Dear colleagues and friends,
We are pleased to welcome you to the second newsletter of the VOLARE – VOice LAb REpository!
This month, we are happy to share with you a major milestone: the completion of the design of our digital repository.
All of us who work on “difficult” topics, such as stories of displacement and exclusion, know how rare moments of genuine joy and fulfillment are along the research journey. Undoubtedly, reaching this stage is one of those moments.
The VOLARE digital repository brings together 22 video-testimonies collected from individuals with refugee and migrant backgrounds who trusted us with their stories from Greece, Bulgaria and France. We have built a network of voices that we believe can spark critical reflection and transformative learning, not only in higher education, but also across the different levels of the educational system. These testimonies are enriched by more than 25 video-field views from educators, legal professionals, activists, artists and other participants. Together, they form learning pathways designed to deepen understanding around each testimony.
Each of the 22 testimonies is accompanied not only by conventional sources of knowledge, such as articles, books, reports and statistics, but also by unexpected connections to multimodal materials, including virtual museums, digital games, artistic creations and other repositories and databases. Additionally, all testimonies and resources are interconnected within the repository, ensuring that all material aligns with VOLARE’s core mission: to make audible the silenced voices of refugee and migrant women and men, and members of ethnic minorities.
The platform also invites visitors to listen to short podcast discussions, explore songs recorded in 12 different languages, and, most importantly, to search, browse, and even lose oneself in a journey of discovery about what it truly means to “listen” in every possible way.
So, where does our sense of fulfillment come from? It comes from two years of daily research, editing, and technical work, overcoming countless administrative obstacles and political dilemmas, and still managing, as a team, to bring to life a digital version of an idea that often felt unreachable, almost utopian. Knowing that we will soon be able to share this material with you, along with a fully developed platform that invites methodological “disruption” in teaching cultural difference, is, for us, proof of the small miracles that can emerge through teamwork and unwavering commitment.
The VOLARE repository is almost ready to step out and be tested by various audiences: lecture halls, conferences, reviewers, friends. Τhank you for being part of the joy of this creation!
Warm regards,
Anna Apostolidou, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology, Ionian University
Project Coordinator and Principal Researcher at VOLARE – responsible for fieldwork and digital repository
Fragments of research material
The VOLARE platform will be online very soon! Until then, each of our newsletters will offer you a small “taste” of the “pieces” that make up this puzzle. In this issue, you can listen to short extracts from the stories shared with us by Rena Souli, Katya Dimitrova, Petros Charavitsidis and J.-Kristoff Camps & Carole Rieussec.
A collective process
Behind the VOLARE platform lies a collective, persistent and creative process involving many months and countless hours of collaboration, exploration and curation.
The creation of the repository is not simply a technical achievement. It is the result of a collaboration among people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and skills. Researchers, educators, filmmakers, visual artists, graphic designers, musicians, developers and academics came together following a shared commitment: to give voice to those who rarely find space for expression in public discourse.
The team traveled, engaged in dialogue, recorded, processed and organized valuable material with respect, care and ongoing reflection. The process of gathering testimonies requires time, empathy, and continuous coordination among people from different countries, languages and academic fields.