Art and/as open education: A collaborative action with refugee artists

Introduction

In 2016, at a time of great social turmoil in Greek society, when thousands of refugees were settling in the country as a result of policy changes in European border crossing (Cabot, 2019; Papataxiarchis, 2016a, 2016b; Tsilimpounidi and Carastathis, 2017), the Hellenic Open University launched a large-scale research project aimed at providing emergency and mid-term research-based solutions to the educational needs of children, youth and adult refugees. ¹ The overall goal of Project PRESS was the generation of tangible interventions for diverse groups of newcomers but it also entailed opening up the space of post-secondary education to experimental and collaborative initiatives that would both widen the definition of educational praxis and challenge the normative assumptions about the ‘refugee phenomenon’. Part of our work focused on the development of educational courses, modules and targeted interventions on language learning and social integration (Apostolidou and Androulakis, 2017; Kitsiou et al., 2019), informed mainly by the scope of critical digital literacy (Pangrazio, 2016) and participatory research (Walker and Boni, 2020), which have been shown to be crucial approaches for refugee integration (Lloyd et al., 2013). Formulating frameworks for formal education was impossible at the time of first arrival, since this responsibility rested with the Ministry of Education which had yet a long way before putting an integration plan in place; it would also be extremely difficult to orchestrate due to the transit condition, the contrasting needs and the diverse demographic and linguistic profiles of the population. Therefore, the significance for conceiving and planning this project rested heavily on the cultivation of an open and tolerant educational philosophy, that could take various forms (from ethnographic fieldwork to awareness-raising campaigns; from structured task-based language lessons to mounting theatre plays and art exhibitions), as reflected on the project’s wide range of actions discussed below.

The goal of this article is to discuss the process of designing a participatory research project focusing specifically on a collaborative arts action and to discuss the conceptual framework and institutional support that such a project requires in the theoretical backdrop of open education. The sections that follow detail the research design of the overarching Project PRESS, wherein the initiative “Find Refuge in Art” was conceived and implemented. They lay out the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of this participatory artistic action and offer an overview of the impact and outcomes it has had for the participating parties, with an emphasis on the strategic opening up of higher education to more inclusive and ethically plausible methodologies when dealing with ‘vulnerable’ populations.

Research design: Project PRESS and the actions of Axis 3

The initial phase of project PRESS, which included the research design, entailed swift and targeted decisions that could be implemented in a fluid policy framework. It soon became apparent that even the most well-prepared education provisions would not suffice if not addressed in tandem with stigma, social exclusion, xenophobia and the sociopsychological implications of displacement. Being a social anthropologist with a strong background in open and distance learning, I was deeply frustrated by the inefficiency of tools at our disposal to address the complexity of the ‘refugee education’, not least because of the political and ethical repercussions that the term ‘refugee’, or ‘vulnerable group’ maintain. This was especially true of a project that was launched and funded by an open university and which, on an institutional level, had a welcoming and somewhat ‘humanitarian’ intention, in its acknowledged controversial connotations (Rozakou, 2012, 2017).

