This workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to share work that explores the multifaceted interdependencies and entanglements between migration and environmental change. How and under what circumstances might climate and migration scholarship be most productively brought to bear on each other? We invite participants to widen the scope of questions commonly posed, knowledges considered, and histories told, and to think at varying temporal, spatial, and causal scales. As such, we aim to challenge the assumptions and power relations often inadvertently or implicitly reproduced in research that recognizes the intersection of mobility and environmental change only in its most pronounced manifestations: for instance, in the desertification of the Sahel — a region of interest in EU illegal immigration fears—or in rising sea levels in Tuvalu. Moreover, by incorporating a variety of research foci and methods, we aim to shed light on how conceptions of climate, migration, and the intersections thereof shift according to our scholarly perspectives: the temporal or geographic scale at which we consider a given crisis or migratory pattern, or whether we examine environmental change on a local, national, hemispheric, or planetary level.
Schedule
Monday, April 26
8 – 8:45 am (PDT), 11 am – 11:45 pm (EDT), 5 – 5:45 pm (CET)
Welcome and Introductions
8:45 – 9 am (PDT) | 11:45 am – 12 pm (EDT) | 5:45 – 6 pm (CET)
Break
9 am – 10:15 am (PDT), 12 – 1:15 pm (EDT), 6 – 7:15 pm (CET)
Panel 1
Cleovi Mosuela: Precarity in a Climate of Change
Tina Shull: Climate Refugee Stories: Building an Archive of Resilience
Discussants: Achilles Kallergis and Uwe Lübken
Tuesday, April 27
8 – 9:15 am (PDT), 11 am – 12:15 pm (EDT), 5 – 6:15 pm (CET)
Panel 2
Felix Mauch: Troubled Waters, Flowing Grounds, and the Layers of Disaster Mobilities
Uwe Lübken: Vanport, Oregon: Race, Displacement and the Reconstruction of a “Lost City”
Discussants: Katharina Loeber and Thomas Nail
9:15 – 9:30 am (PDT) | 12:15 – 12:30 pm (EDT) | 6:15 – 6:30 pm (CET)
Break
9:30 am – 10:45 am (PDT), 12:30 – 1:45 pm (EDT), 6:30 – 7:45 pm (CET)
Panel 3
Katharina Loeber: Environmentalism in the Global North – Environmental Destruction and Forced Migration in the Global South: The Question of Lithium
Ruhi Deol: Fifty years apart: Bengali settlers and Bengali in-migrants in the Andaman Islands
Discussants: Serhiy Choliy and Julia Morris
Wednesday, April 28
8 – 9:15 am (PDT), 11 am – 12:15 pm (EDT), 5 – 6:15 pm (CET)
Panel 4
Andrew Baldwin: Racial Geontopower: Towards a Political Geology of White Supremacy
Achilles Kallergis: Adaptation, Relocation, Marginalization: Contradictions in the Governance of Environmental Mobility
Discussants: Sarah Louise Nash and Tina Shull
9:15 – 9:30 am (PDT) | 12:15 – 12:30 pm (EDT) | 6:15 – 6:30 pm (CET)
Break
9:30 am – 10:45 am (PDT), 12:30 – 1:45 pm (EDT), 6:30 – 7:45 pm (CET)
Panel 5
Serhiy Choliy: Individual Initiative and Population Relocation Process in Late Soviet Union (1986 – 1991)
Sarah Louise Nash: The Perfect (Shit)Storm: ‘Green Fake News’ and Xenophobic Misogyny in Far-Right Populist Discourses on Climate Change and Displacement in the German ‘Climate Passport’ Debate
Discussants: Felix Mauch and Cleovi Mosuela
10:45 am – 12 pm (PDT), 1:45 – 3 pm (EDT), 7:45 pm – 9 pm (CET)
Social Hour
Thursday April 29
8 – 9:15 am (PDT), 11 am – 12:15 pm (EDT), 5 – 6:15 pm (CET)
Panel 6
Thomas Nail: Migration, Climate Change and Capitalism
Julia Morris: Managing, Now Becoming Refugees: Climate Change and Extractivism in the Republic of Nauru
Discussants: Andrew Baldwin and Ruhi Deol
9:15 – 9:30 am (PDT) | 12:15 – 12:30 pm (EDT) | 6:15 – 6:30 pm (CET)
Break
9:30 am – 10:45 am (PDT), 12:30 – 1:45 pm (EDT), 6:30 – 7:45 pm (CET)
Final Discussion
Panels
Panel 1
Precarity in a Climate of Change
By Cleovi Mosuela
This paper analyzes the interplay of migration and climate change through the lens of migrant subjectivity when migrant workers seem to be disproportionately vulnerable, when they are pounded by the winds, the waters, earthquakes, and state carelessness. Based on initial field research in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and New York City and interviews with six grassroots migrant organizations, this paper provides insights into the nuanced post disaster experiences of migrants or non-citizens in the United States. I suggest that the lens of precarity brings to light how migrant workers mobilize from the position of bearing witness to the condition of being on the frontlines of climate change, and of the temporality of migrants’ status in the host country. This paper aims to contribute to the workshop by moving beyond a reductionist account of a climate change-migration nexus and towards an understanding of precarity experienced by migrants at the intersection of climate change and migration politics.
