1.2 Collaboration

Collaboration is a key aspect of Evidence Cafés and migration. Knowledge exchange involves a two-way process of interaction/communication and listening. For example, you may need to draw upon different areas of expertise and/or evidence to allow for collaboration and discussion to be supported. As we will explore later in this course, discussion objects can be used to enable collaboration and help participants work together to address an issue. In the case of migration, this could be issues like investment, skills, entrepreneurship and people returning to their home country.

Activity 1.3 Collaborating and collecting perspectives

Timing: Allow 30 minutes

  • Write a controversial proposition for your migration topic and share it with different types of migration stakeholders already identified and trusted to review this as purely a discussion point. For example, how could a specific migration initiative be implemented, how would it impact upon the current population, what would the migrants, policy makers and the press feel about this approach?
  • Collate all the comments and group them according to their perspectives, types of comments, etc. You can add in analysis of what the percentage of responses were focused on.

When accessing different stakeholder opinions, it is important to consider the variety and the different roles of people you know around you. For example, most of us have access to a migrant (who is one of these stakeholders) in the general public. Policy makers can be more difficult to access but if you consider institutional policy making (as a sub-set of national policy making) we are all involved in supporting/reviewing and providing feedback on policy making within our institutions. You can always contact local departments and people to question them about their migration policies. With regard to media stakeholders, there are many social media contributors who post migration issues in open forums for discussion.

1.2 Migration-focused Evidence Cafés

Summary