Migration is a dynamic process. It moves and morphs, slips and slides, ebbs and flows.

The Media+Migration Lab (M2Lab) seeks innovative ways to capture, record, express, or imagine this movement in the context of wider social, political, and cultural practices. Housed in the School of Media Studies at The New School, New York, we are a platform for multimedia projects composed of stories, photos, videos, and writing from the unique perspectives of our contributors. The lab is steered by student researchers and fellows who co-lead the lab with Dr Sumita S. Chakravarty.

The M2Lab's foundational project is Migration Mapping, a living digital archive on media and migration since 2016. Click a project below to get started, or view all projects here.

This website and its projects are best viewed on the Google Chrome web browser.

How does the experience of movement and migration make meaning, transmit messages, and reorder our social and political environments? In what ways does migration orient ideas and information: about nation and world, self and society, art and culture? How do migration practices relate to the governing metaphors of our time? The Media+Migration Lab (M2Lab) is an experimental platform exploring such questions in an open-ended way. 

Our mission is to incubate experimental multimedia projects exploring the complexities of migration and its mediation, and in this way platforming innovative ideas and solutions to issues relating to migration. In particular, the M2Lab seeks to lend a sharp eye and ear to catch and interpret the conversations between media technologies, forms, and practices and the unfolding scenarios of migration.

The M2Lab's current projects highlight movement as voice, as recollection, and as line tracings. They explore both artistic and theoretical possibilities. They help us see migrant paths as simultaneously existential and symbolic, lived and imagined. Through description, presentation, and narration, mappings and renderings, our goal is to stimulate fresh ways of approaching the media-migration nexus. 

Instagram: @migrationmapping
Facebook: @mediaandmigration
Twitter/X: @migrationmappng
Email: chakravs[at]newschool.edu