MIGRATION
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
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The Migration Special Interest Group (SIG) brings together international scholars, writers, artists, cultural practitioners and translators to explore how contemporary migration works of art reshape our understanding of migration. By tracing migration narratives across literature, theatre, film, visual arts and other creative forms, the group explores how artistic practices generate new perspectives on mobility, culture, society, multiculturalism, multilingualism and transnationalism.
We use the term “migration arts” in a broad sense: it encompasses literature, theatre, film, performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, digital art, music, dance, VR and AR art and other hybrid and interdisciplinary forms of creative practice. While our primary focus is on works produced since the 1990s—when, as Manfred B. Steger notes, journalists and scholars began to use the term “globalisation” to talk about the changes they were observing in various fields such as business, economics, social sciences and humanities—we also remain attentive to earlier traditions and other disciplines that inform today’s understandings of migration.
Migration arts, as we define it, may explicitly address the topic of migration, emerge from the lived experiences of migration, or simply be shaped by its influence. Importantly, the author or artist does not have to be a migrant. What matters is that the work explores migration experiences, reflects hybrid cultural encounters, engages with the realities of a globalised world, or articulates cosmopolitan and transnational visions. As a result, migration arts can be created by anyone―migrants, their family and friends, or local artists whose works resonate with or are transformed by the cultural, social and political changes that migration brings.
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