On 25 August we participated in the summer courses of the International University of Andalusia (UNIA) at its headquarters in Baeza, in the “Workshops for teaching Spanish to immigrants”. Our contribution consisted of a seminar in which students were given a series of proposals, including the analysis of fragments of fiction and documentary films, to see how film, and audiovisual communication in general, can be used as a cultural resource in the teaching of Spanish culture and language. Cultural content, communicated through film or the new digital audiovisual media, is an instrument that favors dialogue around the migratory experience, the ways of constructing social imaginaries about otherness and one’s own identity and, above all, we consider how to use the audiovisual in a creative way to favor a dialogical and creative reflection on the encounter and coexistence between natives and foreigners or, beyond that, to understand that we are all the opportunities of a migratory culture.

In this context, the results of the project on which MIGRIMAGE is built (the previous project “Images of migration on the southern Spanish border” Caixa/UGR) were presented, as well as the objectives and expected results of the MIGRIMAGE network. Fragments of the material filmed for the MIGRIMAGE webdoc were shown and the project of the Master in Communication and Border Culture was presented in its general architecture.

The presentation produced a great interest, provoking a very interesting interaction and not a few questions about the future master’s degree, proving the expectations that a project of these characteristics generates.

Speaker: Domingo Sánchez-Mesa (Director of MIGRIMAGE)

On the other hand, on 18 September 2021 we participated in a dissemination event in a teaching and learning activity of the ERASMUS+ project for adult education MOVING MEMORIES ( http://www.moving-memories.eu ).

The meeting allowed us to meet professionals working in different types of organizations – NGOs, museums, theaters and universities from Finland, Germany, Greece, Poland, Serbia and Spain. Most of the partners of Moving Memories carry out in their institutions actions linked to areas related to the MIGRIMAGE project: work with migrants, training aimed at social inclusion and intercultural education.

The presentation was addressed to the contextual framework of MIGRIMAGE, the situation of borders in Southern Europe, and specifically in the cities where the project is developed (Granada, Ceuta, Melilla, Lecce and Mytilene). Subsequently, the MIGRIMAGE partners were presented with their experience in relation to the themes on which the project focuses and their specific contributions to the consortium. In addition, the needs that MIGRIMAGE responds too were raised, specifically the need to generate training materials that link migration, borders and communication. Emphasis was placed on the need to generate other narratives on migration that go beyond victimizing discourses and, in general, the narrative frameworks from which migration is usually discussed, especially in the media. We proposed that one of the fundamental objectives of MIGRIMAGE is to create training materials (masters, MOOCs and webdoc) that allow migration to be communicated from collaborative narratives that show the autonomy of people in migratory transit. Finally, part of the material already developed was shown: audiovisual material of the webdoc and the curriculum of the master’s degree.

Those attending the meeting got to know and valued the quality of our training proposal and our teaching methodology, and expressed their interest in using the outputs developed by MIGRIMAGE in their institutions.

Speaker: Ana Belén Estrada (Project Manager of MIGRIMAGE)