European Commission Research on Middle Eastern Christians in Europe

By Dr. Marta Wozniak

From left to right: Dr Lise Paulsen Galal (Roskilde University, Denmark), Torsten Moritz (Churches' Commission for Migrants in Europe), Dr Fiona McCallum (University of St Andrews, Scotland), Dr Marta Wozniak (University of Lodz, Poland), Dr Sara Lei Sparre (Roskilde University, Denmark).(AINA) -- We are an international team of academics specialising in Middle Eastern Christianity.

For several years we were working independently -- from the United Kingdom, Denmark and Poland. Inspired by Dr Fiona McCallum, we met in Oxford in 2011 and decided to join our efforts to apply for a prestigous European Commission grant -- the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) network. 593 research teams from all of Europe submitted their proposals but only 18 projects have been funded under the framework of the HERA Joint Research Programme on Cultural Encounters -- one of them being our DIMECCE (Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe) project.

Our project started in September 2013 and will last till August 2015. We want to explore the migrant experiences of Middle Eastern Christians, especially Copts, Assyrians/Syriacs and/or Iraqi Christians. We are interested in learning about the situation of these communities and challenges they face in the countries of residence. We will achieve it through interviews, surveys, archival research and workshops. Our fieldwork sites are London and Kirkcaldy in the UK, Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark and Stockholm and S?dert?lje in Sweden. This selection will allow us to conduct a cross-community and cross-country comparative study and contribute to a wider understanding of the role and needs of Middle Eastern Christians in Europe.

An important part of our research is a multilingual survey which will be active until 28th of February, 2014. We strongly encourage you to participate if you are a Copt, Assyrian [also known as Chaldean or Syriac] and/or Iraqi Christian, normally residing in the UK, Denmark or Sweden and are more than 18 years old. The survey is anonymous and should take up to 15 minutes to complete. The results, as well as published articles and conference papers, will be made available on our project website: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/dimecce/. You can also follow us at www.facebook.com/dimecce.

Please go to the survey:

•          English

•          Swedish

•          Danish

•          Arabic

Thank you for helping us to make the Middle Eastern Christians' voice be heard in Europe.

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