Lessons in Failing Well: Building Hyper-Migration—a postcolonial, digital, feminist game with refugee youth in Toronto
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1913-5874/37392Abstract
“Hyper-Migration” is an experimental collaborative project with refugee youth in Toronto that investigates how storytelling might be employed in a digital platform to meet the needs of this community, addressing issues such as displacement, social marginalisation and a lack of access to educational and job opportunities. This paper reviews our process of elaborating, vetting and instituting a method combining praxis and participatory-action research, informed by feminist, postcolonial, trauma and refugee studies. In an experimental art-based approach that aspires to design failure (Halberstam), the project shifts in strategy and objective as the refugee youth iteratively test and redesign a social action game. This paper explores this process and how critical theory and in-situ game play worked as techniques, driving a focus on local problems and needs, ultimately establishing analogue practices that took on affordances normally ascribed to the digital. As well, the project demonstrates the deep critical abilities of refugee youth to drive critical game design addressing their concerns, and to target key structural, policy and social issues affecting refugee communities that require social change.
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