Early on, the nucleus research team, comprised of the academic director George Androulakis and the three principal investigators and project coordinators, Ivi Daskalaki, Sofia Tsioli and myself, realized that in order to tackle a multi-faceted problem effectively we needed to develop a structurally similar project, one that would resemble the issue at hand by addressing its various aspects at once. First, since the ‘refugee phenomenon’ had apparent consequences (unwelcoming schools in certain regions, hostility and hate speech in public discourse), as well as undocumented social implications (economic, political and cultural upheaval), we needed to empirically study the socio-educational ramifications of the incoming flows and the conceptual content and prioritization of ‘education’ for newcomers (Daskalaki et al., 2017). Secondly, we needed to collect, analyze and put to use the array of good practices that were available through academic literature and educational interventions already in place in other parts of Europe (Dryden-Peterson and Giles, 2012), or past experiences from the Greek terrain in similar situations (Androussou et al., 2011). Thirdly, we had to come up with out-of-the-box ways to address the lack of awareness, the short-term span of standard interventions and the flexible structures that a transit population required in order to benefit from educational content and courses. Since we were dealing with a multitude of oppressions made manifest on an institutional, political, cultural and interpersonal level, and drawing on the urge to use complex and intersectional approaches to treat refugee-related subjects (Carastathis et al., 2018; Unangst and Crea, 2020), we decided to generate a puzzle-like project, with three main strands and 24 compact targeted actions, each of which would address in greater depth a specific aspect of the issue at hand. Therefore, Project PRESS was developed along three autonomous yet closely intertwined axes: (a) Axis 1. Fieldwork research on communication, linguistic and educational needs and expectations of refugees; (b) Axis 2. Linguistic-cultural and social integration of children and adults; and (c) Axis 3. Awareness raising, support services and long-term educational empowerment.

Even though the three PIs co-supervised all three axes of the project, I was primarily responsible for the supervision and coordination of Axis 3, which entailed developing online awareness programs and mobilizing local communities through a variety of events, performances and seminars in various cities in Greece; developing support tools for refugees, educators and volunteers working in the field; launching a mobile unit for local intervention, and promoting artistic and intercultural collaborations, when possible. Furthermore, Axis 3 aimed at cultivating the approach of cultural adaptation of existing educational material to support the development of online courses for adult refugees in their mother tongues and ultimately offer a flexible model for developing culturally adapted higher education curricula (Apostolidou, 2019). Within the extremely condensed timespan of 20 months, I designed and supervised the implementation of the following 11 separate sub-actions, which were all informed by the ongoing anthropological and sociolinguistic field research (Axis 1, supervised by Ivi Daskalaki) and closely affiliated with specially designed actions of language learning and educational integration (Axis 2, supervised by Sofia Tsioli).

Situating our methodologies towards an expansive definition of education, so as to allow room for the necessary experimentation, and drawing on the philosophy of open education (Barth 1969; Nyberg, 2010 [1975]) and the anthropology of learning (Anderson-Levitt, 2011), Axis 3 included the following interrelated actions:

1. Action 2. Open Think Tank: An online Trilingual Public Dialogue Platform, which was designed to collect evidence, suggestions and good practices on the education of children and adult refugees in an accessible digital platform. It is worth-mentioning that, although initially designed as a think tank on education which would engage various agents and institutions, the users soon turned it into a Facebook-like platform for communication and networking, especially in relation to Arabic-speaking newcomers.

The working languages of most of the above actions were English, Arabic, Farsi and Greek and we attempted to systematically bring together local agents and refugees (often as paid associates) during the preparation, translation and implementation of each action, in accordance with a participatory bottom-up approach, where possible. As will be argued, the pedagogical philosophy underlying each discrete activity of Axis 3 was that of an open education which promotes critical thinking and intercultural dialogue in praxis as well as extended activities of raising awareness and cultivating intercultural contact and empathic understanding. This strategy was also steadily anchored on open-based web 2.0 pedagogies such as the demand-pull learning, which is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice and shifts the focus of learning to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on ‘learning to be’ through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning. In most cases the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting and it occurs “in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars” (Brown and Adler, 2008: 30). The initiative portrayed below describes one component of Axis 3, an artistic action that was only plausible as part of a larger multi-faceted research project in which every action was intrinsically tied to others in the backdrop of the inclusive imperative of open education.

The initiative “Find Refuge in Art”: Tackling the affective economy of hostility

One of the most unorthodox actions to be launched by a university project focusing on refugee education was Action 20, entitled “Find Refuge in Art”, which started as a convergence between local awareness-raising and intercultural collaboration and resulted into a laboratory of exchange, research and (un)learning for many of its participants. In the backdrop of a galloping discourse on openness, ² we progressed with caution during the design and implementation of this action and theoretically tied it to other relevant actions of Axis 3, bearing in mind what Gourlay (2015), following Latour, aptly demonstrates: that “allegedly ‘radical’ claims of the ‘openness’ movement in education may in fact serve to reinforce rather than challenge utopic thinking, fantasies of the human, and monolithic social categories, fixity and power, and as such may be seen as indicative of a ‘heterotopia of desire’” (2015).

