2024-2025 Theme: Ecology The Media + Migration Lab constantly works to refine our social and political understanding of migration, which involves maintaining unwavering attention to the continued global conflicts that force the migration of millions of people around the world. The conflict in Gaza, and now Lebanon, is in its fourteenth month, and the genocide has resulted in the death of over 40,000 Palestinians and immense destruction of land and infrastructure. The Russian invasion of… Read more

Sinha Fellow 2024-25 Congratulations to Maggie Meyer, MA in Media Studies student at The New School, who has been awarded the 2024-25 Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Fellowship! We look forward to the work she will be doing during her fellowship year. 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… Read more

Applications are open to continuing M.A. students in Media Studies for this research fellowship in the amount of $5,100 for the academic year 2024-25. Application Due Date: July 1, 2024 The annual Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Endowed Fellowship at the School of Media Studies in The New School is a year-long funded research assistantship in the area of Media Studies, with an emphasis on the intersections between media and migration. The Sinha Fellow will be… Read more

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 concepts constituting our mental maps about the migrant/emigrant/immigrant. With a greater emphasis on the impact of technology on migration, each… Read more

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 Europe 2023: The Year in Review  The year 2023 has been bookended by two conflicts that have again brought displacement… Read more

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 fellows. More recently, we began the process of giving Migration Mapping a fully refreshed look for more intuitive navigation of… Read more

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 dissected between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania illustrate both the cyclical nature of crisis in the region and the area’s unique… Read more

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, infamously labeled the ‘China virus’ by former President Trump. Others have pointed out that racial animosity against Asians is nothing… Read more

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 then a guest professor responded to the students’ presentations.  This newsletter presents the opening remarks of the workshop, and sections… Read more

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 that, for some, has become quite profitable.” Amir Husak is a brilliant, thoughtful, and socially-engaged multi-media artist and educator based… Read more

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 form. —Nitin Anand in My Voice (October 2020) The selection of Ms. Harris represents at least a handful of firsts… Read more

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 generation immigrants as they face challenges and disappointments, find their voice in art or activism, and reflect on the nature… Read more

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 of this year, twenty scholars interested in the intersections of media, urbanism, and migration convened at the School of Arts,… Read more

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 content between India and China via the Nepal border through established routes in the 1980s and 1990s. This research allows… Read more

      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, advocacy and public information, leading campaigns for the BBC and the UN in North America, Asia, Africa and the Balkans.… Read more

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 local artists to the killing of George Floyd capture the other faces of the community’s stance and are proof of… Read more

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 earliest impacts as institutions started to shut down in mid-March was the disruption that students felt across colleges and universities… Read more

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 networking event, this summit aims to change the perception of what Latin American fashion was traditionally.  Latin America and fashion… Read more

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 votes matter because they will start to shape who the likely Democratic nominee for president will be and what issues… Read more

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 culture’s spatialized interiority; it combines territorial claims with a fundamental ethical reassurance of innocence; and, to achieve this combination, it… Read more

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 there hardly seems space for alternative ways of looking and feeling in public visual culture. The very terms “migrant” and… Read more

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 cynical, the two might be closely intertwined, since tourism sites rely heavily on the island’s many temples as sources… Read more

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 as a barrier to understanding between peoples separated by their faith is hard to shake. So any instances of deviation… Read more

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 New York City, famed crime writer Fleming sought to experience the dark yet romantic underbellies of America’s greatest Mafia towns.… Read more

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 that appeal to our sense of belonging that goes beyond an awareness of differences. White settler societies such as Canada,… Read more

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 of topics relevant to a variety of contexts that had the overarching aim of defining the relationship between local and… Read more

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 of migration; the implicit and explicit messaging which shapes our policy, opinions, and values. But these thoughts were far from… Read more

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 of museums in the world – art museums, science and technology museums, urban history and natural history museums, and a… Read more

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 Today’s world is rich in content for those of us studying migration. Political landscapes from Germany to Argentina are consumed… Read more

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 often find myself studying media portrayals of migrants and media created by migrants. It is a rare occurrence to explore media created specifically for migrants.… Read more

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 at The New School. The documentary starts by interviewing African migrants from various countries: Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Nigeria.… Read more

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 anti-Nazi campaign to Chuck Norris’ endorsement of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, it has become commonplace for celebrities to harness their visibility… Read more

’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 expedite the immigration process for Asian-born brides of Vietnam War veterans, the K-1 visa requires applicants to marry their respective… Read more

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 last classes. Both films illuminate an immigrant perspective of New York City, and specifically look at the day-to-day migration that… Read more

    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, upheavals, and changes to keep track of, it can be difficult to get a grasp on topics as broad as… Read more

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 policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally, stated that “After… Read more

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 struck me was their luminosity: the brightness in the faces of children, of ordinary men and women marked by history… Read more

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 though change is clearly happening, it is still happening slowly. According to a study of TV programming done by The… Read more

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 like an outsider in one’s own country that really resonates. Guilt seems to be the major reason for Vargas’ coming out as… Read more

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 family stories. Even if neither you nor your parents are first generation Americans, it is likely you identify that your… Read more

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