Building Belonging through Art with Young Migrants Living in Care in South Africa

Abstract

As young people with migration experiences build their lives in new contexts, their
connectedness to who they are, to other people, to place and to culture underpin
whether and how a sense of belonging is built in their lives. Belonging as a concept
matters in young lives as it is underpinned by feelings of acceptance, inclusion and selfdetermination.
The realization of belonging can have important implications for young
people’s wellbeing and development. This paper shares the barriers to belonging for
young migrants in South Africa, and how the pain of past experiences, and the exclusions
they are navigating in the present constrain their sense of agency, impacting selfworth
and relationship formation. We share how a child and youth care center in Cape
Town specializing in supporting young migrants and young people with experiences
of trauma, innovated with a group of young women through participatory arts-based
methods towards building belonging. We found that layering multiple arts methods
can support young people to connect to their cultural roots and personal relationships,
re-build trust, reimagine their identities as part of a collective and challenge power
relations around gender, nationality and generation. We found that building belonging
should be seen as a continuous learning process, that builds young people’s reflective
capacities to understand self and others and to make sense of the interaction between
past, present and future. In turn, belonging provides an important conceptual tool for
youth-led, context-specific approaches to working with young migrants, including on
youth transitions.