Climate Refugee Stories: Building an Archive of Resilience
By Tina Shull
In November of 2016, a man named Fortune called the non-profit organization Freedom for Immigrants’ national hotline from a Florida immigration detention center. He told the volunteer operator that he could not return to his country because Hurricane Matthew, a Category 5 hurricane that first made landfall in Haiti on October 4th, had destroyed his home. While the United States had granted Temporary Protected Status to migrants from Haiti in the wake of its 2010 earthquake and for a brief period after Hurricane Matthew, this status had since been lifted and Fortune was deported to Haiti. Advocates have since lost touch with him, but thanks to the efforts of Freedom for Immigrants to document people’s experiences in US immigration detention, Fortune’s story remains. But so do the questions: who do stories like Fortune’s belong to? How do we honor them? What is the cost of their being lost? This paper explores the intersections of the struggles for climate and social justice, and how the disciplines of History and Ethnic Studies can contribute to our understandings of climate change through a discussion of the Climate Refugee Stories digital humanities project. Climate Refugee Stories is a multimedia narrative, public education, and archiving project that uplifts the stories of people from around the world who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change and documents the ways communities are responding to these crises. As there are currently no legal protections for climate refugees in US or international law, the project places an emphasis on “borders,” broadly defined as sites where movement is controlled or restricted. The project is global in scope but focuses on the United States as current US policies of climate change denialism and refugee refusal are exacerbating a global refugee crisis. What’s more, the United States is, by far, the leading carbon emitter in world history. The project employs mixed methods of participatory action research, oral history, archiving, and co-curricular development to invite storytellers, students, and audiences to debate and define “climate refugees” for themselves in order to reveal the historical, political, economic, and environmental causes of global inequality and displacement, to recognize community resilience, and to provide tools for allying movements for social and environmental justice.
Panel 2
Flowing Grounds, and the Layers of Disaster Mobilities
By Felix Mauch
Rivers move. They run, roll and flow, no matter how hard we try to fix them in place. Constantly transgressing physical as well as political borders, rivers thereby also mobilize people, plants, animals, and fluvial materials. And yet, Wilhelmsburg, a little speck of land located between two branches of the northern German Elbe and gradually reshaped by its current, was never more in flux than over the long aftermath of Hamburg’s “Great Deluge” in 1962, when thousands of disaster displacees moved in and out of the flood area. The flood catastrophe was a pivotal and transformative event in the island’s history. Its “migrancy”, I however would like to argue, was already a fundamental component of its amphibious setting: not caused but only further enhanced by natural hazard. My paper seeks to interrogate how varying forms and time scales of environmental change – from daily tides to ‘once-in-a-century’ storm floods and thousand-year intervals in river avulsions – set Wilhelmsburg in motion. By focusing on movements of (more-than-)human migrations, wetland ecologies, social justice, and the politics of disaster relief that each in their own ways both forged and dismantled Wilhelmsburg’s “islandness” at the same time, I intend to contribute to a better understanding of disaster-induced mobility patterns in the longue durée. With this approach I also hope to press another themethat is mostly missing from the discussion. Using a longer chronology will allow me to explore how continuous natural action has posed a severe challenge for disaster migrants hoping to stand still. Or, in other words: being stuck on the island proved to be the actual catastrophic effect triggered by the floodplain’s constant movement. From that point of view, Wilhelmsburg’s environmental history is indeed a special case, for it inverts the common story of dynamic humanity disrupting a static nature.
