Abstract
This thesis explores how community-based arts practices can foster personal, relational, cultural, and symbolic dimensions of peace and belonging within migrant and refugee (re)settlement contexts. Drawing on feminist and everyday peace theories, it challenges dominant neoliberal approaches to integration that privilege economic participation and individual responsibility, instead illuminating how creative, relational, and caring practices may provide alternative pathways to meaningful integration. The study employed a qualitative mixed-methods design, informed by critical feminist epistemologies and participatory, arts-based approaches. I co-facilitated a weekly community arts initiative with women of migrant and refugee backgrounds in Aotearoa New Zealand. The formal research phase spanned 17 weeks and involved questionnaires, group discussion, interviews, fieldnotes, and visual artefacts. The initiative continued informally beyond the duration of the study as a community-led, arts-based peacebuilding space, sustaining relational and creative connections.
Reflexive thematic analysis revealed three interrelated ways community arts supported women’s everyday peace in (re)settlement: by nurturing a connection to self through embodied expression, emotional refuge, and reclaimed creative agency; by fostering relational peacebuilding, enabling meaningful bonds, mutual support, and bridging networks; and by deepening connection to place, cultivating belonging and inclusion within the host community, while also enabling women to explore and hold complex, multiple feelings of belongingness across space and time.
These themes were synthesised into an original creative peacebuilding framework, Roots of Connection, which conceptualises the role of the arts in (re)settlement as a holistic process of connection, re-grounding, and relational flourishing. The framework illustrates how everyday peace can grow through creative connections to self, others, and place, supported by enabling “soil conditions” such as care, time, resources, partnerships, and recognition.
Conceptually, the thesis contributes to understandings of peacebuilding by foregrounding artistic, relational, and embodied dimensions of belonging within integration contexts. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of participatory, arts-based approaches in generating aesthetic and relational forms of knowledge. Practically, it highlights community arts initiatives as accessible, culturally-responsive spaces that can support well-being, inclusion, and everyday peace.