Working with a group of girls and women from Myanmar who are now living in Nelson, Amber has been exploring how former refugees connect with the city through their everyday sensory experiences.
“I’ve completed a multisensory mapping project to find out where in Nelson these girls and women felt most at home,” Amber, who is doing a PhD in Human Geography, says. “Multisensory mapping means that they described, or mapped, how they felt in different places by exploring what they could see, smell, hear, taste, touch, and feel in these locations.”
Amber met with each individual in a place that was important to them, including gardens, kitchens, and local parks, to complete the multisensory mapping process. Amber then led a series of painting workshops with the girls and women, where they painted pictures of these places, and other important sites like beaches and churches, where they would go to relax, pray, and have fun. They then collected different multisensory objects to go with the paintings—spices that smelled like home, music from home that matched the location, and other objects such as flowers, shells, and acorns.
The paintings and their matching multisensory objects were then exhibited at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.
“The purpose of this exhibition was twofold,” Amber says. “We wanted to encourage the local community to engage with the girls and women’s experiences, and we also wanted to work with the community to make these places more accessible and help find other places where former refugees could feel safe, healthy, and happy.”
Amber also met with refugee resettlement practitioners in Nelson to find out how former refugees were interacting with the Nelson community, and what processes were in place to support individuals and families as they settled into life in New Zealand.
Amber is in the final year of her doctoral studies. Now that her research is complete, she will be sharing her work at several conferences, including holding other exhibitions of the paintings. She also plans to follow up with the people she worked with during her research to see how her work could be applied in practical ways to support former refugees throughout New Zealand.
“For example, many of the girls and women reported loving fishing and cooking, but not knowing how to fish in the Kiwi way or cook Kiwi foods. This could be addressed through informal community cooking classes or fishing trips with locals, which would help former refugees to learn about their new homes and to share their own culture and knowledge with locals to strengthen cross-cultural relationships.”
Another interesting finding that has implications for assisting former refugees relates to the link between time and place, Amber says.
“Whilst cross-cultural events such as Race Unity Day or the Tasman Asian Food Fair can help people to become more familiar with different sensory cultural experiences, these one-off annual events do not help the community to foster important everyday relationships and feelings of belonging. We need more regular informal opportunities, like the cooking or fishing experiences, for former refugees and locals to share different smells and flavours and engage with different places around the city. These ongoing interactions can help individuals to develop new rhythms and routines and reinforce their connection to place,” she says.
These processes of becoming familiar with a new environment and becoming connected to different people and places are particularly significant for former refugees who have been forced to leave their homes and the places where they used to go to feel well and happy.
“Whilst place-attachment is not currently acknowledged as a vital part of the New Zealand resettlement process, building emotional connections to one’s surroundings is central to constructing a sense of identity and belonging in the world and enhancing a feeling of wellbeing,” Amber says.