Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Current Issue

This article revolves around fourteen main migration film festivals (MFFs) worldwide, exploring them as an interdisciplinary fertile subject of inquiry and analysis, with a particular emphasis on their social functions. The specific objectives aim at understanding the principles, values, circumstances and dynamics that permeate these cultural events. We assume that MFFs can serve as genuine catalysts of critical reflection and social transformation, fostering more empathetic, inclusive and respectful ways of life. Data have been collected through a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including semi-structured interviews with film festival directors and curators, non-participant observation and the formal content analysis of festival catalogues, leaflets, flyers, web pages, para-visual texts and media platforms. The theoretical underpinning anchors the study in the intersection between the concept of ‘social profitability’ and ‘social function’. Results show that, despite the economic constraints, MFFs shape public spaces, creating opportunities for witnessing, negotiation and social transformation. However, innovative, disruptive and transformative changes are required to attract more festival goers, especially those in need of altering their perceptions. Moreover, the involvement of migrants in key organizational roles remains a crucial issue that requires attention.

This article draws from the experience of a research initiative and an immersive art project, ‘Windows on the World’ (WOTW), Ritsona Refugee Camp in Greece, in 2022–23. Embedded within a framework that entangles creative arts, educational psychology and cultural studies, the article navigates the experience of resilience for the participant children aged 6–16 years. Taking the thread from the artistic experiences proposed in WOTW, this arts-based research traces how the encounter between creative arts, and in particular music, empowers the children living in protracted displacement. By mapping and analysing experiences of empowerment, cross-cultural integration and transculturation, we seek to produce knowledge on the potential of creative arts for building resilience in fluctuating communities.

In the last few years, civil society groups working from below the established core of power have been acting as contestant parties in border sites, particularly in the Mediterranean zone, by repurposing technological devices traditionally utilized for state security and control. For their task, these groups engage through the development of networks and channels of communication to enable informal systems of knowledge, which imply technological affordances for purposes that contribute to the freedom of movement and anti-hegemonic claims. What emerges thus are forms of activism mobilized through subversive affordances, that is, the (re)appropriation of available technologies to serve as tools for the dissemination of know-hows, the organization of tactics for survival and the configuration of systems of information, mutual care and solidarity. Following the operation of a concrete network – the Alarm-Phone-Initiative – this article analyses the scope and reach of such subversive affordances in order to offer a critical interpretation of ‘disobedient’ civic practices that help indeed strengthen a democratic space of humanitarian engagement and dissent.

Inspired by scholarly calls for archives that connect different justice claims across times and geographies, this article examines the Colours of a Journey (CoJ) archive, focusing on its visions and practices of documenting, curating and disseminating migration struggles. Using an ethnographic approach, the article investigates what constitutes an archival record of migration struggles and the practices that support such an archive. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, the CoJ archive is situated within discussions of archives as sites for migration justice struggles, proposing a model that rejects hierarchies of knowledge, memories and classifications, instead fostering encounters among diverse experiences, memories, bodies and objects. Second, the article analyses drawings as a core element of the archive, interpreting them as knowledge-making tools that interweave varied migration experiences. Third, it explores how the CoJ archive’s commitment to epistemic diversity is reflected in exhibitions, art performances and public displays, highlighting the interplay between archival structure and public engagement.

Time in autobiographical writing is central for the construction of the self and a cohesive identity. The autobiographical text balances between being geared towards the future despite its preoccupation with the past, while written from a present perspective relating to the time of writing. Experiences of migration introduce yet another dimension, as migration is movement in both place and time. This article examines two autobiographical texts that address the relationship between self and time in connection with migration: Roberto Lovato’s memoir Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas and Jose Antonio Vargas’s Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. Vargas’s experience of being undocumented in the United States causes temporal limbo, whereas Lovato sets out to uncover personal family history as it intertwines with El Salvador’s past. Both authors also advocate for change with regard to migration and how particularly those without papers are treated. The memoirs perform work for the future, envisioning social transformation and connecting it to the authors pasts. The narrated selves build on the temporalities of remembering and reconstructing the past and of an activist present.

Review of: ‘Am I Less British?’ Racism, Belonging and the Children of Refugees and Immigrants in North London, Doğuş Şimşek (2024)

London: UCL Press, 250 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78735-179-0, h/bk, £45.00

ISBN 978-1-78735-178-3, p/bk, £25.00