Invasive Kin by Shenghan Gao
Sinha Fellow, Shenghan Gao, has posted her project, Invasive Kin on the M2Lab site. This project is interested in the specific question that an invasive plant, mugwort, poses to the field: What happens when we treat an invasive species not as a problem to be managed, but as a medium through which migration’s histories are recorded and transmitted? Mugwort does not narrate its crossing; it carries it chemically, in its roots and volatile oils and the particular way it finds purchase in disturbed ground. This project asks what it means to learn to read those records — and to make new ones with it. Read more…
S.G.
“It’s Never Just A Human Story.” Phytogram Workshop with Shenghan
By spending a whole afternoon thinking about, with, and physically engaging with mugwort and the material reality of film, we found ourselves inhabiting — however briefly — the kind of question that sits at the heart of the M2Lab’s Migration Mapping project: what does it mean to migrate, to be uprooted and re-rooted, to be declared “invasive” in a place you have nonetheless made home? Mugwort didn’t choose to cross oceans; it was carried, just as so many living things — plants, people, images — are carried by forces larger than themselves. As a Sinha Memorial Fellow, I’ve been learning to pay attention to those entanglements: between media and movement, between the botanical and the political, between what a plant “sees” through chemical reaction and what we see when we finally slow down enough to look. The phytogram, with its insistence on letting the plant participate in its own image-making, felt like a small but genuine act of that attention — a reminder that migration is never just a human story, and that the archive we are building together must be wide enough to hold all of it. Read More…
S.G.
Data Entry Highlight: Dispersal: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
Jessica J. Lee’s Dispersals is a meditation on migration, memory, and ecology that foregrounds the entanglement of human and more-than-human forms of dispersal. Moving between her family’s history of displacement across Taiwan, Canada, and the UK, and the drifting pathways of seeds, spores, and plants, Lee weaves together an intimate memoir with natural history to show how dispersal is both biological and cultural, material and emotional. Plants that travel through wind, water, and animals become metaphors and companions for the migrations of people, carrying stories of survival, belonging, and loss. Read More…
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Do you research, write, or create projects around media and migration? Check out our Submissions page to see how you can get your projects and writings hosted on M2Lab and its Migration Mapping project.
These updates developed as part of the Sinha Memorial Fellowship, which is awarded yearly by The New School’s School of Media Studies.