Cultural Studies and Media Studies / Spanish/Portuguese

In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

María Matz (University of Massachusetts Lowell)

This panel brings together scholars and practitioners working on documentary film, photography, and multimedia to examine how nonfiction media represents migrants and the environmental conditions that force people to move. Across the Americas, communities are being displaced by climate change, land dispossession, extractive industries, and environmental contamination. How documentary makers choose to represent these realities (and the people living them) has real consequences for how audiences, institutions, and policymakers respond.

We invite proposals that analyze specific documentaries, photo projects, or multimedia works engaging with migration and environmental harm in any part of the hemisphere, from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Amazon basin to Caribbean coastlines. Possible topics include the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects, the role of community-based and participatory documentary, the tension between bearing witness and exploitation, and the ways Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities document their own experiences of displacement, among others.

Nonfiction media is one of the primary ways the public forms opinions about migration and environmental crisis. Examining how these stories are told, and by whom, matters for both scholarship and advocacy.

Proposals are welcome in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

This panel examines how nonfiction media — documentary film, photography, and multimedia — represents migrants and the environmental conditions driving displacement across the Americas. We invite proposals analyzing specific works that engage with migration and environmental harm anywhere in the hemisphere, with attention to questions of ethics, representation, and who gets to tell these stories. Proposals are welcome in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.