To avoid this peril, and making use of the findings of the ethnographic fieldwork and the observed seclusion of incoming persons in refugee-only lessons, camps and policies, this particular initiative aimed firstly at encouraging ongoing partnerships among artists with different cultural backgrounds and secondly at the organization of an art exhibition that would ignite reflection on the general rubric of ‘refugee experience’ through various media, and standpoints. Within the framework of this initiative, seven pairs of artists were brought together, each pair comprised of one self-identified refugee artist and another one from the host country. After the initial call for participation (Figure 1) and the networking required to locate prospective participants, we held a number of face-to-face meetings where the rationale of the action was laid out and the invited artists presented their earlier work and orientation with the intention to get to know each other and form pairs. Sketchbooks, laptops, phones, and intense narratives flooded the third floor of the administrative building of the university (where the research team of the project camped for 20 months) and an initial configuration of pairs was performed with coffees and notepads at hand.OPEN IN VIEWER

Each pair was then provided with physical and digital materials and devices in order to develop their work and, in two occasions, they were also offered working spaces. The seven pairs formed what we termed ‘the core’ of the action and, after 7 months of collaboration and dialogue, they were able to jointly create artistic work that focused on contrasting representations of refugee experience, sometimes reflecting the very process of the two partners’ collaboration. Some had chemistry from the start, others had a calm and joyous creative journey, while other pairs decided to co-create in a parallel way, going through intervals of little communication or heated debates and overt conflict throughout the project. Unfortunately, due to the periodical movement and relocations of thousands of refugees during the timespan of the action, only five ‘core pairs’ were ultimately able to complete their work and take part in the final exhibition. The progress of the core’s work was subtly monitored by the PI/Coordinator who kept notes and offered suggestions in each stage, according to the core groups’ observed routes and challenges.

In a specific socio-historical context, where the state’s slow reflexes rendered formal education unable to address an ‘emergency situation’, our principal aim was to initiate immediate contact and collaboration between individuals and treat artistic co-creation as education in an attempt to counterbalance what Carastathis (2015) terms “the affective economy of hostility” that was omnipresent in the country at the time, greatly reinforced by the social repercussions of the economic ‘crisis’. This approach draws on contemporary considerations of refugee art as an inevitably political endeavour and tries to resist the century-long narrative of the art by the displaced as a fleeting, impermanent, cry for help that is meant to be forgotten and historically erased; yet, it also strived to avoid what Garfield (2018) points out, namely that “[u]nder the banner of aesthetic activism, elite stakeholders (philosophers, academics, sociologists and critics) discuss (…) exemplary viewpoints” (p. 105) that have nothing or little to do with the representation of refugee experience by displaced artists.

Recent work on participatory research stresses on the top-down approaches that usually prevail and further illustrates the power of art to enhance human contact and to initiate positive social change for individuals and societies recovering from conflict (Mkwananzi and Cin, 2021). As with the action “Find refuge in Art”, the overall rationale of each action in project PRESS was based on participatory, bottom-up approaches to learning, be it the component of ethnographic research (Axis 1), task-based and informal language learning (Axis 2) or creating the conditions for awareness, empowerment, intercultural communication and informal learning (Axis 3). It attempted a broadening of the concepts and praxis of social justice, in introducing participatory work horizontally, in accordance with approaches which argue that social justice needs to be more than a topic of higher education research and must also be part of the way that research is undertaken, and explicitly evident in the research practices we adopt (McArthur and Ashwin, 2020). Especially the use of participatory arts can help to address these challenges by fostering community engagement, social cohesion, and ultimately, advancing social justice and has been shown to be particularly effective at reaching youth communities, providing voice and political agency to young people who are often not given a platform.

