Migration Unboxed

Rethinking migration: the 'Bristol Approach'

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:11:51 GMT

In this bonus episode of 'Migration Unboxed' our host Bridget Anderson talks to four of the authors from her new edited volume Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (Bristol University Press, 2025). The book takes a radically interdisciplinary approach to migration and makes connections with other academic, policy and activist fields. It situates what is conventionally understood as ‘migration’ within the broader field of mobilities – including of goods, animals, policies and ideas as well as people. Like this podcast, then, Rethinking Migration follows the Bristol Approach in taking thinking on migration outside the box.

The four authors in this episode come from diverse disciplines - history, music, criminology and history of art. Their conversation shows how working closely together on the volume enabled them think in new ways about their subject, whether migrants and borders in Medieval England, how music crosses borders and the Ukraine war, the movement of earth in pre-modern Europe, or the construction of illegality and borders in speeches of the UK political elite.

Bios:

Bridget Anderson is Director of MMB and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol.

Natasha Carver is Senior Lecturer in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol.

Lucy Donkin is Senior Lecturer in History and History of Art, University of Bristol.

Florian Scheding is Senior Lecturer in Music, University of Bristol.

Brendan Smith is Professor of Medieval History, University of Bristol.

Read more about Rethinking Migration here and follow a link to buy the book or download it for free here.

Credits:

Produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Edited by Melissa FitzGerald – X @melissafitzg

Music by Olly Shaw – ollyshawmusic.com

Follow us on:

Bluesky - @mmbuob.bsky.social

LinkedIn – Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Instagram – mmbuob

Facebook – Migration Mobilities Bristol

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The good, the bad and the migrant?

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:31:59 GMT

In academia there is a lot of debate about whether immigration controls are inherently unjust. But the focus of everyday conversations about migration and asylum is less on the ethics of borders, and more on the morality of migrants. In this episode our host Bridget Anderson is joined by anthropologists Miriam Ticktin and Juan Zhang to unbox how ideas of vulnerability and deservingness work with understandings of migration and mobility, and what the implications are for politics.

Bios:

Bridget Anderson is Director of 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.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York. She writes on migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. She is MMB's Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2025 - read more here.

Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bristol and researchers borders and transnational migration, with a particular focus on the Asian borderlands, cross-border cultural politics and China.

Further links for the episode:

Miriam's book: Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Her most recent book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press.

Juan's chapter: 'Why Can’t Chinese Citizens Go Home? Spoiled Citizenship and Stigmatized Returns in Pandemic Times' in Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (2025).

Credits:

Produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Edited by Melissa FitzGerald – X @melissafitzg

Music by Olly Shaw – ollyshawmusic.com

Follow us on:

Bluesky - @mmbuob.bsky.social

LinkedIn – Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Instagram – mmbuob

Facebook – Migration Mobilities Bristol

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do people become 'migrants'?

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:52:56 GMT

In this episode we ask, how do people become migrantized, and what does this tell us about both migration and citizenship? Bridget invites guests Janine Dahinden and Manoj Dias-Abey to discuss these questions from their different disciplinary perspectives. As a social anthropologist and professor of transnational studies, Janine understands ‘migranticization’ as sets of performative practices that ascribe migratory status to certain people and bodies. Manoj, as a socio-legal scholar, considers how such processes shape the laws and regulations created by state institutions.

In bringing together these different approaches our guests raise questions about how race, class and concepts of skill play into migrantization. They also ask whether the academic gaze should, in fact, focus more on 'demigrantizing' people by recognising how certain laws, such as those regulating labour migration, impact on citizens more widely.

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 (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Janine Dahinden is Professor of Transnational Studies at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Her research focuses on (de)migranticization, mobility, transnationalisation and boundary making.

Manoj Dias-Abey is Senior Lecturer in the University of Bristol Law School. His current research investigates how Britain thinks about and regulates labour migration, and how this has changed over time.

Further links for the episode:

Janine’s article on ‘Migranticization’.

Manoj’s chapter on ‘The Aliens Order 1920, the “Work Permit” and the Making of the National Labour Market’ in the MMB edited volume Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race (available 17th February 2025).

Credits:

Produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Edited by Melissa FitzGerald – X @melissafitzg

Music by Olly Shaw – ollyshawmusic.com

Follow us on:

Bluesky - @mmbuob.bsky.social

LinkedIn – Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)

Instagram – mmbuob

Facebook – Migration Mobilities Bristol

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does visuality help us understand movement?

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 15:14:43 GMT

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:

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:

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

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

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

Follow us:

@mmbuob.bsky.social

Instagram

Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is 'migration' and why unbox it?

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:22:52 GMT

Host Bridget Anderson asks guests Nandita Sharma and Tim Cole what they think of when they hear the word ‘migration’. Humans have always moved so when and why does moving become described as ‘migrating’? What might we miss if we just accept the term ‘migration’ without questioning it? In this lively conversation, taking us across different histories, landscapes, species and state systems, Bridget, Nandita and Tim take on the challenge of unboxing migration and show why this matters for making a more just world.

Bios:

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol 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 (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Nandita Sharma is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is involved in. Nandita was a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor with MMB in 2022.

Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol. His research ranges across social, landscape and environmental histories with a focus on the Holocaust.

Further links for this episode:

Nandita Sharma’s book Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

MMB’s Race, Nation and Migration blog series.

‘Invasive Others: Plants? People? Pathogens?’ – an interview with Miriam Ticktin on MMB Insights and Sounds.

The (de)Bordering plot at the University of Bristol.

Credits:

Produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol

Edited by Melissa FitzGerald – X @Melissafitzg

Music by Olly Shaw – ollyshawmusic.com

Follow us on:

@mmbuob.bsky.social

Instagram

Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.