Thinking with the hands: LEGO® Serious Play® a game-based tool to empower young migrants integrating

in Migration Letters (2023), 20(3), 443452

In recent years, various low-threshold and often creative methods and tools have been developed, considering the specific requirements of vulnerable persons to explore their identities, experiences ... [more ▼]

In recent years, various low-threshold and often creative methods and tools have been developed, considering the specific requirements of vulnerable persons to explore their identities, experiences, knowledge, opinions and needs. The idea of LEGO® Serious Play® is based on play pedagogy. Playing allows to distance oneself from everyday life by sliding into a world of imaginations, ideas and utopias while concurrently keeping the ties to reality (Heimlich, 2015). LEGO® Serious Play® uses metaphors to enable participants to express playfully their thoughts and ideas. As the building process with Lego bricks is physical and haptic, LEGO® Serious Play® is a low-threshold method to work with vulnerable groups (Cavaliero, 2017). The following article will concentrate on the use of LEGO® Serious Play® as creative exploration method and its possibilities and limitations when used to empower young migrants in vulnerable conditions in the Germany and Luxembourg in the H2020 research project MIMY. [less ▲]

Entgrenzte Lebenswelten: Wohn- und Arbeitsmigration als Ausdruck transnationaler Lebensentwürfe im deutsch-luxemburgischen und deutsch-polnischen Grenzraum

in Raumforschung und Raumordnung (2013), 71(3), 221-232

National borders inside the European Union are open contact zones of transnational everyday lives. The Schengen Agreement ensures the free movement of EU citizens leading to new forms of international ... [more ▼]

National borders inside the European Union are open contact zones of transnational everyday lives. The Schengen Agreement ensures the free movement of EU citizens leading to new forms of international migration and illustrating the European integration process on the local level. Therefore, migrants move to the neighbouring country to live or work there. Cross-border residential property and labour markets develop meaning the transnationalisation of everyday lives between neighbouring countries. With the case study region of the municipality of Perl in the German federal state of Saarland and the joined municipality Amt Löcknitz-Penkun in the German federal state of Mecklenburg- Western Pomerania the following article deals with these cross-border everyday lives. On the one side of the national state borders there is a booming region (Luxembourg or Szczecin) and on the other side there is a structural weak rural German region. This substantially influences these processes. Both case study regions show dealings with these cross-border phenomena and spatial implications deriving from this. [less ▲]