Daria Lynch

Research project

Decolonising York - Redefining “Yorkness”: Provincialising Britain’s Migrant and Refugee Heritage

Supervisors: Stephanie Wynne-Jones; Gerard McCann

Funding: White Rose College of Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH)

Summary of research project: Decolonising the history and built environment of York through a study of lived migrant experiences in the city using oral history and cultural heritage methodologies.

Focusing on contemporary migrant and refugee communities in the city of York (including Ugandan Asians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and Pakistanis), my research explores how these communities interact with the official heritage story of York while striving to preserve their own cultural identities. Using such outlets as self-initiated community centres, festivals, ethnic food markets and restaurants, York’s migrants create a rich alternative heritage layer that complicates the city’s traditional heritage narrative which prioritises the built environment and history that often erases the presence of migrant communities and/or their culture. I use community-based
participatory research methods as a practice of academic activism to support immigrant communities as they develop a sense of belonging in York. My research aims to answer the following questions:

➢ What does “belonging” mean for migrant and refugee communities in the context of a traditional heritage city?
➢ How has heritage been used in placemaking for (or by) migrants in York?

Collaborating with vulnerable communities, communities with whom the author shares an identity, is not without challenges. My own immigrant identity informs my work and ties me directly to the results of this ethnographic process as my drive to find solutions to issues of inclusion, representation, accessibility, and emplacement shapes the project.

Profile

Masters in Modern European History from the University of Oxford, University College (Swire Fellow, 2020);

Bachelors in Environmental History and Turkish Studies from the University of Rochester (2019)

My interest in identity began during my gap year of 2013-2014 in Germany, where, while wandering through town quarters, I encountered two cultures existing side by side: one distinctively German and one seemingly transplanted straight from Istanbul, with kebab shops and Turkish markets dominating the streets. The scenes of a culture that lived in its own separate space evoked memories of my own experience. Migrating from Eastern Europe in the 1990s, my mother struggled to find her place in American society as she tried to reconcile the pressure to integrate with the desire to preserve her cultural identity. Like the Turkish immigrants, my mother sought out reminders of home: stores and restaurants, churches, and people who spoke her language. This question – how displaced people creatively address shifting identities and the tension opposing forces produce to find emplacement– became the one I aspire to answer in both my creative and academic work.
A historian by training, my interdisciplinary research experience ranges from migration studies, spatial politics, and community-based participatory research in Germany, Austria, Turkey, India, Azerbaijan, the United States and England. My immigrant identity shapes my work and as such I am interested in questions of shifting identities, mobility, and emplacement. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Rochester (2019, Phi Beta Kappa) and a Master of Studies in Modern European History from the University of Oxford (2020, University College, Swire Fellow). My MSt dissertation focused on the spatial politics of allotment gardens in Germany. In this work, I argue that allotment gardens serve as a microcosm where different forces that shaped German cultural and social landscapes come together. These gardens, Schrebergärten historically served - and continue to serve - as a means of civilising populations deemed as “Other,” whether that population be working class Germans of the nineteenth century, or Turkish and Russian immigrants of today.

As an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, I created an interdisciplinary minor in “Turkish Studies.” Awarded a Critical Language Scholarship by the US Department of State to study Turkish, I spent the summer of 2017 in Baku, Azerbaijan. This experience strengthened my interest in questions of shifting identities, mobility, and emplacement. In my first inter-disciplinary research project I explored the issue of second-language acquisition by Turkish immigrant women in Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Research for this project was conducted in Cologne’s Documentation Center and Museum of Migration (DOMiD), and FFBiZ, “the Feminist Archive”
in Berlin.

As a recipient of the University of Rochester’s competitive Take Five scholarship, I designed an interdisciplinary program on environment and conflict, changing my scholarly focus to exploring questions of immigration, integration, and identity through the lens of environmental studies. In the context of the program, I acted as a research assistant on a project Social Vulnerability, Community Resilience, and Disaster Recovery in Ladakh, India. With rising temperatures and changing weather patterns, environmental disasters have become more frequent, placing vulnerable communities such as that in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in danger.