Vanport, Oregon: Race, Displacement and the Reconstruction of a “Lost City”
By Uwe Lübken
The history of Vanport, Oregon, is in many ways unique. This city of approximately 40,000 inhabitants (some people question whether it was a city in the first place) was constructed in just a few months, it existed merely six years and, in the end, its citizens had about 35 minutes to pack their belongings and flee the impending flood of the Columbia River. Despite this extraordinarily brief period of existence, Vanport has a fascinating “afterlife.” In fact, one can argue that Vanport has, for a variety of reasons, literally been recently rediscovered. This paper looks at the origins of Vanport coming into existence and the factors that have shaped the diaspora of the displaced population and explores the memory of this “lost city.”
Panel 3
Environmentalism in the Global North – Environmental Destruction and Forced Migration in the Global South: The Question of Lithium
By Katharina Loeber
Many countries in the Global North rely on electromobility to counter climate change. The raw material required for electromobility technologies is lithium. Global lithium production has more than doubled since 2016. This increase raises the question of post-colonial economic and ecological interactions. The largest lithium deposits are located in the so-called “lithium triangle” between Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. The raw material is easily accessible since it is deposited in salt lakes. However, the mining of lithium destroys the livelihood of the local population. This result, in turn, leads to refugee movements on the one hand and labor migration on the other.
In my talk, I deal with the ecological effects of lithium mining and the resulting migration movements. First, I will outline the environmental impact of lithium mining in Latin America and Africa and electric mobility opportunities in the Global North. Post-colonial relationships between the industrialized nations in the North and former colonies will play an important role. In the next step, I will investigate the migration movements caused by lithium mining. On the one hand, parts of the population, such as Bolivia and Argentina’s indigenous population, are forced to flee because their economic and ecological livelihood is being destroyed. At the same time, people will migrate to the lithium regions to work there. This migration has various implications for human-environment relationships. In the final step, I will analyze the social and ecological consequences. On the one hand, there is the question of dealing with the emerging refugee movements, starting with recognizing ecological crises as a reason for fleeing. On the other hand, solutions such as sustainable mining processes, negotiations with the local population groups, or creating a lithium industry in resource-rich countries are conceivable.
Fifty Years Apart: Bengali Settlers and Bengali In-migrants in the Andaman Islands
By Ruhi Deol
Following Independence from the British colonial regime, and the Partition of India, the Andaman Islands — a Union Territory administered by the Central Government of India were settled through state-led ‘colonization and rehabilitation schemes’ between the 1950s and 1980s by Hindu refugees from East Bengal. Today these settlers are a major part of Andaman society, with increasing political and social mobility. And now, fifty years later, the Central Government is pushing to develop these Islands through tourism. The economic opportunities this entails have led to waves of in-migration from the Indian ‘mainland’. Employing the Andaman Islands as a case study, this paper proposes to explore ways in which migrants from areas affected by climate change may influence the socio-political dynamics of the places to which they migrate. It considers the case of in-migration to the Andamans, particularly the increasing rates of in-migrating labour from the district of South 24 Paraganas, in the state of West Bengal. This district, which includes the particularly vulnerable Sundarban delta, has been affected by sea-level rise as well as a higher intensity and frequency of cyclonic storms in the last two decades. In the Andaman Islands, in-migrants from West Bengal district are predominantly employed as construction and agricultural labour. Their increasing migration has been a point of contention for other ethnic and social groups, particularly the descendants of convict-settlers or Pre-independence settlers. Politically organised as the Local Born Association, they claim this migration has been tacitly encouraged by the Bengali settler community, is stealing scarce job opportunities from islanders, and pushing the Islands beyond their carrying capacity. I explore how Bengali settlers view these in-migrants, and how their presence affects aspects of Bengali islander society, especially in areas where tourism is flourishing.
Panel 4
Racial Geontopower: Towards a Political Geology of White Supremacy
By Andrew Baldwin
In this paper I sketch the contours of what I’m proposing to call racial geontopower – this is a form of racism that undertakes to control or modulate the movement of people in relation to geophysical heterogeneity, or more simply the undoing of the Earth. It’s the racism at stake in the political discourse on climate change and human displacement, migration and resettlement. This paper starts from the premise that the figure of the climate change migrant/refugee is racialised. However, it further develops this idea through an engagement with the ontological turn in black studies alongside recent work in the geological turn in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Racial geontopower is by necessity a reactive logic but one that masquerades in the language of progressive liberalism. Its mode of application is neither segregation nor integration but circulation and adaptation. But unlike biopower its terrain of application is not territory, but proto-territory. Ontopower is a form of power that operates in relation to ontogenic processes; racial geontopower operates in an ontogenic field prior to race itself. This paper will consider these ideas in relation to international discourses and aesthetics on climate change and human migration.
