The Migrations Global Grand Challenge cultivates dialogue and nurtures collaboration across disciplines at Cornell and beyond. We are made up of a community of migration scholars who are thinking in innovative, multispecies ways about global migration challenges.
During academic year 2021–22, Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge continued its critical work on interdisciplinary, multispecies migration of all living things across the globe. Read about our research, pedagogy, and engagement.
Vision
Researching, Teaching, and Building for a World on the Move
We study how all living things—humans, animals, insects, microorganisms, plant life—migrate from place to place on our planet. They cross borders, escape threats, live with changing climates and food supplies, recreate habitats, develop cultural patterns, seek improved quality of life, adapt and evolve, or face extinction.
To sustain these populations in motion, we create new approaches to infrastructure, urban design, housing, health and nutrition, disaster relief, conservation, legal frameworks, economies, business models, geopolitical systems, technologies, and more.
Education—through multidisciplinary research, teaching, and engagement—can prepare future leaders, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and community members to thrive in a world on the move.
The Mellon Just Futures Initiative
Cross-Border Movements: Racism, Dispossession, and Migration
As part of our partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Just Futures Initiative, we are supporting research and learning that ties together racism, dispossession, and migration with a global focus. Through collaborations across and beyond the university, we are supporting interdisciplinary work around racism and migration that demonstrates real-world impact.
Migrations was chosen as the first Cornell Global Grand Challenge, based on dialogues during and after the Global Grand Challenges Symposium, held November 2018 on the Ithaca campus.
View the Migrations taskforce report, which highlights key focal areas of the Migrations initiative at Cornell and key activities from its first year.
