What does migration mean and how does it inform and impact human societies, existence and civilisations?
These were some of the questions at the core of the dialogues, conversations, engagements and workshops at the Migrant Forms: Creative Futures symposium held at Magdalene College, Oxford.
The symposium began life in 2019 when it was conceived as the “anti-conference conference” because of its conveners’ preference for conversations, performances, and sharing of experiences over strict academic papers and presentations.
Returning six years later, the deliberations and insights from the first edition have given life to a book, Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms edited by Natalya Din-Kariuki, Subha Mukherji, Rowan Williams.
For almost 12 hours, academics, writers, music makers, chefs, and migrants of various stripes gathered in the cavernous belly of the Cripps Building to trade stories, share experiences, cry and exult in memories of places, sounds and smells.
The opening roundtable on Migrant Forms was curated by the academic, Rowan Williams who is more famously known as the former Archbishop of Canterbury. “History and the culture of migrancy reminds us that all cultures are co-operative efforts,” he shared before adding that “the problem we face at the moment is so many societies are retreating into thinking that they are self-contained, self-evident, self-defining realities,” he said.
The second roundtable proceeded under the title ‘Moving Things’ followed by an engaging discussion on ‘Migrant Ecologies’ and then by poetry readings and interactive workshops.
Two sessions on music and food were very poignant and evocative of places and people from Syria to Turkey and India as participants traded stories around food and recipes, tastes and aromas as well as nostalgia forged out of sounds.
Speaking to the conversations and experiences Kenyan academic Natalya Din Kariuki said convening the conference and co-editing the book has taught her “how central migration is to human experience whether its local migration within a particular country or in terms of crossing national borders.” Speaking further she said, “migration has shaped all of our lives, even those of us who aren’t necessarily migrants in the ways things like food or art or music or even language touch every single person’s life even if they themselves are not migrants.”
For Subha Mukherji, who has been credited with coining the term “migrant forms” “migration confronts us with our own vulnerability and our humanity. It’s a mixing of cultures. It changes our lives. It is enriching, it layers us, it brings us into contact with difference. It enlarges us. There’s all of that.”
In her comments before pre-launching the book at the end of the conference, Jo McDonaugh, author of Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 said “migration is not the exception, it is the norm. It shapes our society and environment in profound ways.” Continuing, she described the book as a “joyful book with a real mixture of themes with creative and critical voices engaged in conversation.”
Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms, edited by Natalya Din-Kariuki, Subha Mukherji & Rowan Williams is forthcoming from Punctum books and as the editors put it, “posits and probes these ‘migrant forms’, the processes of meaning-making they embody, and how they negotiate with dispossession in a way that can also recreate exchange, agency, and even homecoming.”
It will be available as a free e-copy post publication.
