Media & Migration in a Digital Age
04.16 + 04.17
The Media and Migration in a Digital Age symposium will convene a diversified group of artists and scholars to investigate how visual and digital media enact practices of care, particularly towards marginal migrant communities, in an increasingly divisive world — particularly with the rise of right-wing movements and authoritarian regimes around the world. Through a robust series of panels, workshops, film screenings, and installations over two days, this symposium aims to critically examine the problematic of how visual and digital media enable the circulation of anti- immigrant racism, on the one hand, and how, on the other hand, decolonial diasporic aesthetics creates space for modes of resistance.
04.16 | 9:00 AM - 1:15 PM | 340 Stephens HallDay One Program
9 AM - 9:15 AM -- Opening remarks by Professor Minoo Moallem, Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
9:15 AM - 11:00 AM -- Panel 1. Media and Migration in the Age of Globalization
Moderator: Professor Elora Shehabuddin, Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor Inderpal Grewal, Yale University
Panelists:
Narratives of Breakdown: Bordering the Exceptional and Expendable
Professor Radha Sarma Hegde, Media, Culture & Communication, NYU
Mediatized Spectacles of Sexual Violence
Professor Sherene Razack, Gender Studies, UCLA
Circulating Signs of Migrants and Refugees
Professor Leti Volpp, Director of the Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley
11:00 AM - 11:30 AM -- Break11:30 AM - 1:15 PM -- Panel 2. Disinformation
Moderator: Professor Salar Mameni, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Professor Caren Kaplan, UC Davis
Panelists:
Material Ruination as a Site of Dis- and De-Information
Helga Tawil-Souri, Media, Culture & Communication and Middle East & Islamic Studies, NYU
Undoing Virtuous Media Making: Lessons from the Live-VR Lab
Ilya Brookwell, Media & Cultural Studies and Chair of ITS Senate Oversight Committee, UC Riverside
Media Malpractice in Genocide
Noura Erakat, Africana Studies, Rutgers University – New Brunswick1:15 PM - 2:30 PM -- Break3:00 PM - 9:00 PM*
*Note Location Change - Pacific Film Archive - BAMPFA (2155 Center Street Berkeley, CA) 3:00 PM - 4:50 PM -- Media and Migration Film Series: In Conversation with Allyson Unzicker & Crystal Z Campbell
Films by Noor Abed, Joyce Joumaa, Crystal Z. Campbell, Rosalind Nashashibi, Shireen Seno, Denise Ferreira de Silva & Arjuna Neuman
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4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, USA / UK, 2018
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Merging, Dissecting, Collecting, Joyce Joumaa, Lebanon / Turkey, 2021
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Penelope, Noor Abed, Palestine, 2014
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Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office, Rosalind Nashashibi, UK, 2002
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A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off, Shireen Seno, the Philippines, 2020
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Makahiya, Crystal Z. Campbell, the Philippines, 2024
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM -- “The Avalanche” by Pinar Öğrenci - Documentary Film Screening.
Organized by: Professor Deniz Göktürk, Department of German
Panelists: Professor Deniz Göktürk and Professor Minoo Moallem
04.17 | 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM | 340 Stephens Hall
Day Two Program
9:00 AM - 10:45 AM -- Panel 3: Decolonial Aesthetics
Moderator/Discussant: Professor Courtney Morris, Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
Panelists:
Framing a Theory of Decolonial Digital Poetics
Dr. Rana Sharif, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley and member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective
The Work of Sound in the Age of America First: Rethinking Sonic Media Under Anti-Immigration
Osarugue Otebele, Ph.D. Candidate, Film and Cinema Studies, UC Berkeley
Vietnam, Palestine and Decolonial Aesthetics
Professor Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Asian American Studies, UCLA
Nah Gaza, Nah Lebanon: Diaspora Nationalism and the Paradox of Neither Nor
Professor Sima Shakhsari, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota11:00 AM - 12:00 PM -- Workshop “20 Years in Transit”
Participants: Professor Deniz Göktürk and Graduate students Elizabeth Sun, Kayla van Kooten, and Ambika Athreya
12:00 - 12:30 PM Closing Remarks by Dr. Amir Aziz, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow of Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
The Media & Migration symposium is organized by Professor Minoo Moallem (Department of Gender and Women's Studies), Dr. Amir Aziz, 2023-2025 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, and UC Berkeley Film & Media Graduate Students Osarugue Otebele and Allyson Unzicker.
Event co-hosted by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Race and Gender, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, the Dean of Social Sciences, the Department of Film & Media, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and the Media Studies Program, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and generously funded by a UCHRI 2024-25 Conference award.