Intercultural explorations of ‘hospitality’ and ‘integration’

Researchers: Dr Jane Wilkinson and Dr Sibylle Ratz

With Forth Valley Welcome and local community New Scots during Summer 2025

Jane and Sibylle started their collaboration with Forth Valley Welcome (FVW), a third-sector organisation, in 2022-23 when they first received public engagement funding from Edinburgh Napier University as part of a team of researchers. FVW supports refugees and New Scots (people who have recently moved to Scotland, including refugees and migrants) in the Forth Valley region of Scotland, and the original collaboration had enabled the researchers to co-create ‘cultural presentations’ about Ukraine and Afghanistan with groups of refugee women from these countries. The presentations were shared with volunteers and members of the Stirling Council Resettlement Team and were further developed by the co-creators for various occasions (for instance the refugee festival in 2023).

The current round of funding enabled Jane and Sibylle to continue their good working relationship with employees and service-users of the organisation. Initial planning meetings allowed the researchers to hear about projects which their colleagues from FVW were keen to pursue, and the team considered how Jane and Sibylle could be involved in these activities. The main events which were eventually chosen and co-led by colleagues / service-users from FVW and the researchers from ENU were a photography workshop for New Scots and Ukrainians, language tasters in Ukrainian, Pashto and Arabic, and a traditional Ukrainian ‘petrykivka’ painting workshop. The photography workshop fed into an exhibition of photographs (‘From Milestones to Moments’) and this exhibition, along with the language and art workshops, took place in Stirling as part of the refugee week in June 2025. The audience at the Refugee Festival Scotland was made up of volunteers working for FVW as well as visitors from the general public. Not all of the planned activities have taken place so far, and the collaboration is due to continue into the new academic year 2025-26.

The aims of this collaboration were to create and foster a strong relationship with FVW and the people they support, and to allow space for activities which demonstrate a ‘reciprocal’ understanding of hospitality and integration based on dialogue and mutual understanding. This approach to integration is in line with the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy which was developed by the Scottish government in 2024 and describes integration as an inclusive approach featuring ‘equitable interactions between people from diverse cultures through dialogue and respect’.

In addition to the public events, the researchers and their FVW colleagues planned and presented a round table-style discussion at the MeCCSA conference on ‘Identity & Belonging’ hosted by ENU. This gave the FVW partners (as members of the ‘public’) the opportunity to become equal ‘research partners’ and to share both their learning from the project and their wider work with an academic audience.