ICR Colloquium Series- Speculations on the Freedom to Move: Migrant Arts and Migrant Freedoms
- Event Type
- Seminar/Symposium
- Sponsor
- Institute of Communications Research
- Location
- Gregory Hall, Room 225
- Date
- Mar 26, 2026 12:30 pm 1:30 pm
- Speaker
- Dr. David Cisneros
- Contact
- Heather Hendren
- hhendren@illinois.edu
- Phone
- 217-714-3956
- Originating Calendar
- Institute of Communications Research (ICR) Events, College of Media
This presentation will analyze an archive of activist art from the immigrant justice movements, focusing on visual art and narrative. Artivists use visual rhetoric to spur complex and contradictory visions of migration, including helping audiences to see and experience migration as something familiar and alien, traumatic and world-making, as both in the present and of the future. Migrant visual artivism engages affect, time, space, and mobility differently. More specifically, the presentation contrasts the different functions of artivism within movements, including through more documentary/realist and speculative modes. In more documentary or forensic modes, artivism manifests the presence of compassionate and defiant migrants in the here and now. In contrast, speculative works use playfulness or deliberative alienation to imagine a time-space otherwise than the present, establishing the possibility of a world of freedom of movement. Then, the presentation focuses on the different speculative visions of freedom of movement constructed in the art, using these as inspirations to construct my own speculations about migrant freedom. As fascist movements strengthen their stranglehold on US politics, media, and higher education, speculative visions of freedom and justice are desperately needed now more than ever.
Read more about our speaker Dr. David Cisneros here: https://experts.illinois.edu/en/persons/josue-david-cisneros/
Feel free to bring a brown bag lunch!