What is plus41?
Switzerland consists of roughly 8.5 million people, of whom 37.2% are people who were born elsewhere, or whose parents were born elsewhere. We often read about them in the news and magazines. We often read stories about them. But do we read stories by them?
plus41 is an online platform on which the underrepresented migrants of Switzerland get to represent themselves. The purpose of this site is to allow people of all walks of life to speak about themselves in an environment where, more often than not, they are being misrepresented by a single, stereotypical, distorted image. People of international backgrounds come together to tell their stories. As a result, you, the reader, will find a bizarre, seemingly disconnected collection of images and texts. We are united in that we are all different – and we are all also the core and heart of Switzerland.
TLDR; here, you will find a collection of stories, true or fictional, relating to the dramatic or to the absolutely ordinary. What is finally happening is Switzerland's people are being portrayed as the diverse, international group that we actually are!
Find out more about the origin of the idea in this article.
You could be our next writer!
What does 'plus41' mean?
As anyone who has ever travelled outside Switzerland (and has someone to call back home) will know, +41 is Switzerland's international country code. These three digits represent us migrants in a unique way, in that they carry the same juxtaposition that we carry. The digits are directly related to international travel, but they are also unmistakably Swiss.
The Authors
Anyone who has anything to say can get in touch. The authors are the community. We are writers from any country, with any religion and with all perspectives. You could be our next writer!
The Team
Tamara
The concept for plus41 spontaneously occurred to Tamara Imboden while she was bored out of her mind after having completed her BA thesis at the University of Zurich on migrant literatures in the UK. Tamara was born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and Maldivian mother. She moved to the Maldives and then to Sri Lanka, where she grew up speaking English at school and Swiss German as a secret language. At 15, she returned to Switzerland. She has also lived in New Zealand, but she has been based in Zurich since 2012. It wasn't until the fourth semester of her BA that she realised that she counts as a Kind mit Migrationshintergrund (child with migration background) – and then found out that she's actually a 'Third Culture Kid'. In her life, not once has she read a story about someone with a background remotely similar to her own. Maybe someone out there is bursting to tell just such a story!
