New Introductory Essays for Concepts This Spring, we launched a series of 17 short essays by Prof Sumita S. Chakravarty and Sinha Memorial Research Fellow Johann Yamin, each introducing a keyword on our new “Concepts” page on the Migration Mapping project. This is part of the Migration Mapping project’s broader aims to arrive at key …
With 2023 coming to a close, we reflect on international developments in media and migration, also taking stock of the continued growth of the Media+Migration Lab (M2Lab) and its foundational project, Migration Mapping. Header image: Still from Amy Mullenex’s M2Lab multimedia project, Tracing Crisis in Ukraine: On War, Digital Media, and Forced Migration in Southeastern …
New look for Migration Mapping Migration Mapping was officially launched in 2016, though if one were to explore its archived versions on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, one would find multiple iterations of the project emerging since 2015, transforming over time with slight variations to its appearance through the work of volunteers, student researchers, and …
Tracing Crisis in Ukraine: On War, Digital Media, and Forced Migration in Southeastern Europe by Amy Mullenex This multimedia project documents how digital media (and digital discourses) about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine are complicated by lived experiences of forced migration in Southeastern Europe. Multimedia artworks about a Jewish family’s history in the region today …
Entanglements: A Conversation with Mediamaker Ina Adele Ray – conducted by Sumita S. Chakravarty and Guillermina Zabala Suárez In recent months, we have become painfully aware of racial attacks against Asian Americans in San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, and elsewhere in the U.S. Some have attributed the hatred to fears stoked by the COVID-19 virus, …
Pandemic Media and Emergent Infrastructures On April 16, 2021 Professor Sumita Chakravarty, along with graduate students Isabel Munson, Rachel Pincus, Nick Travaglini, and Guillermina Zabala, held a workshop on the topic of Pandemic Media and Emergent Infrastructures as part of The New School’s online events. Each student presented a different aspect of this theme and …
Welcome to Bihac!: A Conversation with Amir Husak Interview conducted by Guillermina Zabala Suárez and Sumita S. Chakravarty. Photography by Amir Husak. “What I have observed first-hand could be called a border-industry complex, with IOM (International Organization for Migration), EU authorities, border police, smugglers, local and federal politicians all implicated in a severe humanitarian crisis …
Kamala Harris and the Immigrant Story by Sumita S. Chakravarty Dr. Chakravarty, PhD is the founder of the Migration Mapping initiative and is currently working on a book titled Unsettled States: Towards a Media History of Migration. By hiding a big part of your ethnicity, heritage, religion—you are practicing bigotry and bias, in a new …
From Here: A Documentary by Christina Antonakos-Wallace Christina Antonakos-Wallace is an American documentary filmmaker whose acclaimed film, From Here (2020), explores what it means to be considered a racial, ethnic, or religious outsider in mainstream society. Moving back and forth between New York and Berlin, the film follows four people who are first or second …
Media’s Border Logics: Reflecting on Platforms to the World Symposium By Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is assistant professor of critical media studies in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research spans digital media, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American film and television. At the end of January …
The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Migrating Media Technologies By Ishita Tiwary Ishita Tiwary is a postdoctoral fellow at Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. In the summer of 2019, I conducted fieldwork in India and Nepal for my new research project. The project seeks to track the migration of media technologies and video …
The Power of Cartoons in Global Education: An Interview with Christian Clark Conducted by Sumita S. Chakravarty A former cartoonist and two-time Emmy-award winning writer for the Children’s Television Workshop flagship show, Sesame Street, Christian Clark works for the United Nations where he has more than 25 years of experience in communications, …
Notes about Home . . . in Minnesota by Pamela Vázquez Torres The dignity of a safe home shouldn’t be determined by color of skin or country of birth. The ongoing social movement in Minneapolis, now spread out nationally and internationally, is a reclamation of home. Opposed to corporate media coverage of events, reactions by …
Documenting our Time: The Paradoxes of Belonging by Sumita S. Chakravarty Ideas of home and belonging– long a staple of migration as lived reality and structure of consciousness in that home is often defined in the very act of leaving it– have once again become food for thought during the coronavirus pandemic. One of the …
The Migration of Fashion, Part 1: The Colonizing Gaze and Counter-Gaze Written by Sandra Mathey García-Rada The Latin American Fashion Summit platform created in 2018 aims to help Latin American fashion brands and designers join the global stage. Through different initiatives that bring together powerful industry figures, the main one being a yearly conference and …
The next time you read this newsletter, there will have been several votes cast that will give some indication of what issues, policies and ideologies will drive the future direction of politics in America. First, the Iowa caucuses will be held on Tuesday February 7th, followed by the New Hampshire primary on February 11th. These …
Retooling Heimat By Berkley Wilson “Heimat is a crucial aspect in German self-perceptions; it represents the fusional anti-Enlightenment thinking in German Romanticism; it is the idealization of the pre-modern within the modern; it unites geographic and imaginary conceptions of space; it is a provincializing, but disalienating, part of German bourgeois culture; it reflects modern German …
Aasif Mandvi on Ellis Island by Sumita S. Chakravarty Is there a comic vision of migration, or more precisely, a comedian’s take on the matter? We are so used to dark and gloomy images of migrants, to accounts of danger, violence, and death as far as the movement of people across borders is concerned, that …
