Community Reaction to Immigrant Youth Experiences in Atlanta
“How do immigrant stories impact perceptions of immigrant experiences in a major-emerging immigrant gateway such as Atlanta?” begins our article, “Inclusive Storytelling: Community Reaction to Immigrant Youth Experiences in Atlanta,” published on September 14, 2021, in Atlanta Studies.
The following is a brief excerpt from the article’s introduction:
“From 2016 to 2018, an interdisciplinary community-engaged project incorporating community-based participatory research methodology, explored how the role of storytelling is integral for the transference of knowledge, history, and sense of purpose. This is important not only for the storytellers but also for those who are impacted by stories they hear. Stories capture our attention, create emotional connections, and compel us to action. In an effort to inform — and possibly reshape — the public narratives regarding twenty-first-century immigration, we embarked on a multi-faceted immigrant storytelling university-community partnership that included both local stakeholders and a national nonprofit. The outcomes help us understand how the views of receiving communities change over time with respect to migrants through their own stories, thus impacting the work of immigrant-serving organizations, such as Georgia-based Welcoming America, a nonprofit committed to implementing a variety of initiatives to cultivate welcoming cities and welcoming regions.
Our project gauges the impact of the 2018 publication, Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from an Atlanta High School. That effort documents stories of youth migrants about their journeys from their homelands to their experiences in receiving communities…Our project, funded in part by the National Geographic Society, the Kendeda Fund, and a Strategic Internationalization Grant from the Kennesaw State University Division of Global Affairs, examined the stories from the immigrant youths and how these stories shaped audience perceptions about immigration…From a place-based perspective, we chose the Atlanta region for this project for several reasons. First, with the exception of Green Card Voices staff, the researchers on this project all reside in the Atlanta region and are invested in applied research benefitting our region and local communities. Second, the Atlanta metropolitan area is a “major-emerging” new immigrant gateway destination and a “twenty-first century gateway.” Other such gateway regions include the Austin, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Phoenix metropolitan areas-each characterized by high growth rates of foreign-born populations in recent decades as compared to traditional immigrant destinations of the past, along with suburban immigrant settlement patterns throughout the metropolitan region. Third, two members of the research team are co-founders of the Georgia Immigration Research Network (GIRN), and this work aligns with the purpose and intent of GIRN. Finally, our overall methodology relies upon a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework, involving a multi-year, interdisciplinary university-community partnership…”
Continue reading the full article post with project photos and images here at Atlanta Studies.
Originally published at https://www.atlantastudies.org on September 14, 2021.
