MMB North America

We are delighted to have hosted some inspirational scholars from North America over the last few years. Their visits have initiated multiple new conversations across and between Faculties and involved both staff and students from the University of Bristol. The in-person connections have also been crucial to the development of additional funding bids bringing our universities together to address important issues related to migration and mobilities. Visits from North American partners continue apace this year.

Recent blog posts with a North American link

North American Collaborations

Leverhulme Visiting Professorship 2023-24

Professor Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research, New York. Her 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 spent a total of seven months at the University of Bristol (UoB) in 2023-24 sharing skills, expertise and building collaborative projects. Her visit enhanced the skills and knowledge of staff and doctoral researchers at UoB and catalysed and embedded long-term exchange and mutual learning between UoB and The New School for Social Research. Find out more >>

Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professorship 2022

Nandita Sharma is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She is an activist scholar whose research is shaped by the social movements she is active in, including No Borders movements and those struggling for the planetary commons. We were delighted to have her join us in June-July 2022, when we held a series of workshops and lectures with her.  Find out more >>

Transoceanic Mobilities Network

A collaboration between MMB, New School and University of Hawai’i

Existing institutional forms seem ill suited when it comes to addressing the pressing substantive issues and political dynamics at play in the current moment.  Migration, climate change, global capital and trade, as well as the politics of populism and polarization, can not be easily navigated via the siloed institutional structures currently in places.

The Multiple Mobilities Research Group at The New School and MMB have established a fledging initiative: Transoceanic Mobilities Network.  We envision a cross-disciplinary and multi-modal network that will address these complex problems through the engendering of new political imaginaries and analytic frames; in particular, we centre questions of mobility that infuse and join all three concerns. The Network will both broaden and embed our current research collaboration, make a major intervention in the field of mobility studies, and increase the profile of our institutions as generating innovative and interdisciplinary thinking that challenges existing research and policy paradigms.

Working together with UC Santa Cruz

We were very lucky to be able to host feminist and decolonial scholar Sylvanna Falcon (Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz) in Bristol between October and December 2023. Sylvanna gave two papers on her research whilst she was here: ‘Documenting Violence against Migrants as Forms of Complex Memorialisation’ in SPAIS and ‘The Ethics and Geopolitics of Representation in Post-Conflict Peru’ in HiPLA. She also led a workshop on ‘Trigger Warnings and their Impact on Teaching’ as part of the School of Modern Languages ‘Challenging Conversations’ series. Our conversations have continued since then, with her participation in the launch of Priscilla Solano’s new book Shelter on the Journey and a forthcoming Faculty visit to UC Santa Cruz in February 2025.