Unfolding the initiative

Action 20 of project PRESS was not merely a research-imbued or education-based initiative. It also coincided with an important transition in contemporary art practice, adopted by both ‘mainstream’ and less-publicized fringe groups, wherein conventional notions of aesthetic autonomy are being redefined and renegotiated and the very concept of art moves from something envisioned beforehand by the artist and placed before the viewer, to the concept of art as a process of reciprocal creative labor, that mobilizes new forms of agency and identity (Kester, 2011). One concern while designing this action was that art is habitually perceived as a response to the refugees’ trauma (Jones, 2018), and often rooted on a prevailing discourse about therapy (Kalmanowitz, 2016; Klauck, 2021; Rowe et al., 2017), which in turn reinforces the dominant image of “the refugee” as victim or as unimaginative, a-political (Fobear, 2017) and dependent actor. Aiming to grant agency to self-identified refugees, we allowed for the cultivation of expressive means to articulate their own stance and communicate their experience in a long-term dialogic collaboration with other (‘local’) artists; this line of action coincided with approaches that create a platform for emerging refugees’ stories and artwork about their own role and experience of displacement (Holle et al., 2021).

The artworks developed by the pairs of artists who participated in this experimental attempt were the following:

1. Why are our eyes sad Momo, by Mohamed Belhedi and Christos Tolis (Video 3.58′)

In addition to the artistic ‘core’ of the action, we also released an open call to independent artists to participate in the exhibition with works that spanned from photography, painting, and sculpture to video art and mixed media entries (Figure 2). In this way, our approach was anchored on work that combined oral histories and photographs to create a narrative of memory through visual practice-based research projects conducted all around the world (Bootwala and Desai, 2009; Toll, 2019). This call was answered by 171 individual artists, from whom 60 were selected by a panel of experts to participate in the exhibition on criteria that were aimed at raising the awareness of the local audiences. Project PRESS collaborator and artist Ellie Veliou undertook the coordination of the artists and the conceptual and material staging of the final exhibition, which was entitled “Find Refuge in Art”. The exhibition was held at the “Art Factory” in Athens, between 13 and 23 December 2017, and it included performances of live painting and music, with daily visits from the artists, curators and various audiences (Figure 3OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Why are our eyes sad Momo, by Mohamed Belhedi and Christos Tolis.

Contrary to a growing public discourse that portrayed refugee influxes as a pervasive, dangerous and potentially destructive invasion in the fragile body of the state, we found that opening up a space for actual ongoing collaboration between specific individuals and highlighting this approach as an alternative way of learning (about) the Other was a strategy to re-act and un-learn the deeply rooted representations of the Other as a source of fear and injury and to help cultivate capabilities that tend to escape the priorities of formal education. The trajectory of the action was not educational in a strict sense; it was closer to bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy (2014), which goes beyond pushing students to achieve a prescribed level of literacy, develop professional skills and/or conformity to the status quo. This pedagogy calls for a re-conceptualization of the knowledge base, linking theory to practice, student empowerment, multiculturalism, and incorporation of passion, thus nurturing a reflective and critical stance to social realities and rendering the process of learning more engaging and meaningful. Engaged pedagogy is essentially a ‘transgressive’ pedagogy, combining anti-colonialist, critical, feminist, and multicultural theory, and in our case, this was performed through the free association, the laborious co-creation and the exchange of viewpoints and identity positionalities that took place during the implementation of the action (Figure 4). In this respect it fulfilled to some degree what hooks identifies as the promise of multicultural change (Hooks, 2014), and served as a critique as to how race, class, gender and intersectional exclusion inform both the production and reception of art (Hooks, 1996) and become empowering and liberating modalities of thinking.OPEN IN VIEWER

