Original Manuscript Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–23 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/14740222231156807 journals.sagepub.com/home/ahh Art and/as open education: A collaborative action with refugee artists Anna Apostolidou  Hellenic Open University, Athens, Greece Abstract The article illustrates the potential of engaged arts-based pedagogies in higher education with respect to integration interventions for young refugees in Europe. It discusses the conception and implementation of the collaborative initiative “Find Refuge in Art”, which was part of the research Project PRESS at the Hellenic Open University. This example shows how artistic synergy may become an integral part of research design, framing both awareness raising and open education in the backdrop of intercultural exchange. The initiative encouraged the co-production of artistic work from pairs of artists with refugee and non-refugee background and culminated in an exhibition with over 75 participating artists. Challenging the victimizing conceptualizations of refugee art as a primarily trauma- centered representation of displacement, the article invites us to consider questions of agency and inclusion in terms of mutual recognition and to widen participation as a means of fostering transformative intercultural learning and epistemic justice in universities. Keywords Collaborative art, intercultural dialogue, open education, participatory research, refugee inclusion Introduction In 2016, at a time of great social turmoil in Greek society, when thousands of refugees were settling in the country as a result of policy changes in European border crossing (Cabot, 2019; Papataxiarchis, 2016a, 2016b; Tsilimpounidi and Carastathis, 2017), the Hellenic Open University launched a large-scale research project aimed at providing Corresponding author: Anna Apostolidou, School of Humanities, Hellenic Open University, Athens, Greece. Emails: annapostolidou@gmail.com; apostolidou.anna@ac.eap.gr