Migration in Media Histories

This special issue of TMG – Journal for Media History aims to historicize the entanglement of media and migration. Encompassing a wide range of experiences of human mobility, including labour migration, postcolonial migration, refugee conditions, exile, and diaspora, regimes of representation, in/visibility, and audibility, media have been central in the framing of migration as problem, threat, crisis or emergency. Yet (digital) media have also been essential in terms of cultural imagination, and the shared and connected imaginations of diaspora communities. Moving beyond the persistent ahistorical rhetoric of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’, the selection of theme articles presented here acknowledge and foreground the temporal and historical dimensions of migration as a deeply mediatized phenomenon, an experience, and a process.