Adaptation, Relocation, Marginalization: Contradictions in the Governance of Environmental Mobility
By Achilles Kallergis
Climate-induced migration increasingly occupies a central place in migration, climate and urban policy discussions. The dominant and self-reinforcing policy narratives dramatically portray climate migration as a looming crisis that will test the adaptive capacity of countries, cities, citizens and the environment. Yet they provide little evidence on the mechanisms and impacts of climate mobility. Across fora, environmental migration is often reduced to a linear, unidirectional and monocausal migration pattern, a depiction that is far from the intertwined human mobility drivers documented by research. This paper suggests that a more dispassionate and fluid analytical and multi-scalar perspective that focuses on the interconnections between human mobilities and their impact on destination places, localities and populations could more meaningfully contribute to a better understanding of the impacts of climate mobility. This involves first and foremost the acquisition of better knowledge on climate mobility. The paper explores how multiple knowledge systems, can contextualize and provide a more granular view on climate mobility in the context of African cities and their informal neighborhoods. It uses community-conducted surveys to unpack the complex relationship between mobility and environmental conditions as they occur in destination places in low-income neighborhoods that absorb mobile populations.
Panel 5
Individual Initiative and Population Relocation Process in Late Soviet Union (1986 – 1991)
By Serhiy Choliy
This paper is devoted to an investigation of the population relocation processes after the Chernobyl disaster, processes that in many cases can be recognized as symptoms of democratization, the rise of public initiative and loss of governing authority by Soviet power. The Chernobyl disaster became a great challenge to the Soviet Union; it is even recognized by some scientists as a key point in its dissolution (Priester). The economic effect is estimated as higher than all profits combined from the nuclear power industry in the post-WWII Soviet Union. One of the integral components of managing this disaster was forced migration from contaminated territories. Such measures affected up to two hundred thousand people and stretched in time for decades in the aftermath of disaster. Investigating the processes of population relocation through official documentation as well as interviewing relocated people demonstrates two main stages of relocation: 1986-1987 and 1988-2004. In the first stage, the state controlled all processes of relocation, trying to make it as fast and effective as possible. At the second stage, relocation became a part of administrative routine and planned economy, often confronted by different difficulties. At the same time, organized and mostly forcible resettlement in the first stage changed to a situation where the population of contaminated areas could influence their fate, increase the speed of resettlement, and acquire better living conditions at the place of resettlement, etc. Such analysis is made through reference to two case studies of the Zhovtneve area (contaminated territory) and Novosilky (resettlement place), both in the Kyiv region of Ukraine.
The Perfect (Shit)Storm: ‘Green Fake News’ and Xenophobic Misogyny in Far-Right Populist Discourses on Climate Change and Displacement in the German ‘Climate Passport’ Debate
By Sarah Louise Nash
Since 2017, a debate has been ongoing in Germany concerning a proposal for a climate passport, which would essentially be a document provided to people in danger of becoming displaced due to climate change, then allowing them to emigrate to nation states that due to their historical and current emissions are most responsible for climate change. In 2019 the climate passport was debated in the German Bundestag in a motion moved by the Green Party. The proposers’ discourse drew on the concept of historical responsibility and critiques of failing climate policy. However, an extremely combative opposition discourse has also been present, put forward mainly by the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. This discourse is marked by challenging the link between climate change and displacement, conflating the climate passport with a German passport, focusing on so-called illegal migration, emphasizing international development cooperation – particularly the trope of overpopulation – and an intertwining of xenophobia and misogyny. Not only the discourse but also practices surrounding opposition were marked by misogyny, with attacks reported against female politicians supporting the Green Party proposal. I argue that the debate surrounding the climate passport is emblematic of a blind spot in the literature on climate change and human mobilities, which has not focused on the workings of nation state legislatures. Through exploring these discourses we can begin to open up the black box of the often cited political unfeasibility of policy proposals.
Panel 6
Migration, Climate Change and Capitalism
By Thomas Nail
I call the “climate-migrant industrial complex” the group of private companies who profit by securitizing nation-states from the effects of climate-related events, including migration. This includes private detention centers, border construction companies, surveillance technology consultants and developers, deportation and transportation contractors, and a growing army of other subcontractors profiting from insecurity more broadly. Every feature of this crisis complex is an opportunity for profit. For example, even when security measures “fail” and migrants cross borders illegally, or remain beyond their visas to live without status as “criminals,” there is an entire wing of private companies paid to hunt them down, detain them, and deport them just across the border, where they can return and begin the market cycle all over again. Each step in the “crimmigration” process now has its own cottage industry and dedicated army of lobbyists to perpetuate the laws that support it.
