How does visuality help us understand movement?

Images are crucial to how ideas and feelings about migrants circulate. In this episode, host Bridget Anderson invites her guests Victoria Hattam and Nariman Massoumi to explore how visual representation relates to the politics of migration. They discuss photographs, film scenes and everyday sights (and sounds!) that open up their thinking on movement and challenge the stereotypical images of migration in the media. Broadening our approach to visual representation can unsettle presumptions about who should and shouldn’t move.

Bios:

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Us and Them: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research, New York. She works at the intersection of visual and material culture, global political economy, and bordering. Victoria was MMB’s Leverhulme Visiting Professor in 2023-24.

Nariman Massoumi is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol and coordinator of the MMB research challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures. His latest film is ‘Pouring Water on Troubled Oil’ (2023).

Further links for this episode:

Blogposts by Victoria and Nariman on Dover and Calais: Borderland Infrastructures.

Blogpost on Victoria and Nariman’s workshop on visuality: Bordering Bristol: looking to see.

Recordings of Victoria’s Leverhulme lectures, and her image of the landing mat fence on the US-Mexico border: Leverhulme Visiting Professorship.

Credits:

Produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Edited by Melissa FitzGerald – X @melissafitzg

Music by Olly Shaw – ollyshawmusic.com

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