An interview by the University of Bristol’s Internal Communications Team, originally published on the staff intranet on 5th December 2024.
Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) is sharing their research in a new podcast, Migration Unboxed. Professor Bridget Anderson, Director of MMB at the University, talks about reframing the topic of migration through cross-discipline conversation, and the questions the podcast series explores.
Congratulations on launching the podcast! Tell us about the research and motivation behind it.
Thank you! The Migration Unboxed podcast comes out of our work at Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB), an interdisciplinary research institute concerned with all things moving – from data to plants, iPhones to ideas, and of course, people.
By making connections between different types of mobilities beyond the movement of people and across time, we challenge and expand our understanding and definition of migration.
MMB has about 250 academic members across all faculties at Bristol. We’re radically interdisciplinary, bringing together historians, life scientists, musicians, sociologists, to name a few. We want to show that everyone’s research touches on mobilities in some way, and it’s not just limited to migration scholars and social scientists. We would define our approach as being conceptually driven, creative and critical, with practical and political applications.
As well as showcasing our amazing breadth of work externally, we bring international scholars into the conversations – so we thought a podcast would be a great way to platform and share our discussions. In each episode we bring together a researcher at Bristol and an international scholar whose work we think has interesting overlaps.
The series is designed for ‘curious minds’, so we hope it will interest anyone, from those who have studied the topic for years to someone that has only thought about it in passing.
How does the podcast’s title – Migration Unboxed – reflect its approach, and why it is important to look at the subject in this way?
The current tools we have to think about people and movement are pretty old and worn out. We don’t think twice about the many kinds of movements solidified in our University laptops – the raw materials from Africa and South America, and the factories in China.
It is amazing really that their presence in Bristol can seem so unremarkable, but we fixate on human movement and treat it as disconnected and as unquestionably a problem.
There was an article in New Scientist in October this year suggesting that one of the reasons why Neanderthals were replaced by Homo Sapiens was because, unlike Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals were in isolated communities and couldn’t draw on a shared and networked bank of knowledge.
Of course, we don’t want to romanticise migration, but we do want to reframe it, so we called the series Migration Unboxed. We want to give listeners new perspectives and ideas to think about movement, and how responding to its challenges can connect rather than divide people.
What topics are up for discussion and debate?
The first episode, ‘What is ‘migration’ and why unbox it?’ introduces the series and sets the scene for the conversations that follow. The second episode is about representation and how visuality helps us understand movement. In this discussion, we explore what visual representations both reveal and obscure about mobility, and how visuality can be a method for understanding movement, not just a way to describe it.
In our final three episodes we’ll be looking at the processes by which people become migrants; how ideas of vulnerability and deservingness work with understandings of migration and mobility; and, finally, the role of migration research in supporting migrant struggles.
Any favourite conversations in the series?
That’s like asking ‘who’s your favourite child?’! I love all of them and I’ve learned so much from all our guests. In different ways they’ll all be speaking to the book we have coming out with Bristol University Press, ‘Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race‘. So I guess that gives you an idea of the topics I’m personally interested in.
But rather than choose a favourite, I’d say I’m looking forward to continuing the exciting conversations we’ve started here on the podcast and sharing them with people beyond MMB and our networks.
Read more about the Migration Unboxed podcast here.
Episodes 1 & 2, ‘What is “migration” and why unbox it?’, and ‘How does visuality help us understand movement?’ are available now. Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or via the RSS feed.