Such non-formal approaches in educational settings have been shown to demonstrate great affinities with the ideals and practices of intercultural education (Palaiologou et al., 2019). In a country where the concept of intercultural education has not reached its full potential (Palaiologou and Faas, 2012) and is often used as ‘wishful thinking’ or an ‘empty label’ (Tsimouris, 2008), the development of grounded actions supports the promulgation of an ethics of care, often found in theater and performance-based approaches (Smith, 2014), that avoids the perils of victimization and stereotypical framing of the human subjects involved in specific visual economies (Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi, 2020) and raises awareness on human rights (Maguire, 2017) (Figures 5 and 6).OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 6.

Detail from the work HUMAN/Home-Hearth, by Nadir Noori and Artemis Alcalay.

As was apparent in this case, participatory arts-based practices such as video, grafitti, photovoice and other multimodal forms often serve as means of cultivating capabilities for vulnerable groups (Figure 7) (Apostolidou, 2021). Moreover, as case studies from South Africa illustrate, these techniques appear to enhance certain dimensions of narrative capability and functioning that correspond with being able to give and receive epistemic resources and to enhance an epistemic capability, such as self-recognition, mutual recognition, and creative and critical skills (Walker and Mathebula, 2020). Furthermore, research work has demonstrated how certain epistemic capabilities, especially vis-à-vis political awareness and democratic capabilities, can be marginalized by the academy. Therefore, safeguarding epistemic justice among seemingly unequal participants is often a crucial and demanding political and practical task, especially since participatory action research in higher education is happening in non-ideal settings of epistemic justice and is imbued with colonial remnants (Walker and Boni, 2020).OPEN IN VIEWER

Why open education? A contribution to autonomous learning

According to the literature, transformative learning through community engagement (Acquah, 2018; Katz, 2019) and integration initiatives (Gross et al., 2021) usually take place in the space of a disciplined institution, usually a school or a museum (Chayder, 2019). In order to subvert this top-down approach, which is closely tied to state policies, we tried to limit the university’s institutional interference as much as possible and to minimize disciplinary control and compartmentalization (Palaiologou, 2010) by offering recourses and spaces for artists to develop their own routes of thought and experiment with urban locations, materials and concepts, free from institutional and formal restrictions. The two-part structure of the action (i.e., the ‘core’ and the surrounding artists) was informed by the philosophy of open education and was intended to create the sense of a larger community that spanned in concentric circles from the artistic ‘core’ to the wider Greek society—and beyond that.

Connecting open education with specific institutional and research design initiatives for refugees was identified as one of the more significant gaps in literature and one we took upon to investigate. As representatives of an open university, we closely adhered to certain basic principles of open education as we found them plausible to the problem at hand. The open (vis-à-vis traditional) education debate predates the models of 20th-century distance learning and is thought to reach far back to the time of Socrates (Broudy and Palmer cited in Brown and Adler, 2008: 580). Couched on developmental psychology, and heavily drawing on Dewey and Piaget’s notions on the development of logical thinking, open education is nonetheless shown to be well applied to young adults, especially with regard to the cultivation of strategies for provisioning and organizing the open classroom, by providing ample opportunity to act and reflect, and to experience cognitive conflict situations (Mai, 1974) (Figures 8 and 9).OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 9.

Detail from the work Growing up to the beauty of speed, Faisal Khodsuz and Theo Prodromidis.

Nyberg, already in the mid-seventies claimed: “‘Open,’ ‘informal,’ and sometimes ‘humanistic’ are adjectives used to describe this new style of educating that is presumed distinct from ordinary or traditional educating”. However, as he notes, more often than not, the rhetoric of supporters of open education is more “vituperative, self-righteous, and lyrical than analytical”, urging scholars to be for or against open education on moral grounds or by force of political conviction, “rather than being asked to understand the presumed strength and nature of open education on its intellectual or at least pedagogical grounds” (Nyberg, 2010 [1975]: xi). Thus, Open Education, like the Progressive Movement in education before it, faced early on the major task of getting beyond the phase of self-advocacy through polemical rhetoric and sentimental theorizing, so as to evolve a consistent and workable body of pedagogical prescriptions for instructors (Mai, 1974).

