This website is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Bishwanath Sinha (1921-2000) and Sandhya Sinha (1928-2016). It was launched in its current version on April 9, 2016 in honor of my mother’s birthday.
About Migration Mapping
The Migration Mapping project seeks to map migration as a conceptual field. Its aim is to identify, describe, and track the verbal, visual, aural, and digital forms through which we make sense of migration as human practice. Conceived as at once an archive, a resource guide, and a research hub for all those who are interested in this topic, this project provides a platform for ongoing inquiry into some of the key concerns of our time. Migration Mapping was launched in 2016, later becoming the foundational project of the Media+Migration Lab (M2Lab) that was founded in 2018 at the School of Media Studies in The New School, New York.
Media images, representations, art and commentary provide the ‘raw data’ on which the website draws to arrive at the concepts which in turn constitute or shape our mental maps about the migrant/emigrant/immigrant. We direct our critiques to these same images and representations but often are not aware of the wider network of ideas on which they draw.
By focusing on mediated understandings of migration, we not only engage with the predominant modes of information gathering and processing that have become normative the world over, but treat the media themselves as conduits of meaning rather than as ‘mere’ instruments of self-expression of individuals and communities, migrant or otherwise. We wish to problematize the media as much as ‘the media’ problematize migration.
The cultural production of migration is a fascinating topic but an open field at this time. While the subject-matter is vast, there are few navigational tools to sort through its profusion. If this website cannot be exhaustive in the presentation of ‘migration data’ (in the form of news coverage, photographs, film clips, or other discursive means), it can provide pathways through the major themes and tropes of migration. Above all, it hopes to shed light on some of the endemic debates circulating at the present time.
Migration is most often seen in terms of policing the movement of bodies, the competition for skilled labor, or the seepage of problems across countries and continents. Yet migration is equally about inner landscapes, about the movement of thoughts and ideas, images and information. No other human phenomenon evokes in equal measure notions of paradise and plague, adventure and loss, abjection and attainment. It is hoped that the information on this site can help us make sense of such contraries.
For all information regarding this project, please contact:
Sumita S. Chakravarty
Professor Emerita of Media Studies
The New School, New York
Email: chakravs@newschool.edu
All media excerpted on the site fall within the parameters of “fair use.” Wherever possible, we have also linked to source material and to external sites.
History
I began research on migration as an aspect of media study five years ago, hoping to discover the implications of the deeper intersections between the two for a book project. I wanted to understand the tensions between these two fields, but also reveal underlying patterns that give shape to their interactions. Casting the net wide, I read across disciplines and used an expansive notion of media to include diverse forms of expression and commentary. I developed courses on the topic, attended migration-related conferences, and assembled small research teams to access different kinds of ‘data’. From these there emerged a sense of a core vocabulary—verbal, visual, and narrative—that provides the cultural and imaginative ‘tools’ to address migration.
At some point it was evident, however, that not all the material I was accumulating could find their way into a book, no matter how exhaustive. Given the emphasis on media as source material, it seemed appropriate to find a repository that could display them, and that would allow for constant updating on a topic that had become increasingly important worldwide. The internet with its capacious resources and global reach was the obvious answer for the archival, interactive, and outreach aspects of this project. This website is the result. It had its tentative beginnings two years ago and has been growing since. It remains, however, a work in progress, given that migration is, at its heart, unfinished business.
Finally, a word about ‘mapping.’ Given the preponderance of maps in charting migration movements and data of all sorts, the association of the two words, migration and mapping, would seem self-evident. This site, however, uses the term ‘mapping’ more broadly to help build a lexicon. It maps all kinds of information while treating ‘mapping’ itself as a medium. And as with all the other media explored, these are amenable to critical analysis and open to elaboration.
Sumita S. Chakravarty
Founder and Curator
April 2016
View a timeline of the Migration Mapping project on the Media+Migration Lab website here.
The Migration Mapping Team
Faculty
Sumita S. Chakravarty has a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in English from Lucknow University, India. She served as associate dean in Media Studies from 2011-2014, and as the founding chair of Culture and Media at Lang College from 2000-2008. She is the author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (U of Texas Press 1993; Oxford U Press 1996); The Enemy Within (editor, 2000) and several articles in journals and anthologies, including The Routledge Companion to Gender and Cinema (2016) and most recently, “Mapping Migration” in Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2020). Her research interests include media theory, media and globalization, film and national identity, digital cultures, and the history and philosophy of media technologies. She is currently working on a book on the intersections of media and migration. She leads the online platform Media+Migration Lab, which cultivates interdisciplinary projects examining the entanglements between immigration and its mediation. This includes its ongoing foundational project, Migration Mapping, a living digital archive for media and migration.
Sumita Chakravarty was the recipient of the Distinguished University Teaching Award at the New School in 2018. She has also established an endowed fellowship in her parents’ memory for a rising MA student in digital media studies, The Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Endowed Fellowship.
Current Research Fellow
Maggie Meyer is a creative and scholar who is passionate about the intersection of community, capitalism, agriculture, and media in the United States. She approaches this work through storytelling and data visualization methods that take the form of scholarly research, writing, and creative transmedia projects. She earned her BA in Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College with a focus in forced migration and has a professional background in theatrical lighting design.
Currently, Maggie is an MA in Media Studies student at The New School. Here, she has been examining the role of food as a tangible media that both represents the unsustainable and frequently violent nature of the United States’s food system, as well as food’s power as a tool of activism. Maggie is also the Academic Food Writing Editor for the Inquisitive Eater, The New School’s Food Literary Magazine.
Project Advisor
Johann Yamin is a cultural worker whose writing and research focus on emerging media, digital cultures, and histories of technology. His projects have taken shape as essays, moving image installations, and text-based videogames, alongside curatorial work and varied forms of support. He was previously a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam, New York, for co-organising the online project Pulau Something, and a Curatorial & Research Resident at the Singapore Art Museum in 2021. He was awarded a Rhizome microgrant in 2023 to write about the lifeworlds and afterlives of Flash-based artworks.
As an MA in Media Studies student at The New School, they have been examining digital culture from the contexts of Singapore and its broader region of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on the materiality of communication infrastructures and their entanglement with colonial histories. He is also a Research Assistant with the critical new media lab, Palah 파랗 Light Lab.
Past Research Assistants and Fellows (since 2013)
Johann Yamin
Amy Mullenex
Sofia Navarrete Zur
Guillermina Zabala Suárez
Sofia Carvalhaes
Elvira Blanco Santini
Ashley Cartagena
Jessica Mantas
Maria Gonzales
Andrea Pinto
Annelie Koller
Lani Rodriguez
Pablo Uribe
Julian de Mayo
Lotte Allen
Original website logo and homepage design
Anupam Chakravarty
Initial support for this project was provided by a grant from The New School.
