The migration-memory nexus in the human and social sciences has traditionally been conceptualized to analyze the role of collective and individual memory in shaping the migration experience, particularly in terms of ethno-national belonging. Less attention has been paid to the possible forms of inter-diasporic solidarity involving memory practices. However, recent contributions in memory and diaspora studies have focused on how vernacular memories increasingly entangle with other memories, in an ongoing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization within a post-national, global memory framework.
This seminar aims to discuss, from various perspectives and in different diasporic contexts, the role memory plays in diasporic practices related to exile, border crossing, and return. It will also explore how different diasporas interact in sharing their transnational cultural memories and developing forms of cultural solidarity.
A reception will follow the event.
This in-person event will be broadcast via Zoom. Please register to receive Zoom credentials.
Presented by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research, Horizon MSCA Global Fellowship “MEMODIAS. Memory Practices of the Afghan and Somali Diasporas in the USA and Italy” (funded by the European Union), the New University in Exile Consortium, and Università degli Studio di Milano.
SPEAKERS
Mohamed Hashi
PhD Candidate, International Conflict Management and Politics Science – Kennesaw State University
Karina Horsti
Visiting Professor Communication Studies, University of Minnesota; Senior Lecturer, University of Jyvaskylä, Finland
Karina Horsti is Visiting Professor at Communication Studies, University of Minnesota (2023-2025). She is on leave from lectureship at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Previously she has been a Visiting Fellow at New York University (2009, 2011 – 2012, 2019), London School of Economics and Political Science (2016), University of Melbourne (2017), and Freie Universität Berlin (2022). Karina’s background is in media and migration studies. She has developed a multidisciplinary profile in transnational migration research by successfully completing research on cultural diversity policies, nationalist populism, deportations, and mediated representations of refugees and asylum seekers. Her current research examines public remembering of forced migration.
Sahraa Karimi
Filmmaker and Scholar, Yale University
Sahraa Karimi is a film director, scriptwriter and university Lecturer from Afghanistan.
After completing her studies, she returned to Kabul in August 2012 and founded her own film and multimedia company, Kapila Multimedia House, to support independent Afghan filmmakers and artists. In 2016, she worked as a communications officer at UNICEF in Afghanistan. However, after two years, she decided to quit her job and focus on her career as a filmmaker. While shooting her debut fiction film, “Hava, Maryam, Ayesha,” she found that the government film organization, Afghan Film, did not support independent filmmakers and did not function, as it should. When the government advertised the position of director general of Afghan Film, she applied among four other men and became the first woman in Afghanistan’s history to head a state film organization.
She is also the first and only woman from Afghanistan to earn a doctorate in cinema and the only Afghan filmmaker who is an active member of the Slovak Film and TV Academy.
Gianluca Gatta
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Milan; Visiting Scholar, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
Gianluca Gatta is principal investigator (Archive of migrant memories research unit) for the Horizon 2020 project ITHACA. Interconnecting Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency: Entangled Narratives Across Europe and the Mediterranean Region (G.A. 101004539). He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He is also co-founder of the Archive of migrant memories (AMM) in Rome. His research interests are: body, power and production of illegality; third places and sociability; migrant voice, memory and subjectivity. Among his recent publications are: “Self-narration, Participatory Video and Migrant Memories: A (Re)making of the Italian Borders” (2019); “‘Half devil and half child’: an ethnographic perspective on the treatment of migrants on their arrival in Lampedusa” (2018).