Victoria Hattam, Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research (TNSSR), New York, is MMB’s Leverhulme Visiting Professor 2023-24.

Professor Hattam’s work is focused on shifting the boundaries of migration studies by considering production and trade alongside migration and human (im)mobilities. She also brings a wealth of experience in relation to visuality and method.

Professor Hattam will be spending a total of seven months at the University of Bristol sharing skills, expertise and building collaborative projects. Her visit will enhance the skills and knowledge of staff and doctoral researchers at UoB and catalyse and embed long-term exchange and mutual learning between UoB and The New School for Social Research (TNSSR).

MMB and Professor Hattam have together developed a programme of ‘Leverhulme Lectures’, workshops and meetings which will help develop cutting edge perspectives on key global social challenges. The programme will take place over two visits: In June and July 2023 we are kickstarting a methodological conversation that rethinks the relation between imagination and evidence. The longer second visit between February and June 2024 will incorporate this learning to develop MMB’s empirical research and theoretical approaches to mobilities with a distinctive focus on political economies.

Looking Sideways: Policy Silos and De-Siloing

Wednesday 14 June at 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

An interactive workshop with Victoria Hattam and Bridget Anderson examining the origins and politics of policy silos and how to think beyond them.

For some time now, scholars have examined the formation of policy silos across a number of domains documenting the ways that lines of demarcation are themselves deeply political. Commonly held distinctions between migration and trade; design and production; state and society; and between the biological and social sciences have been shown to shape the very terms of engagement long before specific policy disagreements emerge within particular domains. In addition to tracing silo formation, some scholars and creative artists have been reimagining what de-siloed worlds might look like, while ecological processes have become an important analytic for considering entailment for many.

This interactive workshop with Leverhulme Visiting Professor Victoria Hattam and MMB Director Bridget Anderson examined the origins and politics of policy siloes, what we learn from thinking outside of policy siloes and what kinds of politics and political alliances this can help generate.

Object Politics: Remembering Vietnam at the US-Mexico Border Wall

Monday 12 June at 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

A multi-disciplinary seminar with Professor Victoria Hattam exploring politics, migration, mobility, visual culture, design and materiality.

Drawing on photographic and historical research, Victoria Hattam considered links between the US war in Vietnam and construction of a border wall in the United States. Portable helicopter landing mats used in Vietnam were sent back to the United States at the war’s end and were used to build large sections of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. How do material connections between war and wall shift the analytic terrain of border politics? And what of the aesthetics of the landing mats themselves?  How might the landing mat grids alert us to political affiliations that heretofore remain out of sight?