The Migration of Religions, part 2 of 2Bali: A Hieroglyphics of the Sacred By Sumita Chakravarty Religion, one might say, is the struggle for the soul of a place. In Bali, this struggle still manifests itself between an externally-driven economy of tourism and an internally-driven (for want of a better term) sensibility of the sacred. To …
THE MIGRATION OF RELIGIONS (PART 1 of 2) BY: SUMITA CHAKRAVARTY The journalist and food writer, Yasmin Khan, said recently that food is a vehicle to understand how cultures interact in areas of conflict. Religion, on the other hand, is so steeped in histories of conflict that our perception, warranted or not, of religion …
THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT: MYTH, ENEMY, ICON (PART 3 of 4) BY: JEN EVANS “Nowadays, crime’s gone respectable.” These were the words of Captain James Hamilton, Head of Intelligence for the Los Angeles Police Department, as he described the Italian-American Mafia to Ian Fleming circa 1959.1 In his travels to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, and …
MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY: CANADA’S NATIONAL MUSEUM BY: SUMITA S. CHAKRAVARTY At a time of increasing fragmentation of civic life and thought in many western societies, it is instructive to ponder the role of national museums in articulating a culture’s collective history, goals, and aspirations. Museums, like sports, are perhaps the mediated experiences still remaining …
ENTANGLEMENTS BY: SUMITA S. CHAKRAVARTY “The Multiplication of Perspectives” was the title of a conference hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently (April 26-28, 2019) to mark the 10th anniversary of its Global Research Initiative, C-MAP. The event brought together scholars, artists, and curators to present their work on a variety …
SPOILER ALERT! Captain Marvel & The Skulls: Heroes & Villains in a Refugee Crisis contains spoilers for Marvel Entertainment’s most recent film, Captain Marvel. CAPTAIN MARVEL & THE SKRULLS: HEROES AND VILLAINS IN A REFUGEE CRISIS BY: JEN EVANS In last month’s article The Language of Migration: Power and Politics in the American News Media, we discussed biased depictions …
TAKE THE #20MOVIECHALLENGE! The Migration+Media Network is taking the #20MovieChallenge! We are highlighting one movie per day for 20 days… and all of our movies are by migrants, about migrants, or starring migrants! Join us on Twitter @migrationmappng and let us know what your favorite migration-related films are! ARGENTINA’S IMMIGRATION MUSEUM BY: SUMITA CHAKRAVARTY Of all the types …
TAKE THE #20MOVIECHALLENGE! The Migration+Media Network is taking the #20MovieChallenge! We are highlighting one movie per day for 20 days… and all of our movies are by migrants, about migrants, or starring migrants! Join us on Twitter @migrationmappng and let us know what your favorite migration-related films are! DEFINING “THE MIGRANT”: REFLECTIONS OF AN IMMIGRANT BY: JEN EVANS …
CONNECT WITH US ON SOCIAL MEDIA! The Migration+Media Network, comprised of Migration Mapping and M2Lab, is now active on social media. Follow us on Twitter @migrationmappng and find us on Facebook @mediaandmigration. MUPPETS & MIGRATION: A LOOK AT SESAME STREET‘S GROUND-BREAKING SUPPORT OF REFUGEE CHILDREN BY: JEN EVANS In researching the interface of media and migration, I …
CONNECT WITH US ON SOCIAL MEDIA! The Migration+Media Network, comprised of Migration Mapping and M2Lab, is now active on social media. Follow us on Twitter @migrationmappng DO ALL “CITIES OF DREAMS” DIE? BY: SOFIA CARVALHAES CHERTO SILVEIRA That is the question I kept asking myself when seeing Christiane Badgley’s Guangzhou Dream Factory in a cold room …
FIND US ON TWITTER! The Migration+Media Network, comprised of Migration Mapping and M2Lab, is now active on social media. Follow @migrationmappng JIM CARREY’S ART AS A MESSAGE ON IMMIGRATION POLICY AND THE DANGERS OF CENSORSHIP BY: JEN EVANS Hollywood has long used its star power to both promote and resist political agendas. From Marlene Dietrich’s …
’90-DAY FIANCÉ’: WHAT REALITY TV TEACHES US ABOUT THE REALITIES OF MIGRATION BY: JEN EVANS Now entering its sixth season, TLC’s ’90-Day Fiancé’ has become popular programming among audiences. The reality show depicts couples as they navigate the K-1 visa process, a pathway to immigration for foreign nationals who are engaged to marry U.S. citizens. Originally established to …
Both projects were conceived and executed in a class called The Cinematic Place, taught by the late Deanna Kamiel, who passed away on June 16th. There has been an outpouring of heartfelt tributes from students who were touched by Kamiel’s dedicated service as a professor, and these two projects are products of one of her …
Despite the tendency for things to slow down during the Summer, the work being done surrounding issues related to migration seems to be just ramping up. It seems like there are endless opportunities to contribute or discuss, but where to start? In an era of information oversaturation, and a deluge of political movements, …
Migration is not just happening across national borders; it is also a risky move forced on women within the United States. I am referring to migratory practice related to the need to have an abortion that some women face. In an assessment published at the beginning of 2018, The Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and …
Photo Essay By Kai Baldwin Photographs, Susan Sontag famously wrote, anesthetize. But there is nothing anesthetic about the photographs in the exhibition titled, And Then They Came for Me, about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Given the somber topic, one would expect to be confronted by dark and gloomy images, but what …
Immigrant stories have increased greatly over the past fews years, seeming to be only encouraged by the 2016 election and current political climate. Years ago, having immigrant characters at all was considered transgressive. They had to be used sparingly, and with vagueness surrounding their background. This often resulted in some pretty offensive portrayals. Frustratingly, even …
In June 2011, a lengthy essay by journalist Jose Antonio Vargas was published in The New York Times Magazine. It was titled “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” In the essay, Vargas talks about the complicated logistical aspects of succeeding in America while undocumented, but it is his insight into the psychological impact of feeling …
In a Ted Talk, Chris Milk calls virtual reality the “ultimate empathy machine” and he is not the only one who has taken note of the possibilities this technology holds; possibilities that non-interactive media such as traditional cinema or fine art cannot offer. The immigrant experience is one that is a part of most American …
