MADAR

MADAR combines an interdisciplinary approach with participatory and collaborative methods, deploying artistic and creative engagement to mobilise global voices, to improve access to marginal and underrepresented groups, and provide a more active role for displaced people to shape the research process and outcomes.

Supporting artistic and creative engagements is at the heart of our approach to tackle the social and political challenges associated with migration and displacement. Creative, narrative and arts-based approaches will facilitate public engagement on issues of protection and displacement in the region.

Our ongoing commitment to co-design and co-delivery of research aims to respond effectively to the protection needs of refugees and other displaced people in the region by drawing on local knowledge and community-centred approaches – our research partners include advocacy, humanitarian and cultural civil society organisations in the central Maghreb.

MADAR responds to Sustainable Development Goal number 16 to: "Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels".  MADAR aims to:

• Bring together the regional expertise of UK and Maghreb-based scholars from across the arts and humanities and the social and political sciences.
• Commission research that will bring together and strengthen the work of researchers in the Maghreb and the wider Middle East and North Africa region.
• Share best working practices to strengthen partnerships between researchers, activists, artists, and practitioners.
• Identify ways to help displaced people gain better access to healthcare, education, and jobs.
• Influence and help governments to support and protect displaced people in the Maghreb.
• Work with civil society organisations to combat racism and xenophobia in the region.

• Keele Academic Lead: Professor Mariangela Palladino
• Methods used: Our interdisciplinary combination of political and legal anthropology, cultural and postcolonial studies, arts and visual cultures, sociology and development studies, geography, and economics seeks to collapse disciplinary boundaries and to overcome the challenges that isolated methodological approaches pose. We will engage with research approaches derived from different disciplines and gain fresh insights into displacement and protection. The inclusion of creative arts will generate data exploring how the arts and humanities can effectively contribute to social debates and global challenges.