By Eleanor Chapman

After facilitating a community radio project with teenage refugees and asylum-seekers in Cambridge, UK in 2019, I consider the value of the sonic medium of radio for building translingual communication confidence and challenging the top-down, reductive narratives of victimhood often foisted on young migrants.

Inside the recording studio. Photo by Hiraeth project volunteers.

The stories of children on the move exist on multiple scales of visibility – visceral and topical, spectacle and shadow. Polarised tropes of the young migrant, whether the vulnerable child seeking refuge or the unaccompanied teenager, typically male and portrayed as hardily resilient and a potential threat, are hyper-visible, strategically deployed to justify more intense forms of border policing. While certain images of young border-crossers, such as those in orange life jackets or on the backs of lorries, are highly mediatised – at the expense of the complicated, dynamic and agential individuals that migrant children actually are – the racialised violence of the borders they cross is made invisible, naturalised and dispersed.

Challenging this reductive (and deliberate) juxtaposition was one of the principle aims of Hiraeth, a community radio project I coordinated with teenage forced migrants in Cambridgeshire, UK. Running for six weeks over the school summer holidays of 2019, the project brought together young migrants resettled in Cambridgeshire under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (SVPRS), unaccompanied asylum-seeking teenagers under the care of Cambridgeshire’s Virtual School for Looked After Children, Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign, researchers from the Linguistics department at the University of Cambridge and community radio station Cambridge 105. Through the medium of community radio, the project had dual aims: providing an opportunity to build translingual communication confidence and practise English in a non-judgmental and non-formal educational setting, and allowing participants to offer alternatives to the narratives of victimhood that are often foisted on forced migrants.

Rather than being asked time and time again – by journalists, immigration officials, researchers, service providers, neighbours – to repeat (re)traumatising asylum narratives, this was a space to play their favourite songs, share words and stories, and discuss the odds and ends of daily life.

As weeks went by, the young participants became more and more comfortable behind the microphones, most notably as they started to assume the role of radio host themselves. Here, they directly addressed the listeners and asked questions—not only of each other, but also of myself and other project volunteers. In a matter of weeks, two of the shyest girls went from sitting in the recording studio, quietly listening in at the beginning of the project, to spontaneously asking to sing a nasheed [a typically unaccompanied Islamic song] on air. Another girl praised radio as a medium for self-expression and a way to build confidence in her English ability, explaining that radio audiences ‘can’t see you, but they can hear you’.

This observation has stuck with me since the project ended in 2019. How do the politics of visibility and invisibility translate into a sonic context? How do the invisibility and ephemerality of sound impact our – typically visually imagined – understandings of testimony, representation, agency and relation? For a fifteen-year-old asylum-seeker, what might it mean to be heard and not seen?

The purely audio medium of Hiraeth might have offered a welcome alternative to the highly polarised visual tropes of young migrants described above. As a radio listener, you typically have no image of the source of the voice in your ears. Speaking on the radio, you have no idea how many people are tuned in listening to you, who they are or what they think of you. Can this lack of vision, these voices speaking and listening to each other in the dark, enable a more speculative, imaginative form of empathy? I am interested too in how these sonic relations are shaped – enabled or hindered – by and through language and language difference. While varying degrees of competency and confidence in English did significantly impact the extent to which Hiraeth participants could direct the conversations, there were generally enough languages and patience in the recording studio for a degree of meaning to be created and communicated collaboratively. Translations and equivalences were suggested, whether across different languages or within a common language, as, for example, when a Syrian thirteen-year-old, confronted with the void of my video game knowledge, offered Fortnite as an equivalence for PUBG.

There were also, of course, times when translations couldn’t be found or wouldn’t be provided, but listening to the sonic space between language as a means of communicating shared meaning and language as sound was generally a space of empathy, creativity and playfulness. As I recognised from having fumbled my own way through botched translations into a foreign language on a previous radio project with forced migrants in Italy, there can be a sense of validation in the belief that your grasping for the right words, however frustrating they might be, on some level are being heard. In practical terms, music was an invaluable way of navigating the more impactful language barriers and engaging those with less confidence in their English – one participant with weaker English came along every week essentially to DJ. While some of the older teenagers linked their song choices to particular memories or discussed their interpretation of the lyrics, the younger ones tended to play us music such as ‘The Chicken Song’, a novelty tune comprised entirely of chicken squawks and cockadoodledoos, and sidestepped my attempts at elicitation with the simple and obvious explanation: ‘It’s fun.’

Challenging the position of migrant children as ‘seen and not heard’ requires a willingness to listen to the voices, stutters, giggles, memories (and chicken squawks) that move invisibly through the air between us. This entails an understanding of voice and language as more than a conduit for the linear shuttling of meaning, but as a messy means of affective, playful and care-filled relation.

About the author

Eleanor Chapman is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, researching multilingualism and minoritised languages in the contexts of forced migration. She can be contacted at e.chapman.1@research.gla.ac.uk or on twitter @sensitive_bore_. More information about the Hiraeth project and links to edited recordings of the radio episodes are available at www.hiraethproject.weebly.com and www.cam.ac.uk/nowwearetalking.