Migration, Mobilities and the Environment

In this blog series MMB and the Cabot Institute for the Environment bring together researchers from across the University of Bristol to explore connections between movement and the environment from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Their diverse approaches highlight the importance of developing frames that incorporate both migration and environment, and in so doing benefit our understandings of both.

Seven Sisters Park in flood, 2020 (image: Peter Castleton on flickr)
  • Engaging with visions of mobilities within the landscape of risk
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Thomas O’Shea. When describing the commercial port land of Felixstowe (fig. 1) as a ‘nerve ganglion of capitalism’, a proto-nostalgic horizon ‘blighted by cargo ships’, Mark Fisher (2006) was describing a vision of the natural’s collision course […]
  • Migrants and miners: gender, age and precarious labour in a Tajik resource extractive landscape
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Negar Elodie Behzadi. Migration is both gendered and aged. It is also deeply tied to the emergence of new extractive landscapes around the world, marked by extractive frontiers pushing into already stressed and fragile environments.  The story […]
  • What protections are available to people displaced by climate change?
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Kathryn Allinson. Climate change will impact all our lives in the coming years and many people will experience extreme events due to climate  change resulting in displacement, both internally and across international borders. This has become the […]
  • Eurofisch: hyper-mobility, cosmopolitanism and the European eel’s appeal
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Peter Coates Unlike the Atlantic salmon, the snake-like European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is widely perceived as devoid of charisma. An epic reproductive journey is integral to the salmon’s appeal. But an equally spectacular migration, if in reverse, […]
  • Digital home working and its sustainability potential: human immobility and the mobilities of stuff
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Chris Preist and Dale Southerton. Despite the huge human and economic costs of the COVID pandemic, many commentators have observed that this disruption – or shock – to our resource-intensive daily lives could offer a catalyst for […]
  • Migration, mobilities and the ecological context
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Jane Memmott. Migration can make you happy. When I see the first swifts arrive in the spring, I stop in my tracks and smile broadly at all and everyone. I have to restrain myself from telling people […]
  • How water stress impacts on migration
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment, in association with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. By Anita Etale. In 2015, Ioane Teitiota and his family were deported from New Zealand to the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. His asylum application had been based on the grounds that water, due to sea level rise, […]
  • The politics of climate justice, migration and mobility
    Special series on Migration, Mobilities and the Environment Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and the Cabot Institute for the Environment bring together researchers from across the University of Bristol to explore connections between movement and the environment from a multi-disciplinary perspective. These diverse approaches highlight the importance of developing frames that incorporate both migration and environment, […]