Almost half a century later, similar questions on the definition of open education still persist. Open education has been identified as a vague concept that is malleable, anti-normative and constantly subject to redefinitions. It has had a vast array of applications, ranging from being appropriated by corporate mindsets to offering liberating and emergency education to war-zones and excluded groups of learners. Our project drew on the genealogy of groundbreaking learning modalities that open education has offered, such as the emancipating ‘Silent University’ in Boston, devoted to the teaching of women by mail in mid-nineteenth century (Bergmann, 2001) to the University of Sanctuary initiative that studied the transition experiences of refugees studying through open and online higher education (Brunton et al., 2019). One of our concerns was to bring this philosophy to date and test its utility in contemporary settings and problematics. In our own approach, I found useful the categorization offered by Hill (2010 [1975]) who identified a first cluster of definitions of open education, where the referents for ‘open’ are variously, spatial, temporal and procedural, and a second one with characteristic emphasis in what he terms normative openness. Into this category fall those viewpoints which advocate that the choice of learning tasks and activities shall be entirely the prerogative of the students. As he observes (Hill, 2010 [1975]: 5) “[n]ormative openness logically implies procedural openness, whereas the reverse does not necessarily follow”.

According to this viewpoint ‘open education’ suggests, by metaphorical extension, a removal of obstacles so that the benefits of education are available to everyone with the ultimate goal of producing people with highly developed thinking skills properly prepared for self-actualization, social participation and exploration of reality (Egan, 2010 [1975]).

Throughout the historical unfolding of open education (Peter and Deimann, 2013) there has been a notable focus on approaches that question the concept of standardized education and it has been paramount not only in settings that deal with children and young pupils but also adults, especially when they are in a socially disadvantaged position. Peter and Deimann’s diachronic overview also demonstrates that it is often the case that some aspects of education are opened up precisely as others are further institutionalized. In response to this conundrum, Oliver (2015) proposes we move away from the implied open/closed binary, and use relational, networked and sociomaterial analyses in recognition that social structures are inevitably permeable. In discussing Knox’s distinction between positive and negative liberties, he makes a case for the social significance of removing institutional ‘unfreedoms’ as a first step of achieving open education, stressing that those positive liberties require from the learner to take the additional step of re-creating these ‘unfreedoms’ (restrictions and hierarchical balances) on her own terms (p. 14). Furthermore, among the rules that make up the definition of the concept of ‘open education’, Tunnell (2010 [1975]) advocates that students are to pursue educational activities of their own choosing, while teachers are to create an environment rich in educational possibilities, provide individualized instruction and demonstrate respect by making sure that the student is granted considerable freedom and is, for the most part, autonomous.

In the same vein, Arnstine (2010 [1975]) has long stressed that two components are significant for the creation of open education practices that fulfill the ideal of openness: on the one hand, the minimization of red-tape and other institutional obstacles and on the other hand the freedom of teachers to experiment with informal and flexible approaches. Regarding the first aspect, the Hellenic Open University granted the research team a remarkable degree of design flexibility which was allowed for the unconventional modular structure of the project and was further reflected onto each action, with a special interest in providing immediate resolution of practical problems and obstacles that participant artists encountered. In turn, participants of Action 20 were given the liberty to develop their independent collaborations without interventions regarding orientation, methodology and content. An immediate result was the forging of strong ties and the generation of completely unique relationships with one another as well as very diverse works of art. As for the second aspect, the approach followed was that of self-teaching and teaching one another, i.e., the handing over of learning to the participating parties by providing a safe framework for intercultural communication to emerge, often in non-recordable and subtle manners. This was in part achieved through the grounding of pedagogies of care, which have recently become acknowledged in open education and online learning settings for their transformative effects in the self-awareness and critical understanding of learners and are imprinted in conceptual, modal and pedagogical principles of openness and care (Apostolidou, 2022).

