As barbed wire and walls rise around the world, governments exclude people, and fascist demagogues whip up majoritarian hatred, a tribe of artistic representations is emerging, speaking across borders, and responding to the imaginative and ethical demands of mass displacement in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. These works include art about migrant reality; objects of migrant life shaped into artefacts for cultural work; and art coming out of the experience of migrancy. Our book, Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms, ed. by Natalya Din-Kariuki, Subha Mukherji & Rowan Williams (punctum books, 2025), posits and probes these ‘migrant forms’, the processes of meaning-making they embody, and how they negotiate with dispossession in a way that can also recreate exchange, agency, and even homecoming.

This symposium will explore possible creative futures, as well as emergent critical paradigms and disciplinary formations and alliances, made available to us by the category of ‘migrant forms’. We hope to forge a collective meditation on the dynamic between crossing borders and border-crossing art, as well as a call for a larger life lived together, harnessing the imaginative yield of speaking, thinking, and moving across boundaries. The programme is available to view here. The symposium will be followed by a book launch, to which all symposium attendees are welcome.

Anyone who cannot pay the symposium registration fee should contact either Natalya Din-Kariuki (Natalya.Din-Kariuki@warwick.ac.uk) or Subha Mukherji (sm10014@cam.ac.uk).