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This chapter showcases some literary pieces centred around Rotherham, and are based on the authors’ own experiences growing up in the area as well as observations on the socio-economic conditions of Rotherham. Some of the poetry articulates the smoke-choked experience of South Yorkshire of the 1960s and 1970s, and one sets the tone for life to be lived on the periphery: in a contested space between working-class pride, and middle-class aspiration; between belonging and rootlessness. The chapter also contains a prose piece detailing ‘Rotherham’s hellish underworld’ which reveals the price paid by dint of economic survival. A song is also included alongside the poetry and prose pieces.
This chapter present excerpts of writing and reflections by three participants who regularly attended the Tassibee (a local charity) programmes: Nasim Bashir, Fazelat Begum, and Mukhtar Begum. They detail the previous lives of the first generation of women who came to the UK from Pakistan in the 1960s. These women’s writing reflects memories of life prior to arriving in the UK, at which point everything changed for them. The different cultural lifestyle in the UK was not something that the women could ever have imagined. They found it hard to adapt to the British weather, and experienced difficulties with accessing services, including health and dental services, and social support in terms of provision (available only if you had the skills to access it).
This chapter discusses the Tassibee ‘Skin and Spirit’ project. The objectives were to work with a group of girls, aged between 7 and 19, with a focus on building their identity and confidence. The aim was to explore anti-bullying strategies through a range of group and individual art and creative activities for a three-month period. The project was able to meet its aims through the exploration of the perception of what our cover of skin is holding ‘within’, by creatively exploring what is valued and ‘precious’ and what is ‘perceived’, and through facilitating safe and open spaces to explore the girls’ experiences, both negative and lovely.
This chapter considers poetry as a creative or arts-based method within social research. It argues that poetry as a research methodology can elicit thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and can give a platform for marginalised voices, such as women and girls, as it enables those silenced voices to be heard — and heard loudly. Poetry offers one way to capture the knowledge held in communities, particularly among those whose voices have been traditionally marginalised, like young people and women. Poetry provides us with a different lens for making sense of everyday interactions, contradictions, and conflicts. Poetry allows us to express different perspectives of our lived experiences — a mosaic of autonomous voices freed through poetry.
This chapter draws on a conversation held in Rotherham central library café between the artist Zahir Rafiq, Kate Pahl, and Steve Pool. All of the quotations from Zahir in this chapter come from the transcript of this conversation. The chapter explores with Zahir Rafiq his lived experience of Rotherham, and how he has used art to create a space for conversations and for the articulation of experience. In doing so, this chapter asks the question, ‘What can art do?’ and in this process, it argues for the arts as a mode of enquiry as well as an articulation of experience.
This chapter prepares the reader for a more unusual reading experience in the following chapters, as influenced by developments in experimental ethnography and community literacy. It describes this volume as something like the experimental texts that began to emerge in ethnographic and related literatures in the 1960s and 1970s, and burst onto the scene in the 1980s. This text also fits within the very broad range of disruptive, multi-vocal, and hybrid texts that have emerged out of community literacy. However, the chapter asserts that an ‘intercultural conversation’ may be the best way to think about this book. Its collaborators hail from different histories, universities, ethnicities, professions, disciplines, neighbourhoods, classes, religions, and context. Although all share an experience of Rotherham, those experiences are very particular, and can be both similar and different.
This chapter attempts the question: how can one re-imagine provision for parenting and families with young children in Rotherham through the knowledge that exists in these families and communities? It does so by detailing a series of family den-building events, with community partners, in order to think through how children learn and have experiences in places. By foregrounding and valuing these everyday lived experiences of families and children, the chapter offers more realistic accounts of what it means to parent young children, which should inform policy and practice regarding how young children should be cared for and should participate in communities.
This chapter offers a sense of the legacy of this book and identify its key features, in order to provide a summary of what the authors have learned from doing the book. The central goal in writing this book has been to demonstrate that communities produce their own forms of knowledge, and that those forms are valid — and valuable — ways of knowing. The chapter articulates the value of this kind of research for community knowledge production that is emergent, situated, and future oriented. As such, this chapter identifies four key themes: thinking across difference, the arts as a mode of inquiry and as an agent of change, rethinking knowledge production practices, and hope and the importance of transformational change. The chapter then reflects on these themes.
This chapter discusses the ‘I come from’ project, one of the strands within the ‘Imagine’ project, which set out to work with a group of Rotherham’s young women, defined as Roma by their school and the communities around them. The project aimed to explore their experiences and visions of an imagined future and their fused identities and shared sense of belonging. In the very midst of the project’s creative activities, however, the Jay Report into child sexual exploitation was released, letting loose formerly suppressed fears and anxieties about the population growth and perceptions of Roma communities in parts of Rotherham, especially around the town centre. Immediately upon the report’s release, Rotherham’s once suppressed racial and cultural tensions came to the surface. Perspectives across the communities changed quickly and significantly, and the growing differences between ethnicities and cultures became the focus of both individual actions and media attention.
This chapter challenges what might be called a ‘local history paradigm’, whereby immigration to Britain and the decline of industry are linked and local history is considered to ‘end’ in the 1980s. It explores representations of past and present in Rotherham, and draws on examples of heritage projects undertaken there by people from minority ethnic communities. This chapter emerged from the experience of many of the participants living in and researching the town during the child sexual exploitation scandal. Nonetheless, while about Rotherham, its interpretation might be applicable to a variety of post-industrial towns and cities in northern England and elsewhere. The chapter also considers ways in which the heritage projects add to the local history narrative of the town.
