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 of peoples to the fore—the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that continued into 2023 and has resulted in millions of refugees; and the conflict in Gaza sparked on Oct 7, 2023 by an attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians that brought on major retaliatory strikes by Israel, causing immense death and destruction in Gaza. Amy Mullenex has been following both wars on social media and notes the disinformation and “flattening effect” of comments and posts from those responding to these events. A rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe and the U.S. was noted repeatedly in the news media during the latter half of 2023 and has gained momentum since the conflict in Gaza. The Palestinian cause and solidarity with the civilian population in Gaza has been equally in evidence through a wide range of international voices.
In contemporary art, for instance, the most defining events in 2023 arose not from specific exhibitions but the faultlines that emerged from calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. The entire selection committee of Documenta (a leading arts organization based in Germany) stepped down due to their support for Palestine, and the director of the magazine Artforum was fired for publishing a call for ceasefire and for Palestinian liberation.
Social media persisted in dominating public discourse throughout 2023, as Twitter morphed into X and TikTok continued in its ascendance. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, introduced late last year, has fired the public imagination in visceral ways. While we do not yet know the long-term impact of these latest developments on societies around the world, early prognostications view it as a game-changer, in good ways and ill.
In terms of concepts, “border” stood out in 2023, as in many previous years. This recurs in importance through sites such as the U.S.-Mexico border, and at many other borders in eastern Europe and the Middle East. The concept of “exile”—a word which was once contiguous, if not synonymous, with “migration”—finds itself especially important through the contestations of territorial homelands in 2023.
At the Media+Migration Lab we continued to look for ways to refine our understandings of these two coupled forces in our social and political lives, following their interplay in video games, memoir, science fiction and horror genres. Our interest is in identifying new language and forms, new complexities and turns in the age-old confrontation of self-and-other, and self-as-other. In that regard, it has been interesting to see a trend in American fiction that deals with migrancy and displacement as a more pervasive condition of our new century than ever before. While it is not possible to generalize, given the sheer volume of novels that are published each year, we find that strange-ness is no stranger to our lives and societies any more.
Looking ahead to 2024, which everyone here hopes will be a more peaceful one, we are excited to see that the upcoming Venice Art Biennale has announced its theme as Foreigners Everywhere. Focusing on artists who are “foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees,” the Biennale Arte 2024 places an emphasis on artists who have moved between the Global South and the Global North. Meanwhile, research continues on various fronts that have been exploring the interplay of migration with biology, the environment, genetics, technology, language, as well as cultural attitudes and values.
We thank all those who have visited our websites, and encourage many more people to do the same. Wishing you a very happy new year!
— Sumita S. Chakravarty and Johann Yamin