This paper looks at the ways that climate change and migration are being used as weapons of primitive accumulation against the global poor. Climate migrants now form what we might call a “disposable climate labor army,” conscripted out of a standing reserve of global poverty from wherever the next climate-related disaster strikes, and deployed wherever capitalism demands precarious, securitized, and criminalized labor to be exploited.
Managing, Now Becoming Refugees: Climate Change and Extractivism in the Republic of Nauru
By Julia Morris
The Republic of Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, at just 21km2, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century as part of a colonial extractive arrangement. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted by the 1990s, the by then sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry, importing Australia’s maritime asylum seeker populations. Anyone who makes their way by boat and claims to be a refugee in Australian territorial now excised waters is offshored to Nauru or Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for refugee processing and resettlement. Yet, while Nauruans are imbricated in managing refugees – with an extensive program of financialization and institutionalization in place – local islanders are also ironically now faced with becoming refugees. Projections of sea level rise indicate that Nauru is experiencing dramatic ecological upheavals. Ocean acidification is also affecting the island’s coral reefs, fisheries and marine resources.
This paper focuses on how Nauruans conceptualize climate change in a context where refugees are equated with financial profit, not with self-embodied realities. Anxieties about the inevitable decline of phosphate and refugees converge with a larger trend of the commodification of nature, whereby Nauruans are monetizing their own crises in the quest for ecological profit. I argue that the island’s overlapping post/colonial industrial histories have fomented a culture of extractivism, in which climate – much like minerals and migrants – has become the object of an accumulation strategy. Yet even as climate change has become a profitable line of business for networks of elites, this paper ultimately emphasizes the disproportionate consequences of climate change and resource extraction on publics in the Global South. Intersecting patterns of global inequality are resulting in Nauru becoming a site of possible displacement in the future, as much as a hub of refugee resettlement in the present.
Participants
Andrew Baldwin is a human geographer at Durham University with a longstanding interest in questions around racism, nature and geography. His current work focuses on climate change, migration, and the international. He is currently completing a book manuscript on these themes called The Other of Climate Change: racial futurism, migration, humanism.
Serhiy Choliy is an associate professor in the depart of history at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Ukraine. His research interests are the history of universal military service in Europe and Austria-Hungary, environmental history, and processes of population relocation during the 20th century. His recent publications are The Mobilization at the Periphery. Universal Conscription as Modernization Factor of the Habsburg Empire 1868–1914 (2016) and “War as a model of population movement in the modern world: the Galician perspectives in the first world war”, in: The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres ( 2020).
Ruhi Deol is a sociologist and human geographer with twelve years of work experience in the environment and development sectors in India and Germany. She has worked with local and international NGOs, research firms, and in the digital humanities. A foray into an organic social business stoked a passion for livelihoods research, on women farmers in the Himalayan foothills, and reef-dependent communities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Affiliated with the Rachel Carson Center in Munich for the past six years, she has helped build its digital humanities platform, the Environment and Society Portal. She recently submitted her doctoral dissertation to LMU’s Department of Geography, titled “Building an Islandscape: Discourse, Livelihoods, and Development in the Andaman Islands, India”.
Sarah Earnshaw (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and fellow at the German Historical Institute Pacific Regional Office. She is developing her new project, “Displacing Disaster Temporalities: US Temporary Protection and Caribbean Climate Mobilities.” Embracing an environmental humanities perspective alongside her work in political theory and the history of International Relations, her research interests revolve around the entanglements of security and liberty, humanitarianism, as well as questions of racism and coloniality in US foreign relations. In 2019, she received her PhD from LMU Munich and is currently working on her first book, Freedom Will Be Defended: Human Rights and Sovereign Standards in US Security. Previously, she obtained an MA in History and Literature and an MLitt in War Studies from the University of Glasgow. As of May 2021, she will be joining the DFG-funded research training group “Practicing Place” as a postdoc at KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
Samantha Maurer Fox (she/her) is an assistant professor of Urban Anthropology in the department of sociology and anthropology at Lehigh University. From 2018 to 2020, Fox was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on urban renewal and sustainability in Germany and the United States. She is currently working on a book titled The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City, which examines contemporary life in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany. Founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia, the city suffered catastrophic economic and population declines following the collapse of the East German state. Today, however, residents are once again optimistic as urban planners look to the socialist past to forge a new urban paradigm: one focused on managing shrinkage, decreasing energy consumption, and fulfilling the needs of marginal populations such as refugees and the elderly. Fox has also worked on the revitalization of the Erie Canal region in New York State. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University in 2018..
