Timeframe: September 2014 - December 2015

A huge number of practices of integration of foreign migrants developed for different receiving societies in most of the cases lack evaluation of their effectiveness. This project included designing and undertaking integration events that would fit the Russian context along with creating an evaluation procedures and launching them to study the effectiveness of those events. The events (or series of events) developed were: (1) Faces of a Neighborhood – a short movie contest announced in local schools which implied filming migrants and non-migrants living in a neighborhood as the movies’ characters with subsequent demonstration of the movies during a special neighborhood event; (2) Culinary Workshops – a series of meetings for migrant and non-migrant women which implied common cooking and teaching each other how to cook dishes of ethnic cuisines, (3) Human Library – a series of mediated conversations between schoolchildren and migrants, (4) Intercultural Football – a neighborhood event centered around a football tournament in which ethnically mixed teams competed for the prize. The evaluation included both widely used methods such as experiment and methods specially developed for this project. It showed that these events are an effective tool of integration of migrants.

* The project has been completed in RANEPA with the financial support of the government of the Russian Federation.

Publications

In English:

1. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A., Ivanova, N. (2017). Bridging Science and Practice: Migrant Integration Events in Moscow Neighborhoods. Urban Studies and Practices, 2(1), 25-39.

In Russian:

1. Rocheva, A., Varshaver, E., Ivanova, N. (2017). Playgrounds as Migrant Integration Spaces. Educational Studies Moscow, (2), 167-184. [in Russian]
2. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A., Ivanova, N. (2017). Migrant Integration on the Local Level: Results of an Academic and Practical Project. Sociological Studies, (5), 110-117. [in Russian]
3. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A., Ivanova, N. (2016). Neighborhood Social Map as an Urban Research Tool. Urban Studies and Practices, (3), 31-52. [in Russian]
4. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A. (2016). Migrant Integration on the Local Level: Experience of Russia and Other Countries. In S. Panarin (ed.), East in the East, in Russia and in the West cross-border migrations and diasporas (pp. 194-213). St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya. [in Russian]
5. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A., Ivanova, N. (2015). Manual for organizing intercultural events. Academia.edu. [in Russian]
6. Varshaver, E., Rocheva, A. (2015). Manual for organizing a sociological study of a locality. Academia.edu. [in Russian]
7. Varshaver, E. (2014). Twenty Successful Events for Migrant Integration. Moscow Institute for Socio-Cultural Programs. [in Russian]