“Photography and Mobility in West Africa.” Invited paper presented October 7, 2020, as part of “Women and Migrations: Redefining Resistance,” and ongoing project organized by Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano, and Cheryl Finley, and hosted by the Department of Photography and Imaging, Center for Black Visual Culture, Institute of African American Affairs, New York University and NYU-DC. Other presenters included Michèle Pearson Clarke, Bridget Cooks, and Ana Teresa Fernández.
Project description:
The Women and Migrations Working Group is an interdisciplinary project founded in June of 2017 that has examined the role that photography, art, film, history, law, policy, and writing have played in identifying and remembering the migratory experience of women. Today, in the midst of a global pandemic, protests against anti-black racism, and collective action around environmentalism, we are living through a moment of profound disorientation, dispossession and dislocation and, as in most crises, women are affected disproportionately.
These global crises are aggravating and intensifying the injustice, marginalization and insecurity experienced by women and other exploited people. Women are unequally in low-paid, high-risk, insecure “essential” employment, on the front lines of the health care, social justice, food services, home care, emergency and all the other services that sustain the social distancing and sheltering in place that secure the general population.
What is happening to women already displaced by war, famine, globalized climate change and nationalist governments? Migrant workers, who travel long distances for work, including across borders, already precarious and marginal, are losing jobs. With borders slamming shut, people can neither stay put, nor return to the places from which they have fled. Our perspective on migration crosses boundaries of discipline, geography, law, politics, history and temporality. We seek to capture the breadth of intersectional experience: we include diasporas, internal displacements, and international and transnational migrations. The public policy lens through which the current crisis is analyzed is one vantage point, an essential one to be sure. We hope that our interdisciplinary contributions will help reveal the lived experiences of home and loss, family and belonging, isolation, borders and identity—issues salient both in experiences of migration and in the epochal times in which we find ourselves today.