Media+Migration Ecologies in 2025
At the M2lab, our aim is to serve as an archive, research guide, and research hub for those who wish to identify, describe, and track the verbal, visual, aural, and digital forms through which we make sense of migration as human practice.
At this socio-political moment in the United States, this effort is more relevant than ever. In the Trump administration so far, we have seen increased ICE raids in cities such as Denver and Chicago, widespread confusion based on orders to halt refugee resettlement programing, shifts in permit and temporary residency policies, and increased deployment of the US troops to the US-Mexico border. These abrupt shifts have left tens of thousands of immigrants, both with and without legal status in the United States, in a state of uncertain and fearful limbo. Researchers, scholars, and officials are scrambling to predict and respond to the cascading effects that these policy shifts will have.
Simultaneously, 2024 was the hottest year on record. Global warming has already led to an increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, and wildfires and this year’s average temperature will only contribute to this pattern. Climate change and human movement and mobility have a complex relationship. Climate change and extreme weather events displace millions of people every year, forcing migration and mobility. However, climate related hazards can also increase people’s vulnerability in terms of access to infrastructure and resources that allow for migration. Thus, people’s capacity for movement and mobility can be restricted. While there is a complex relationship between climate change and migration, researchers have found a solid connection between global warming and climate change with the increase of movement and mobility at the Mexico/United States border.
Based on the conjunction of these political and environmental circumstances, the M2Lab has set our attention on the complex migration ecology in North America. As policy shifts and extreme weather events increase in occurrence, the overall migration ecology rapidly shifts and morphs. The M2Lab seeks to explore this landscape through archiving, documenting, and connecting the images and representations of migration in this specific climate, connecting these media to our constantly constricting and expanding mental maps of movement and mobility.
In this vein, the M2Lab has continued working within our 2024-2025 theme of Ecology. This winter, we’ve built upon our datasets and concepts within the Migration Mapping project, placing an emphasis on the media and migration ecology at the Mexico/United States border. Maggie Meyer, the current M2Lab Research Fellow, has released two short essays on recent media exhibitions in New York City that explore these elements.
Transnational Art, Solidarity, and Justice
The M2Lab also seeks to ground our research into the current landscape of media and migration ecology with insight and context into the foundational works of our field. To this end, Dr. Sumita Chakravarty at the Media+Migration Lab has developed a new series: From the Archives… Exploring Genealogies, Seeking Direction, Inviting Discussion. This series is meant to revisit and update news stories, films, and other media from our Migration Mapping archives, as well as include commentary on scholarly works situated at the intersections of media and migration.
We welcome responses and reactions from our M2lab community to further the conversation around media and migration ecology. If you’d like to participate in the discussion, please check out our submissions page on the Migration Mapping website.
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From the Archives… Exploring Genealogies, Seeking Direction, Inviting Discussion
By Sumita S. Chakravarty
In this series, our aim is to occasionally revisit and update news stories, films, and other media from our Migration Mapping archives, as well as include commentary on scholarly works situated at the intersections of media and migration.
From the Archives . . . Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion
The Geographic Imagination
In her 2002 book, Atlas of Emotion, noted visual and environmental studies scholar Giuliana Bruno uses the metaphor as well as the method of journey and mobility to rethink our relationship to cinema and other media. Advancing a wealth, indeed a cornucopia of examples from art, architecture, and film over its 468 pages, the book, the author noted, is a cultural history of the arts that links it to spaces and modes of travel. A prominent figure in the field of media history and theory, Bruno’s efforts pioneered approaches and perspectives such as media archeology, affect theory, spatial and haptic analysis, feminist screen theory, and much else, all through a multidisciplinary method that sought connections between fields that were separate twenty years ago, although less so, largely through the example of scholars like her. Read More…
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From the Archives . . . W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants
The Art of Recollection
A much-praised book, The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald was first published in German in 1992 and appeared in an English translation in 1996. It is a story of exile and its mediations: the ways in which exile is both experienced and narrated. As the book’s back cover states, “the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.” While the protagonists in this account are mostly Jews displaced and dispersed during the first half of the twentieth century, arguably the book has far wider resonance and relevance in our own time. As the subject of exile, deportation, and forced returns regains tragic potency for many in 2025 and beyond, Sebald’s haunting portrait of emigrants is history repeating itself. Against the human ability to forget even the most outrageous acts against fellow human beings, Sebald’s book is about remembrance and the desire to get to the heart of the exile and emigrant experience. Read More…
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Data Entry Spotlight: Borderland Ecologies
Echoes from the Borderlands is an exceedingly relevant aural exploration of the Mexico/United States border. The exhibition presents an urban and natural auditory landscape developed by artists Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. The project draws attention to the deep entanglement between the Borderland’s natural landscape and the flux of migration and anti-immigrant sentiments, militarized border enforcement, nuclear testing, genocide of native people, extractivism, and revival of space travel. This project engages with themes central to the Migration Mapping Project, such as Ecology, Border, and Alien, through its intimate aural exploration of the Borderlands.
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Data Entry Spotlight: Transnational Art, Solidarity, and Justice
The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, showcased the work and life of artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett in “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies: Elizabeth Catlett / Una artista negra revolucionaria con todo lo que ello implica: Elizabeth Catlett.” The exhibition of over 200 sculpture and print works not only presented the life and artistic work of Elizabeth Catlett, but also maintained a central focus on Black liberation, feminism, and transnational political solidarity, themes central to Catlett’s art and activism. Catlett uses her transnational and immigrant perspective to meld styles and visual strategies of Black America and Mesoamerica. The result of this practice creates “anticolonial, yet joyfully proud” work that amplifies non-western visual strategies that promote solidarity and unifying themes amongst Black Americans, Chicano Americans, and Mexicans, which also link to all oppressed peoples. (Catlett Exhibition)
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Upcoming
March, 2025
From the Archives . . . Before the Rain (1994), a film by Milcho Manchevski
In our new series on the Migration Mapping website, From the Archives, look forward to Dr. Sumita S. Chakravary’s discussion of Before the Rain (1994), a film by Milcho Manchevski.
Spring, 2025
Sinha Fellow Maggie Meyer will also be producing a new project for the M2Lab website. Stay tuned!
Become an M2Lab contributor
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.