Abstract

The presented interdisciplinary study examines socially and culturally constructed individual and communal identities through visual representations and personal narratives to inform a diversity model for art education. All participants are students and recent immigrants, many of them refugees, to Finland pursuing preparatory degrees in health and social sciences. The article first describes the focus, context, structure, and participants of the study as well as provide a brief ‘initial inventory’ of the submitted and shared visual, written, and verbal materials followed by a discussion of the conceptual framework of transnationalism as it relates to our project. The studied material indicates continuous negotiation of complex socio-cultural, individual, and communal identities through everyday interactions that do not readily lend themselves to context and location but require a more complex understanding of self.