Judging by the progress and results of the action and taking into account the informal feedback we received at several stages during and after its implementation, we observed that the key impact of this action has to do with the social representations of the concepts ‘artist’ and ‘refugee’ and the strong statement that acceptance, empathy, and intercultural exchange were indeed possible on the level of interpersonal collaboration. This has been also apparent in cases where the identity of ‘student’ manages to overpower the vague and negatively charged legal term ‘refugee’ through participation in online learning (Apostolidou, 2019).

This experimental action supports the view that open education programs can produce greater self-concept, creativity, and positive attitude toward learning. Although our action had an expressed aim at linguistic, social and affective levels for the majority of participants, it did not target pre-specified outcomes and measurable goals, given that the rationale behind its design took into consideration past open education programs that identified specific features of effective open education. Indeed, programs that are more effective in producing nonachievement outcomes (attitude, creativity, and self-concept) have long been characterized by four features: emphasis on the role of the learner, use of diagnostic (rather than norm-referenced) evaluation, individualized instruction, and the presence of flexible materials (Giaconia and Hedges, 1982).

This approach has ultimately become about learning around affect, following a strand of immigration studies which has embraced the affective turn since the early 2000s (Clough and Halley, 2007), and pointing to Ahmed’s (2004) conceptualizations of the cultural politics of emotions. One participant went on to pursue a career in the visual arts, while another one decided to enroll in a university course a few months later. They both hinted that this collaboration was their ticket to thinking differently about their prospects in the country (they both initially intended to relocate to countries of northern Europe). The artistic pair that encountered the greatest difficulty in collaboration had the chance a few months later to reconnect and discuss their gendered, cultural and class differences as causes that created the tension between them; nothing was permanently ‘resolved’ but, as their recent collaboration shows, they maintain contact to this day. As Ahmed argues, affective passages ‘change things’: ‘they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed, 2004: 119). Much like other collaborative projects that promote interpersonal and collective dialogue and demonstrate the value of adopting an intercultural perspective on the inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe today, we adopted an open perspective in learning, removed institutional presence to a bare minimum and placed the focus on the potentialities of the ‘other’ as an active part of the development of their new society (López-Bech and Zúñiga, 2017).

Concluding remarks

Open education has been instilled and applied in various pedagogical and informal activities throughout the past 50 years, where the link between the framework of openness and the actual initiative may not be straightforward or self-evident. However, as a philosophy of/in education it still holds great potential for an ever-changing world, where technological and distance learning advancements (Baraniuk, 2008) make it imperative to re-think the basic tenets of what teaching, learning and intercultural communication is all about. Peters and Britez (2019) recently brought our attention to the properties of open education as a domain that supports education for openness, stressing the global character of openness and allowing for expansive definitions of this long-acknowledged trend in a new economy of educational commons. After the completion of this action, we aspire that, besides the all-consuming discourse on openness promulgated by digitally-mediated cultures, the ideal of open education may still prove relevant in intercultural educational environments, especially when participants are faced with social exclusion and have been ascribed procrustean identity labels. It ultimately helped us consider questions of inclusion in terms of mutual recognition and widening participation as a means of creating inclusive universities; and finally, it lead the majority of us involved to the transformative recognition that openness can be measured against the “fundamental idea of whether everyone within the university can realize themselves as a recognized and valued individual member of society” (McArthur, 2021: 12). Since social support is one of the key factors that scholars have identified as paramount in increasing the psycho-social well-being for refugees during settlement and later (Gifford et al., 2009), the ties of trust built between and among participants in the action “Find Refuge in Art” were clear enough evidence that the modernization of the concept of open education still holds great potential for tackling contemporary educational issues which cannot be addressed in a formal education setting (Charitonos et al., 2020).