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.
Forthcoming events 2024
Professor Hattam will be taking part in a series of ten events, including public lectures, workshops, seminars and group discussions, during her stay in Bristol from February to June 2024. We will continue to post details of the events here as they are confirmed.
Race and Ethnicities Seminar
Wednesday 1st May, 5pm-6.30pm (timing tbc)
The regular series run by the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship will be hosting a seminar by Victoria. More details to follow.
Workshop: ‘Seeing Globalization – Alternative Perspectives on Production Today’
Tuesday 7th May, 2pm-4.30pm
Victoria will join Rutvica Andrijasevic, Professor in International Migration and Business, to run this workshop on challenging old assumptions about global production. They will examine the advantages and limitations of new perspectives and consider if we need more imaginative approaches to global production that take s far beyond our scholarly comfort zones. Further details here.
Bordering Bristol: Visuality Workshop
Wednesday 22nd May, 9.30am-4pm
A day-long workshop run by Victoria with Nariman Massoumi, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television, to explore the dynamics of visual fields through the collaborative making of visual essays. Further details here.
MMB/Leverhulme Public Lecture – ‘Seeing Gold: Imagination and Evidence’
Wednesday 12th June, 6pm-8.30pm
In this public lecture Victoria will explore ways of seeing and how surfacing the imaginative reframes and remakes political possibilities. The event will be chaired by the University of Bristol’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, Professor Philip Taylor, and followed by a drinks reception. Initial information here.
Previous events 2023-24
MMB PGR Discussion Group
Wednesday 7th February, 12.30pm-2.30pm
The MMB PGR group discussed the theme ‘Political imagination and (academic) activism’. Victoria provided some reflections at the end to close the debate. Further details here.
MMB Reading Group: John Hultgren (2015)
Wednesday 21st February, 1pm-2pm
Victoria led this meeting of the reading group to discuss John Hultgren’s book Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America (2015).
SPAIS Public Lecture 2024: ‘Border Economies / Capitalist Imaginaries’
Wednesday 6th March
Victoria gave the annual SPAIS public lecture focusing on the question, how do the contradictory demands of border walls and supply chains co-exist? More information here and a link to a recording of the lecture here.
Looking Sideways: Policy Silos and De-Siloing
Wednesday 14th June, 3pm to 5pm
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 12th June, 3pm to 5pm
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?
Biography
Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research (TNSSR) in New York City. She works at the intersection of visual and material culture, global political economy, and bordering. Hattam received her PhD from MIT and has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton and a Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. She is a recipient of both the Schattschneider and Ralph Bunche prizes from the American Political Science Association. Over the past decade, Hattam has worked collaboratively with faculty and students from the Parsons School of Design.
