I value the OU's experience in creating online environments for learning and development and its pioneering work, especially in the current conditions of the pandemic.

Hi, my name is Elena Boukouvala and I am second year Sociology PhD student at The Open University.

My research question is one that has fascinated me since I was a teenager: how we belong and how we act as citizens. It became present again since I started working with young people in response to the current refugee policy crisis. With a background in Psychology, Dramatherapy and Community Outreach, I worked in various refugee camps across Europe co-creating with young people community performance events. I experienced their agency and power to act and to create as political subjects in conditions that were often challenging and dehumanising.

Through this research, I am exploring how young people enact citizenship and create belonging in response to the refugee policy crisis through creative methods. My research consists of two strands. The first is a piece of action research with two groups of young people, taking place in Greece and in the UK, where we will use creative methods to explore what ‘belonging’ means to them and how we can co-create a stage to enact citizenship through performance. The other is a theoretical exploration of citizenship acts and creative methods of research.

What I find fascinating about the OU is how it fosters collaboration and exchange in between academic and non-academic partners, cultivating research that is accessible by the public and responsive to social issues and concerns. I also value the OU's experience in creating online environments for learning and development and its pioneering work, especially in the current conditions of the pandemic.

Having recently become a mother, I particularly appreciated how holistically I was supported by the OU through this new stage of life - as both a researcher and as a person.

I was very happy that the OU was interested in my application and so grateful for my supervisors' guidance and encouragements.
 

Hi, my name is Nicolas Tavitian, and I am a first year PhD student based in Sociology.

My research has to do with the transformation of culture in diasporas. People in diasporas must constantly deal with a transnational environment. They may maintain contacts in the country their family comes from; they likely have relatives in other countries; they must deal with different languages, and so on. Those situations require adaptations.

I am interested not just in how people adapt to living between countries or languages, but also whether (and how) they pass on a culture adapted to this way of life.

In my research, I will be focussing on the particular case of the Armenian diaspora.

I plan to interview young people in Belgium, France and the UK to find out how they deal with their transnational experience and how they give it meaning. This will hopefully give us useful insights into the nature and possible future of the diasporic experience.

I started my career as an environmental advocate, but eventually went to work for an organisation of the Armenian diaspora (I am of Armenian background myself). I found that there is an awful lot that we need to understand about diasporas. That is why I decided to participate in research myself.

I was very happy that the OU was interested in my application and so grateful for my supervisors' guidance and encouragements.

There is also a personal interest involved in this research, as my children have grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in eight countries, on five continents, and this requires a lot of investment in family relations if we want to keep the family together!