Helene Grøn
Visiting Fellow
Helene Grøn is an interdisciplinary and collaborative researcher, combining research on topics of human rights, relationships of love and belonging, narratives of trauma and resilience and artistic interventions into forced migration. She specialises in literature and theatre around asylum and migration, and also on art-as-method and socially engaged arts practices of co-writing and creative writing.
Her monograph, Asylum and Belonging Through Collective Playwriting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), was a study on home in the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process.
Her chapter on polyphonic and co-writing processes and the Documenta15 and Trampoline House project was published in a 2024 Palgrave Macmillan volume of Contemporary Representations of Forced Migration in Europe. It reflected on several co-writing processes reflecting on storytelling across legal, bordered and politicised divides.