Descripció del projecte
will relate three theoretical frameworks: 1) social interaction and migrants integration, 2) cultural mediation and cultural heritage and 3) technology for integration. Most EU countries have adopted a social assistance approach covering essential needs such as housing and/or medical assistance, with less attention on empowering migrants to be active members in their host communities and establish solid social networks. Batsaikhan et al. (2018) “integration of immigrants has been unsatisfactory: people with an immigrant background participate less in the labour force, feel more over-qualified when they work, have higher school drop-out rates, have worse educational results and are more likely than natives to live in poverty”. What is more, some literature addresses the lack of long term strategy. Papademetriou and Benton (2016) recommend that governments engage employers and social partners in integration efforts as part of a forward-looking strategy. Garcés-Mascareñas (2019) describes that asylum-related Spanish ministries managed with no mid-term strategy the increase of asylum requests going from 930 on September 2015 to 8600 on December 2018. She adds that the relationship between these ministries and NGOs is unbalanced in terms of numbers of housing provided to asylum seekers. Garcés-Mascareñas rises an important issue on empowerment. She describes that there is a gap between the theoretical framework of Spanish asylum programme and its implementation in practice – which makes empowerment currently impossible. Occupational therapists working on forced displacements describe a lack of meaningfulness in migrants life. Timboli et al. (2019) state that to date, published research into occupational therapy intervention with forced migrants has mainly focused on individualistic aspects of forced migration, e.g. health issues, increasing opportunities to participate in the host country community, and the effects of occupational deprivation on the individual. Results show a negative occupational effects of forced migration being identified as a common challenge across domains. Simó and Caballero (2017) explain that when working with refugees, therapists must intervene from an ethical imperative based on the recognition of the capacities and resources of communities, from empowerment strategies. Countries have an assistentialist approach and migrants don’t have meaningful occupation but there is hope in small municipalities: According to the OECD (2018), “making integration happen in small and medium sized cities and rural areas is also a way to incentivise ‘large cities de-congestion effects’ and the challenges linked with housing costs, overcrowding and segregation that are sometimes associated with sudden arrivals in large cities”. European Committee of the Regions elaborates about the integration of migrants in middle and small cities and in rural areas in Europe and states clear benefits. Cultural mediation seems to be a framework for improving the encounter and migrants’ social interaction with host communities. The Council of Europe through the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants argue that due to their special situation, migrants of all ages, but especially adult migrants, are likely to need support in the form of linguistic and cultural mediation from their interlocutors in the host society, including from people who have been through the migration experience themselves, or from fellow migrants who have a shared language and are now less affected by the given issues, and of course from volunteers who work with migrants. Also, cultural heritage is being used as a tool for finding and for creating common identity. SO-CLOSE states that “social identity theory of intergroup behaviour argues that conflict between groups diminishes if they discover they have things in common, and that they can build a new hybrid identity together”. Thus, SO-CLOSE proposes to use the memory of forced migration that both local communities in Europe and refugees coming from afar share, as a ground upon which to meet and discover commonalities. Technology plays a key role for facilitating cultural mediation and migrants integration and for making cultural heritage more accessible. On one hand, REBUILD main objective is to improve migrants and refugees integration processes in Europe through the development of ICT-based solutions, aiming at enhancing the efficiency level in local authorities’ service provision and the immigrants’ quality of life. Actually, the starting point is the awareness about the gap between the supply of public services and the actual possibility of accessing them for migrants and refugees. This objective will be achieved through the realization of an application that may be used by migrants and refugees to assure a better interaction among them and with public administrations and a more effective matching between the migrants’ needs and the supply of services in the hosting countries. On the other, SO-CLOSE describes four different tools for making cultural heritage accessible.