Working with faculty and students at the Central Institute for Buddhist Studies, I conducted community-based participatory oral history interviews to learn about how Ladakhis negotiate their traditional methods of Himalayan agriculture to address the need to adapt and modernise in the face of extreme natural disasters. Through this international project, I learnt about the empowering potential of approaches that facilitate participants in collaborative knowledge production. To continue my training in contemporary, community-based studies, I completed a series of courses towards professional certification in Sustainable Cities from TU Delft. This series of
courses explored how global cities can mitigate the impacts of economic and spatial inequality as well as those of climate change through policies that centre and prioritise community resilience and adaptation. I applied this training as well as my academic research in my work as a research assistant on two distinctly social justice oriented projects: the Global Goalscast and the New York State
Outdoor Recreation Coalition. As an assistant for the podcast “Global GoalsCast,” a podcast series featuring stories on the UN Sustainability Goals, I performed tasks that range from working on story development to conducting research, assisting in interviews, and generating social media content. I similarly focused on telling stories “from the ground” through my work for the New York State Outdoor Recreation Coalition, a group that aims at making the outdoors more equitable for LGBT+ and communities of colour. I ran their blog, featuring stories of environmental activists, their relationship to nature, and their efforts towards decolonising the
outdoors. More recently, I acted as a research associate on a joint project with the York Archaeological Trust and the University of York called Creativity, Heritage and Community, which focused on the potential of using the creative arts to engage local communities in participatory heritage production and protection.

As an emerging scholar whose research focuses on placement, identity, and heritage, I strive to use creative methods to disseminate the results of my work in order to reach local communities, especially those who have been traditionally marginalised through their immigrant identities, an identity I share. I am particularly interested in the use of media, specifically film and visual ethnography, in meeting this goal. I explored the intersection and integration of my two identities, that of a researcher and of an aspiring media producer, through the 2022 summer course “Visual Ethnography as Activism” in Berlin. During this course I participated in the creation of a short film that highlighted the work of a local community garden based in Neukölln. This film explored the social value of green space in urban neighbourhoods through interviews with local residents. I further developed my film production skills through participation in the Budapest summer school organised by the FORTHEM Diversity and Migration Lab. Here I created a documentary short about Budapest’s anarchist community centre, Gólya, and the individuals fighting to keep it alive.
This experience of documentary production deepened my interest in methodologies such as visual ethnography, a practice of academic activism that supports marginalised communities.

My research, shaped by my commitment to social justice issues, is distinctly participatory in nature and I am driven in my work to find solutions to issues of inclusion, representation and accessibility.

Academic Awards

OXFORD-SWIRE GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP - 2019
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
• Full-tuition scholarship to the University of Oxford for a MsT in Modern European History
• Awarded to applicants with excellent academic ability who will contribute to the University’s ground-breaking research

FULBRIGHT ETA - 2019
FULBRIGHT TURKEY
• Fellowship award to teach English at Bartın University in Turkey
• Declined to accept Oxford-Swire Graduate Scholarship

DAAD GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP - 2019
GERMAN ACADEMIC EXCHANGE SERVICE
• Scholarship to fund two-years MA program at Freie Universität, Berlin
• Declined to accept Oxford-Swire Graduate Scholarship

USTA AUSTRIA - 2019
FULBRIGHT AUSTRIA
• Fellowship award to teach English at the Federal Institute of Agricultural Studies in Tirol, Austria
• Declined to accept Oxford-Swire Graduate Scholarship

JOSEPH P. O’HERN SCHOLARSHIP FOR STUDY IN EUROPE - 2019
PHI BETA KAPPA
• Awarded to a graduate who has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa and wishes to prepare for a career
in teaching
• Project: Gardening Europe: Identity, Sustainability, and History in European Urban Gardens

O’CONNOR GRADUATE STUDY FUND - 2019
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Awarded to a woman in the graduating class who has shown marked ability in original English
writing in English literature, classical languages, or history and who plans to pursue an advanced
academic degree

N.B. ELLISON PRIZE - 2019
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Awarded to the graduating senior who displayed the best work in history over their undergraduate
career

WILLIAM COATES AWARD - 2019
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Awarded for the best senior honours seminar paper
• Paper: Gardeners into Germans: The Cultural Politics of the Schrebergarten, 1864-1939

