Sala de Leitura

The RC37 Sociology of Arts will host the roundtable “Arts of Refuge: Art Practices, Socio-Educational Inclusion and Refugee Integration Processes in the Global North and South” at the ISA World Congress of Sociology 2027.

In a context where migration and integration policies are undergoing significant changes, particularly in the Global North, the session proposes a critical dialogue between migration, arts and education.

As labour migration policies increasingly focus on attracting talent and responding to specific labour market needs, asylum systems are becoming more restrictive through selective and bureaucratic procedures, reductions in social benefits and new limitations on family reunification (OECD, 2025).

Against this background, the roundtable seeks to refocus the sociological debate on refugees and socio-educational inclusion around a fundamental question:

What institutional, relational and epistemic conditions allow refugees to stop being merely incorporated into pre-existing systems and become protagonists in their transformation?

The dialogue between the Global North and South is not conceived as a linear comparison. Instead, it is approached as a tense field of historical relations shaped by European borders, African diasporas, Mediterranean displacements, Latin American exiles, popular pedagogies and transnational solidarities.

Within this context, the arts emerge simultaneously as a method, a language and an expressive relational grammar. Artistic practices can make it possible to engage with dimensions of experience that frequently remain outside institutional language, including fears, losses, silences, memories, hopes, bodies and imagination.

The session welcomes contributions from the Global North and South that offer critical, sociologically innovative and creative perspectives at theoretical, methodological and empirical levels, and that bring migration, education and the arts into dialogue.