What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is diaspora? What challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? 

As part of the MA Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS, students were encouraged to use their creativity to interrogate these questions of the world around them and also far away. This exhibition, curated by students on the course, showcases the resulting artworks, a wide-ranging and wonderfully provoking collection ranging from video, collage and illustration to poetry and diary-writing. 

These pieces show how artistic process(es) can meaningfully inform, enrich and/or shape our ethnographic research, to think beyond “traditional” ethnographic methods to challenge how we see reality. Together, these works stretch the canon and reveal ways in which we understand the materiality of objects, spaces and movements, using creative methods.

Curators:  Ruba Salih, Flora Laney-Hubbard, Mahali Mackintosh, Susanna Owusu Twumwah, Aisling Emma Watton

A live discussion with the contributors will take place on Zoom on Saturday 20 March, 11:00 – 11:50 UTC. Find the papers’ abstracts and a link to join the live discussion here.

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