Reel Migration is a participatory workshop that explores the intersections between migration and visual representation through the lens of sociological inquiry. Drawing on key concepts from migration studies including displacement, exile, belonging, and visibility, the workshop examines how fiction films can inform the visual representation of the real in sociological research.
Participants will engage in close visual analysis and critical discussion of selected scenes from Far From Home (Sohrab Shahid Saless), News from Home (Chantal Akerman), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), and The Suspended Step of the Stork (Theo Angelopoulos). The workshop will focus on how cinematic mise-en-scène can be translated into tools for representing the real in sociological research.
Participants will then reflect on their own research or lived experiences of migration and develop a short storyboard imagining how these narratives could be communicated visually.
Key Themes
- Visual storytelling as sociological method
The workshop treats fiction films as more than narrative examples. They are used as tools for generating sociological insight and representing migrant experience through formal cinematic choices. - Reflexivity in visual representation
Participants are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality, and aesthetic decisions. This supports a reflexive approach to how migrants are seen and depicted in both film and research. - Migrant subjectivity and spatial dislocation
The selected films foreground themes of exile, and invisibility. These help participants understand the emotional and embodied dimensions of migration beyond statistical or policy-based views. - Fiction as a method for representing the real
By drawing on fiction film, the workshop explores how the imagined can convey deeper truths about lived migrant realities. - Counter-narratives and representational ethics
Participants examine how dominant media often reduces migrants to stereotypes and are invited to create alternative visual narratives that centre agency and complexity. - Participatory visual practice
The act of storyboarding allows for collaborative knowledge production.
