Media + Migration Lab

Fall 2025 Newsletter

2025–2026 Theme: Entanglement
The Media + Migration Lab continues to expand the ways we think about migration — not as a single trajectory or discrete event, but as a complex web of relations, histories, and ongoing movements that link people, places, and ecologies across time. Migration is never solitary. It is always entangled: with landscapes, with economies, with colonial legacies, with nonhuman life, and with the stories we tell about all of these interdependencies.

This year’s theme, Entanglement, draws inspiration from anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, which traces the multispecies networks that make survival possible amid precarity. Tsing invites us to look closely at how worlds come into being through encounters — between human and nonhuman, local and global, extractive and resilient. Her notion of “entanglement” offers a framework to understand migration not as linear displacement, but as a condition of coexistence shaped by histories of connection, contamination, and collaboration.

At the Media + Migration Lab, we hope to bring attention to works and datasets that foreground these entangled relations — projects that blur the boundaries between human and environment, colonizer and colonized, past and present. This year’s highlights include An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang, which examines the haunted infrastructures and spectral economies left behind by Asia’s rapid urban transformations, and Seeds of Change by Maria Thereza Alves, which traces the accidental migrations of ballast flora carried by colonial trade routes. Both works expose how the movement of people, plants, and goods are intertwined in shared histories of empire, extraction, and survival.

By centering Entanglement, we invite a renewed awareness of how migration is embedded in material and affective networks — in soil, air, archives, and memory. To study migration through entanglement is to study the threads that bind disparate geographies and temporalities together, to see how displacement and belonging are co-constituted rather than opposed. Media, in this sense, are not only records of movement but also active participants in the making and unmaking of these ties.

Through this theme, the Lab aims to extend our conceptual vocabulary and visual archive to better account for the complexities of living and moving in an interdependent world. The Entanglement keyword will be added to our Concepts page, alongside related materials and reflections from our growing dataset. We invite you to explore these connections — to follow the threads of migration as they weave through stories, images, and infrastructures that are, ultimately, inseparable.

Click on one now to browse through the materials we’ve collected!
S.G.