What assumptions are being held about the forms, causes, and effects of global migration? Is knowledge about migrants and migration merely coded or rather produced? How can we grasp the relationship between processes of recording and acts of creating migration knowledges? Which role do the different media and aesthetic practices play in the regime of situated migration knowledges? Despite the breadth of studies from various disciplines within the humanities, the complex interplay between artistic approaches to migration, their specific medial contexts, and their epistemic foundations have not yet been sufficiently explored. It remains unclear how artistic-imaginative portrayals of migrants and migration and the construction of knowledge about migration interact and how imagination relates to the lived realities of migration more generally.
The international and interdisciplinary conference Imagining Migration, Knowing Migration: Intermedial Perspectives focuses on this gap and thus offers an important contribution to the investigation of the forms and effects of the migration imaginary and its cultural representations. We invite contributions from the fields of art history, literary and cultural studies, film, performance and theatre studies, and media studies to address the following or related questions: