at the intersection of education and migration, with a particular interest in the impact of forced migration on young people’s post-primary education.

Her doctoral project, funded by the ESRC, ethnographically explores the challenges and meaning of education for refugee and asylum-seeking youth in Greece. This involves trying to unravel education’s role as a space and practice of ‘hostipitality’ towards newcomers (cf. Derrida), and how young refugees navigate conditions of liminality in/through different forms of learning.

“Like many others, I have been forced to pause the chaos of fieldwork due to COVID-19. As I have been inviting young people to sit and draw with me during focus group discussions and lessons, it seemed natural to continue with this method in my own process of reflecting on what I have seen, heard and read so far. While I am certainly not an artist, I would like to use my tendency to doodle to share the perspectives and experiences of youth in colour, and hopefully beyond academia.

I hope that these sketches  – which summarise in a couple of characters many thoughts, texts and snippets of conversation I’ve encountered – can highlight the concerns of forcibly displaced youth in an accessible way, to encourage a wider audience to try to understand their everyday realities.”