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Tagged: migration

Two small boats on a lake.

A Decolonial Mediterranean – Disparities, Imaginations, Power Relations / MECAM

Representing ‘Sub-Saharan’ Boat Migrants: Global and Tunisian Media Narratives of the Mediterranean Migration ‘Crisis’

By Imene Gannouni Khemiri. The escalating ‘irregular’ migration across the Mediterranean Sea has become a major topic of international interest. While it is not a new phenomenon, the number of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants, along with the associated death toll, has recently reached unprecedented levels. Against this backdrop, the present study explores how the tragic deaths of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants crossing the Mediterranean are represented in media discourse.

A group of students sitting in a seminar room while a woman presents in the front.

Prisma Ukraïna / Reviews

Debates over Cultural Phenomena

By Laura Schmidt, Lisa Schmidt, and Sofie Leubert. On December 10, 2025, the geography course of the 11th grade at Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium in Berlin, focusing on the central themes of home, integration, and inclusion, visited the nearby Forum Transregionale Studien for a workshop entitled “Debates over Cultural Phenomena.” The workshop was organized and led by the Ukrainian sociologists Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska and focused on the complexities of multicultural societies and the challenges they are facing today.

A woman with dark hair in a purple sweater.

Imagining Futures – Dealing with Disparity / MECAM

The Politics of Migration: Framing Sub-Saharan Migrants in Tunisian Online Media – 5in10 with Imene Gannouni Khemiri

Imene Gannouni khemiri is a short-term Fellow at Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) for the 2025 cohort and an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities, University of Manouba, Tunisia. She holds a Master’s degree and a PhD in cultural studies from the University of Manouba with her doctoral research focusing on the representation of Tunis in British travel writing (1815–1910). Her research interests include travel writing, migration studies, media studies, and visual culture.

A bridge with a steel structure painted in blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

Fragmented Lives / Prisma Ukraïna

Cognitive Dissonance in Stay-Leave Decisions of Ukrainian Forced Migrants

By Natalia Zaitseva. The motives of Ukrainian women for mobility and immobility, recorded several years after forced displacement, cannot be considered indicators of the causal mechanisms of decision-making. They are rather the result of a secondary reflection on experience, adapted to new life circumstances and existing structural constraints. Therefore, at the current stage of the war, it is more productive to focus on investigating how forcibly displaced persons interpret and experience their countries of residence. It is these perceptions that allow for a deeper under- standing of the dynamics of (im)mobility in the context of a protracted war.

Six men listening to the portable radios in their hands, looking happy.

EUME / Issues

UnArchive: Sonic Materialities and Sound Media of Migration

By Nazan Maksudyan. The cultural history of labor migration is a well-established field with a rich body of scholarship. However, the production of everyday life by labor migrants through sonic means, and the sound cultures shaped by experiences of displacement, have received comparatively little attention. In this short intervention, following Tom Western, I argue that sound is a central dimension in understanding and representing migration, making it necessary to integrate sound studies into migration history. I further emphasize the audibility of migration and propose that it is possible both to listen to and listen with migration.

The Sahara desert beneath a blue sky.

A Decolonial Mediterranean – Disparities, Imaginations, Power Relations / MECAM

A Reverse Shot of Migratory Narratives in Matteo Garrone’s “Io Capitano” (2022)

By Said Chemlal. In his film Io Capitano (I’m the Captain, 2022), Matteo Garrone inverts popular narratives about illegal immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, both Maghrebi and European. Unlike the common narratives, he brings to the fore the perspective of ‘illegal’ immigrants as individual subjectivities, who become active participants in the film themselves, rather than mere objects of the camera. The protagonists participate in weaving the narrative and, more importantly, (re)narrating their traumatic lived experiences; hence, they are given a voice to tell their stories.

Sign reading "Projet de sauvegarde et de valorisation de la baie de cocody".

MECAM

Southward Bound: Maghrebi Entrepreneurs and the Making of Real Intra-African Trade Corridors

By Youssef Cherif. In recent years, a new migratory dynamic has emerged in Africa: the movement of Maghrebi entrepreneurs toward sub-Saharan Africa. This is a development that remains largely underexplored, despite its growing significance. While most public and scholarly attention has focused on the northbound migration of West Africans or the outward mobility of North Africans toward Europe, the southward shift of North African entrepreneurs—particularly from Tunisia and Morocco—offers a window into how regional economic integration is already happening, from below.

Cover of the book "Unter deutscher Besatzung".

Conversations

Occupation was a Poison Effective within European Societies – An Interview with Tatjana Tönsmeyer on Everyday Life under German Occupation in WWII

Tatjana Tönsmeyer is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Wuppertal. She is one of the most prominent scholars on the history of the Second World War and of occupation in Europe during that period. She also works on the history of memory and the post-history of National Socialism, as well as on questions concerning statehood, supply, and security. She is particularly committed to developing an integrated history of Western and Eastern Europe in their transatlantic relations.

A Decolonial Mediterranean – Disparities, Imaginations, Power Relations / MECAM

Displaced from the Future: Crossing the Sea Back to Syria in Nesrine Khoury’s Speculative Novel Wadi Qandil

By Annamaria Bianco. In the late 1990s, the establishment of the border-free Schengen Area within the newly formed European Union was counterbalanced by sudden restrictions on the granting of visas to citizens of third countries. The novel Wadi Qandil (Wādī Qandīl), published in 2023 by the Spain-based writer and poet Nesrine Khoury, falls into the subcategory of “refugee futurism”. It contributes to the rewriting of the contemporary Mediterranean imaginary, proposing a heterotopic vision of this dual space at the time of the so-called migratory crisis.

Issues / Prisma Ukraïna

Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna

By Marko Duric and Diana Rubezhanska. On Wednesday, 30 April 2025, students of Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium visited the Forum Transregionale Studien for the second time for a workshop on the topic of displacement in the context of Russia’s War against Ukraine. In the Displacement Masterclass, conducted by Prisma Ukraїna Fellows Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska, the students learned about the Forum Transregionale Studien’s Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration and Memory project, an interdisciplinary research group of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine and Germany that has been constituted in 2022 under the direction of Viktoriya Sereda. The research group offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people’s memory, history, and sense of belonging. Since 2016, the Forum cooperates with the nearby Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium and arranges encounters of students and Fellows on issues of common concern.