DEAN’S OUTSTANDING PRESENTATION AWARD - 2019
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Awarded at Annual Undergraduate Research Expo
• Paper: Gardeners Into Nazis: The Spatial Politics of Schrebergärten Under the Nazis

BEST PAPER PRIZE, PHI ALPHA THETA CONFERENCE - 2019
UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
• Awarded for Gardeners Into Nazis: The Spatial Politics of Schrebergärten Under the Nazis

CHRISTOPHER LASCH FELLOWSHIP - 2018
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Granted by the University of Rochester Department of History to students with exemplary
records in history courses
• Students invited to take a 500-level graduate history course to introduce students to professional
historical study

RESEARCH INITIATIVE AWARD, FIRST PRIZE - 2018
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Awarded by Friends of the Library of the University of Rochester for best honours thesis

BEST HISTORY SEMINAR PAPER - 2018
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Granted by the University of Rochester Department of History to one student in all upper-level
seminar courses
• Paper: Dr. M. Schreber and the Origins of the Schrebergarten

JOHN R. SLATER MEMORIAL PRIZE - 2018
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Granted by the University of Rochester Department of English to a member of the senior class
who has shown the most competence in the use of the English language, as exemplified by
excellence in composition

CRITICAL LANGUAGE SCHOLARSHIP - 2017
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
• Intensive summer language and cultural immersion program in Turkish (Baku, Azerbaijan)
• Post-program Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) Test Score: Intermediate High

DAAD RESEARCH GRANT - 2017
GERMAN ACADEMIC EXCHANGE SERVICE
• Fund to support independent research project: “The Other Berlin Wall: the History of the
Second Language Acquisition and the Challenge of Integration Among Turkish Immigrant
Women”
• Declined to accept Critical Language Scholarship, Turkish

UNDERGRADUATE WRITING CONTEST - 2017
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Winner for The ‘Dreadful Men’ of Britain: The Fenian Brotherhood and the British Construction
of Irish Masculinity

TAKE FIVE SCHOLARS PROGRAM - 2016
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• Tuition-free fifth year of study in field different from bachelor’s degree; program focus:
“Environmental Conflict”

Conference Presentations

ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY - 2024
LONDON, ENGLAND
• Paper: Redefining “Yorkness” in Collaboration with the York Civic Trust

ASSOCIATION OF CRITICAL HERITAGE STUDIES - 2024
GALWAY, IRELAND
• Paper: Centring the Immigrant in the Provinces: Community-defined “belonging” in a heritage city

INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH (INVITED) - 2023
LONDON, ENGLAND
• Paper: The Spatial Politics of the Schrebergarten: National Identity in Germany’s Urban Allotment Gardens

INT. ASSOC. FOR RESEARCH ON SERVICE LEARNING AND COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT - 2023
NEW ORLEANS, USA
• Paper: Centering the Immigrant: Community-collaboration towards a decolonised redefinition of Heritage in York, England

DOCTORAL CONFERENCE IN HISTORICAL STUDIES - 2023
BIELEFELD, GERMANY
• Paper: Decolonising “Britishness”: York’s Heritage Industry and the Silencing of Alternative Heritage Narratives

NORDIC SUMMER UNIVERSITY: HERITAGE IN INTERDISCIPLINARITY - 2023
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
• Paper: Heritage, Inclusion, Exclusion: Community-Based Research & Collaborative Ethnography

INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH (INVITED) - 2023
LONDON, ENGLAND
• Paper: The Spatial Politics of the Schrebergarten: National Identity in Germany’s Urban Allotment Gardens

WOMEN’S STUDIES NOW (INVITED) - 2022
YORK, ENGLAND
• Paper: Gender & Migration in Provincial England

ARCHITECTURE, MEDIA, POLITICS & SOCIETY: THE CITY & COMPLEXITY - 2020
LONDON, ENGLAND
• Paper: Cultural Integration in Berlin’s Allotment Gardens

NATIONAL WOMEN’S STUDIES ASSOCIATION - 2018
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA
• Paper: Gender, Climate Change, Environmental Justice: International Community-Engaged Learning in Ladakh, India