The Monthly discusses the Translating Age project with Tess Maginess from Queen’s University – Part 1 – Pulling together a community of older migrant women

How did the project come about?

It is an interesting question and I think the Translating age project combines what you would want to do ideally, with quite pragmatic responses .

We had already completed a project called Photovoice, and that involved a number of migrant women who used photography to record their experiences of what inclusion and exclusion were.

We did that through a workshop process which was then platformed through the Open Learning programme which is a large Adult Education programme here at Queen’s University.

Perhaps around the same time or maybe just before that, I had applied to the Arts Council for a grant to organise a project involving older people, because I was interested in the question of ageing and all the associated elements of that process, dementia for example.

There is a great person from the Nerve Centre, Marty Melarkey, who suggests that if you can run projects off of one another, you are catalysing those projects, and that allows you to bank the work from one project, the bits of knowledge you acquire, the networks you develop, the expertise and learning, and bring it forward to another project.

Did you get the funding you applied for?

We got the money. We had a very good relationship with the person who dealt with that project in the Arts Council called, Lorraine Calderwood, so we had the finances and then the Pandemic occurred and we couldn’t get anyone together to run the project.

Afterwards, I went back to the Arts Council, to Lorraine, and asked if we could combine the projects, if we could reconfigure the project looking into ageing, women and migration. That wasn’t necessarily the most orthodox way to work, but in my experience that isn’t the worst way to set up a project . And they agreed to that proposal although we couldn’t hold on to all the funding because we had spanned a number of years between when the project had initially been agreed to.

We then applied for some existing funding within Queens University, the Engaged Research Fund and the EHRC Impact Acceleration Fund and other small funds which offered seed money for new research. The people at Queen’s were brilliant to work with because, having worked in the community arts sector myself, I know how difficult it is to secure funds, and the negotiation with some funders who don’t often see how important certain projects are; that wasn’t the case with this project.

Who helped you in terms of accessing funding?

Professor, Sir Ian Greer, was very much committed to the kind of civic engagement work we were carrying out, the kind of work we had been carrying out over the last 30 years through Open Learning.

Our work was focussed on excluded groups, marginalised groups, whether that was looking into mental health, or ageing or what they now refer to in Academia as “real world issues”.

In terms of migration, and migrants, it was often the case that this was talked about, discussed, in very negative ways and we always looked at this issue in terms of positive contributions which migrants make and also to look at the misunderstandings, and mistruths, around the issue.

Do you think you managed to draw people from a community which already existed or did you create a community of older migrant women through this project?

I think a bit of both. We used a lot of different networks to populate this project. Some of the people who were involved in the Photovoice Project came on board, and then people like Barbara Boyle, who teaches German in Open Learning, and is a great ambassadorial person, and she was wonderful in terms of helping us find people through the women’s groups which she is part of.

Some people came through a particular community organisation which was already in existence, a group of Indian women from the centre in the Antrim Road, and they were all older women but they did have a sense of their own community. They were brought to us by a Pakistani Muslim woman who was involved in the Photovoice project and she had worked with those women as a tutor teaching computer skills.

And there were others who came through an individual route of one kind or another. There is a whole clatter of organisations which represent women, or migrants or older people, but we were looking for people who fitted all those categories. So we did do quite a bit of developmental work, and we also partnered within our Steering Group, Age NI, The Nerve Centre, the Commission for Older People and University of the 3rd Age.

It seems like it was quite a lengthy process pulling everything together?

It wasn’t completely straightforward. The process took months and we had to spend quite a while convincing people of the worth of the project. We did have to coax people in very gradually.

You will always get people who come into a project who leave quite early on because they decide it is not for them, and you also get people who join in the middle of a project, so we had a bit of both. of those things happening.

We ended up with a very diverse group of people, different cultural background, different places of origin, people from India, Malta, Germany, South Africa, Canada, the United States and we had two Chinese women, one from mainland China and one from Hong Kong.

What do you think some of the obstacles to recruitment were?

I think there may have been a particular perception of Queen’s University, or perhaps academia in general, that this place is not for some people. Yet I can tell you, and this came out in the evaluations, that every time we do these types of projects people realise that they should be here in Queen’s, that this place is somewhere they can be part of, that it can be for everyone and not just people from a privileged background.

We kept working away on the processes of the project and we kept chipping away to recruit people for it, because – and this is quite an important point – sometimes you don’t get your numbers straight away, but you can’t be disheartened by that. You keep working at recruiting people and in the end we had a good number of participants which allowed the project to proceed.