Migrations and Environmental Transformations

MIGRATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS

HALF-DAY RESEARCH WORKSHOP:

Tuesday June 10

1pm to 5pm, Newnham College (Pavilion Room)

 

To register please contact Professor Jenny Mander, Faculty of MMLL, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement:  jsm15@cam.ac.uk

 

This half day interdisciplinary research workshop will focus on the dynamic interactions between people, movement, place.  How does migration transform the spaces in which people live?  How are people, in turn, impacted by their environment and its transformations?  We shall explore these questions from different perspectives, including those of world literature, history, criminology, molecular biology and politics.  The workshop includes a hands-on session inviting participants to explore materiality and movement through collaborative, arts-led methods.

 

 

KEYNOTE TALK, ‘WORLD LITERATURE AND THE ECOLOGICAL CHRONOTOPE’

This will be given by Professor Chen Chang (Department of English, University of Nanjing), visiting Cambridge within the Global Humanities programme.  Focussing on two contemporary Chinese novels, she will examine how the ecological chronotopes within them register and restructure dominant narratives of environmental transformation, modernization, and capitalist globalization. She will illustrate how the literature of the migrants, the colonized, and the displaced contributes to world literature not only through the stories it tells, but through chronotopes of fractured belonging and layered temporality that disrupt and reconfigure the homogenizing forces of globalization.

 

A series of panel talks will be given by:

May Hawas (Faculty of English); Tim Hearn (Department of Medical Genetics); Caroline Lanskey (Institute of Criminology); Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto); William O’Reilly (Faculty of History)

 

Interdisciplinary discussion will be facilitated by RESOURCE 12 – a Community Interest Company, co-founded by Hannah Simon, Marius Sidaravicius and Harang Seo, graduates of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.  Drawing on spatial theory and material practice, this part of the workshop will use collaborative, arts-led methods to explore how stories and structures are shaped and shape our engagement with place.

 

Graduates wishing to offer a 3-minute (3 slide) ‘Lightening talk’ on research pertinent to the workshop’s central themes should offer a title, explained by a 280-character tweet at the point of registration.

 

Launched by a workshop in June 2025, the Centre is developing a research network focussed on the interactions between migration and the environment at multiple scales. 

Led by Jenny Mander (Faculty of MMLL), Tim Hearn (Department of Medical Genetics), William O'Reilly (Faculty of History), and Caroline Lanskey (Institute of Criminology), the research brings together perspectives from molecular biology, criminology, history, literature, sociology, spatial theory and architecture.  The project places arts and culture-based methods at the heart of its interdisciplinary activity. 

 

How might interdisciplinary conversations reveal the collaborative, generative potential of the different disciplines? 

This question framed the half-day research workshop Migrations and Environmental Transformations, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement at the University of Cambridge. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from literature, history, criminology, molecular biology, and politics, the event examined migration as a dynamic interplay between people, movement, and environment. Rather than seeking synthesis or consensus, the workshop created conditions for productive friction, allowing diverse disciplinary perspectives to sit alongside one another and be reworked through encounter. 
 

The structure of the afternoon reflected this intention. A keynote on ecological chronotopes in world literature, followed by a series of short panel presentations, traced migration across multiple scales, from the molecular rhythms of circadian biology to historical patterns of settlement and literary narratives of displacement. These contributions foregrounded themes of fractured belonging, layered temporality, and ecological memory, revealing how environments both register and are reshaped by human movement. Taken together, the talks formed a constellation of perspectives rather than a linear argument, emphasising relationality over resolution. 

ResourceTwelve was invited to extend this mode of inquiry through an arts-led, collaborative workshop that introduced material and spatial experimentation into the research setting. This session sought to explore how interdisciplinary exchange might be enacted, rather than merely discussed, by attending to movement, materiality, and collective process. Participants began with a short, quick f ire exercise outside the seminar room, working with paper and mark-making while moving through space. The acts of walking, pausing, and inscribing shifted attention from abstract theorisation to embodied perception, prompting reflection on how movement produces space and how spatial constraints, textures, and rhythms shape action. The simplicity of the materials encouraged openness and attentiveness, temporarily suspending disciplinary conventions and allowing shared observation to emerge. 

The longer design brief that followed engaged with the concepts of the Right to the City and meanwhile spaces as lenses through which to think about shared and potentially contested environments. Using a small square of garden space within the university as a case study, participants were invited to reflect on how space is perceived differently when approached as familiar or newly encountered, and how perspective shifts when observed from within or at a distance. Why is it challenging to practice these thought experiments in our own space? Working across disciplinary boundaries, groups explored collaborative processes as forms of spatial practice in the own right. Requiring participants, perhaps less familiar than they expected, to work through collective modes of making and decision-making. 

The outputs of the session remained deliberately provisional. Rather than aiming for fixed conclusions, the workshop produced material traces, spatial propositions, and shared narratives. In this process, the group itself became a site of investigation, raising questions about participation, authorship, and the conditions under which interdisciplinary work takes place. Migration emerged not only as a topic of discussion, but as a methodological lens through which to examine how knowledge moves, shifts, and is negotiated. In this sense, the event positioned interdisciplinarity not as the alignment of distinct fields, but as a practice of moving together, foregrounding uncertainty, translation, and the generative potential of working in between established forms of knowledge.

Migrations and Environmental Transformations was run by Jenny Mander for the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, featuring a keynote by Professor Chen Chang and talks by May Hawas, Tim Hearn, Caroline Lanskey, Milena Methodieva and William O’Reilly, alongside a collaborative session led by RESOURCETWELVE; the event brought together scholars and graduate researchers from the Faculties of English, History, MMLL and Classics, and from Criminology, Medical Genetics, Geography, Sociology, Architecture, Film and Screen, Climate Repair, and related institutions. 

Written by Marius Sidaravicius, Harang Seo and Hannah Simon from RESOURCETWELVE.