The BIP “(In)Visibilities and Visualities of Migration” (8.-12.09.2025) at JGU Mainz was a compact, research‑oriented summer school that brought together teaching, artistic exploration, and field‑based learning around current debates in critical migration and visual studies. Organized by the department of human geography, the program aimed to creating a dense, dialogical environment in which students, researchers, artists, and activists co‑produced perspectives on how migration becomes visible, remains invisible, or is strategically made unseen in European societies.
Overall setting and aims
The week in Mainz was structured as an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme within the FORTHEM Alliance’s “Diversity and Migration” Lab, positioning the summer school as one node in a broader transnational research and teaching network on migration and diversity. Rather than treating migration as an exceptional “problem,” the activities framed it as a constitutive dimension of contemporary Europe, asking how institutions, media, and everyday urban practices regulate who and what can be seen and heard. The summer school thus aimed to equip participants with both conceptual tools and practical methods to interrogate representation, bordering, and everyday politics of presence in different European contexts.
Academic and methodological focus
Conceptually, the programme was anchored in debates on (in)visibility of migration, decentering migration studies, and the visual turn in human geography and the social sciences. Discussions around (in)visibility examined how migrants are alternately overexposed (as security risks, victims, or labour reserves) and erased from view (in statistics, urban planning, or institutional procedures), and what this means for agency and subjectification. Decentering migration studies involved questioning national‑methodological frameworks, majority‑centred narratives, and Eurocentric gazes, and foregrounding migrant‑driven knowledges, practices, and spatial experiences instead. The visual turn was addressed through engagement with cinema, comics, graphic narratives, soundmaps, and zines, reflecting a broader move in geography and migration research toward multimodal, sensory, and practice‑based inquiry.
Types of activities during the week
The programme combined three main types of activities: on‑campus academic sessions, creative/arts‑based workshops, and excursions and dialogical formats beyond the university. On campus, participants worked through key theoretical and empirical questions in seminar‑style settings, drawing on case studies from different European regions and critically reflecting on research ethics, representation, and intersectional forms of invisibilisation. Creative workshops on zine‑making, soundmapping, mind‑mapping and visual storytelling allowed students to experiment with non‑textual forms of analysis and communication, treating artistic practices as serious research techniques rather than mere “dissemination tools.” Field‑based activities—such as migrant‑guided city walks, visits to civil society organisations, engagement with a rap studio, and a documentary film screening with the filmmaker—situated theoretical debates in concrete urban and activist contexts.
Student involvement and learning environment
Students were not only recipients of expert knowledge but also contributors to the programme’s content and reflexive orientation. Presentations of their own fieldwork, collaborative exercises, and participatory discussion formats (e.g. fishbowl debates) created a learning environment in which different positionalities and experiences of migration could come into conversation. This participatory design underscored the idea of decentering: knowledge about migration was treated as something that emerges in interaction between universities, migrant communities, and artistic/public practices, rather than being produced only in academic spaces.
Position within the FORTHEM Diversity and Migration La
Within the FORTHEM “Diversity and Migration” Lab, the Mainz BIP functioned as a bridging space between research, teaching, and student‑driven initiatives. It built on and fed back into ongoing FORTHEM projects on human rights cinema, participatory research with migrants, and innovative teaching formats on diversity. By focusing explicitly on visual and sensory methods, ethics of representation, and decentered narratives, the summer school added a strong methodological and epistemological layer to the Alliance’s work on migration. For students and academics, it offered both a substantive introduction to current debates on (in)visibility and a hands‑on laboratory for experimenting with the visual and creative tools that are reshaping contemporary geography and migration studies.
