Exploring Cultural Hybridity Through Expressive Arts
About the Project
What does it mean to belong when you live between cultures — when the place you grew up in is not the place you now call home, and perhaps no single place holds that name completely?
Nomadic Belonging is a qualitative doctoral research project at the European Graduate School (Arts, Health & Society Division), exploring how women who live between cultures can create belonging through the expressive arts. Through walking, writing, and artmaking, we will investigate what it means to carry multiple worlds within us — and how creativity becomes a way of making meaning across those distances.
The project is not about arriving at answers. It is about moving through the questions of nomadic living together.
What Participation Looks Like
Participants take part in a workshop series in Berlin through part of the spring and summer of 2026 combining:
Walking — moving through the city as embodied reflection
Creative writing — language as a way of thinking and feeling
Simple artmaking — collage, drawing, and mixed media as expression and translation
The project culminates in a collective public presentation and exhibition of the group's work in November 2026 — a shared act of witness and creative community.
This is a sustained, collaborative journey. Participants commit not only to their own creative process, but to the creative and relational field made together — to bear witness to one another's process and presence. That commitment is itself part of the research.
The Participants
Women from diverse cultural backgrounds who:
have been living outside the culture they grew up in for at least two years — whether they moved by choice or by necessity, temporarily or permanently, recently or long ago
are based in Berlin and expect to remain for at least another year
are able to walk approximately 3 miles non-stop at a pace that is both contemplative and purposeful
have a working knowledge of English (sessions will be conducted in English)
No creative writing or artmaking experience is required.
Researcher: Molly Moylan Brown