Achilles Kallergis is an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research and the Director of the Cities and Migration Project at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. He coordinates the Research Platform on Cities and Human Mobility — a collaboration of The New School and fifteen research institutions from around the world. His research focuses on urbanization, migration, and mobility in rapidly growing cities. Specifically, it explores environmental mobility and how locally-generated data can provide new evidence on mobility patterns and contribute to improving living conditions in low-income destination areas through better provision of housing and services.
Katharina Loeber is Is a lecturer and research assistant in the department of history at the University of Hagen. She received her PhD in 2017 from the University of Cologne for her dissertation “Engineering White Supremacy: Spatial Planning, Ethnic Categorisation, Environmental Power. Hegemonising a Racial Society in Twentieth- Century South Africa.” Her publications include Racism and Human Ecology. Engineering White Supremacy in Twentieth Century South Africa (2019) and Der Niedergang des Chilesalpeters. Chemische Forschung-militärische Interessen- ökonomische Auswirkungen (2010).
Uwe Lübken is a professor of American history at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. He has held teaching and research positions at the universities of Cologne, Munich, Münster and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His publications include a prize-winning book on the U.S. perception of the National Socialist threat to Latin America and several edited volumes, special issues, and articles on (American) transnational history and the history of natural hazards and catastrophes. He has published a history of flooding along the Ohio River (2014) and co-edited volumes on urban fires (2012), the management of natural resources (2014) and city-river relations (2016). His current work explores the intersections of mobilities and the environment.
Felix Mauch is an assistant professor in the history of technology at TU Munich. He studied geosciences and history in Freiburg. He was a research associate at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) from 2009 to 2015 and received his PhD from LMU Munich in 2014. Since 2015, he has been a lecturer in the history of technology, STS and environmental studies at TU Munich and the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS). He was awarded postdoctoral fellowships at the German Historical Institute in London and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Julia Morris (DPhil, University of Oxford, 2017) is an assistant professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is a political anthropologist and migration studies scholar whose research focuses on the commodification of human mobility. She has conducted fieldwork in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva, Fiji, Jordan, and the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her current work examines the postcolonial overlaps of resource extractive sectors centered on migrants and commodities. Her book, From Phosphate to Refugees: The Offshore Refugee Industry is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. http://www.juliacmorris.com
Cleovi C. Mosuela recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the department of sociology, Bielefeld University where she also received her PhD. Her current project examines the relationship between the precarity of the transnational worker and the inherent but increasing precariousness of humans on a volatile Earth. It is not only an object of study for her but also an approach to reflect on her migrant subjectivity – having moved from the global South to work in the global North – by drawing on the tradition of women of color and postcolonial scholars. Cleovi carried out ethnographic and qualitative research projects which led her to do fieldwork in Manila, Rome, Frankfurt, Tübingen, Los Angeles, and New York where she conducted interviews with people from various advocacy groups such as labor, healthcare, migrants’ and civil rights, and climate justice. Bringing diverse voices, narratives, and backgrounds into conversation is a constant in her work.
Thomas Nail is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant, Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II, III, Returning to Revolution, and Being and Motion. His research focuses on the philosophy of movement and can be read online at udenver.academia.edu/ThomasNail
Sarah Louise Nash is a postdoctoral researcher working on climate change politics and policy, especially when climate change intersects with human mobility. Holding a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission, Nash is based at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Universität für Bodenkultur) in Vienna. She completed her PhD in political science in the research group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where she wrote her thesis on the policymaking discourse of the climate change and migration nexus between the Cancun and Paris climate negotiations. Sarah holds an MSc in Human Rights and International Politics from the University of Glasgow, an MA in German and Politics from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. Her research interests include climate change politics, human mobilities, borders, human rights, and discourse analysis.
Tina Shull (she/hers) is a public historian of race, empire, immigration enforcement, and climate migration in the modern US and the World. She holds a PhD in History from UC Irvine, a Master’s in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and a BA in History from UCLA. From 2018-20, Shull was a postdoctoral fellow in Global American Studies at Harvard University. She is the creator of IMM Print and Climate Refugee Stories, and has been named a Soros Justice Fellow and a National Geographic explorer for her storytelling work. Her forthcoming book explores the rise of migrant detention in the United States in the 1980s..