Mobilities, arts and creativity

The relation between state, nation and membership is historically embedded and shaped by law and the imagination. These relations are also (re)produced in everyday practices and representations that treat certain kinds of people as belonging to certain places, from nation to neighbourhood. Activist, artistic, and community-based knowledges have a role in challenging traditional representations. MMB aims to engage in creative practice as a critical research tool and as a means of engaging with futures.

We examine how representation in press, culture and academic projects contributes to making figures such as ‘the migrant’, ‘the refugee’ and ‘the citizen’. We explore mobile populations in different historical periods and geographical spaces, focusing on changing ideas of belonging and the social and cultural notions of home, exile, identity and community formation. We aim to explore the politics and aesthetics of belonging by employing radical, participatory and self-representational methodologies alongside a critical engagement with filmic, literary and figurative strategies.

We are interested in questions such as:

  • How is the ‘migrant’ represented in the media and in different cultural forms?
  • How do dominant representations and spatial imaginaries become established, and how can they be, or how are they being, unsettled?
  • How does academic research contribute to this settling and unsettling?
  • What possibilities lie in the individual, collective and utopian imaginaries of mobile groups and what insights might they offer into new or alternative ways of living and working together?

Highlights:

Selected Activities:

Liz Hingley – MMB Honorary Artist 2024-25.  Liz is an artist and anthropologist with a participatory practice shaped by her experiences living across Europe and China. Rooted in the visual arts, her work focuses on tools and rituals of relation that transcend political boundaries and connect the local and global. MMB is particularly excited about The SIM Project, which Liz has been working on since 2017. Liz led an MMB tour of the V&A, London 2024 Design Festival exhibition and wrote a post on the MMB blog about the 2025 Waymarkers exhibition on the Strand.

Victoria Hattam – MMB Visiting Leverhulme Professor from the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York contributed significantly to our conversations about creativity and practice, for instance leading a practice based seminar on Visuality and Methods.

Arts and environment collaborations – Creative practice has also facilitated engagement with life sciences: MMB members have worked with environmental artists Paul Hurley and Charlie Clarke to design The (de)bordering Plots on the central university campus on the theme of ‘Invasive Others’. We have used this to across the university, including: ‘Wild about weeds walk’, ‘Moth’s Magical Migrations’, and ‘Making place for plants’, all designed to get us to think differently about movement, borders and boundaries.

Borderland infrastructures and design collaboration – a long-running collaboration with the New School for Social Research, the Parsons School of Design and the Cuny Graduate Centre, all based in New York, that has resulted in two successful grants, including a Benjamin Meaker funded visit from Professor Miriam Ticktin, two fieldtrips to Dover/Calais, and a collectively authored visual essay for Design and Culture.

Selected Research Projects:

Selected blog posts: