Underground Railroad scholars Gerard Aching and Alice Baumgartner talk to us about the wait for justice. Aching, a professor at Cornell, studies northward movements of people seeking freedom, while Baumgartner studies a less known path of slaves who traveled south to Mexico to escape. In this conversation, we talk about the stories of freedom seekers and the many forms that waiting can take.

We're back with season 2! In our first full episode on the theme of waiting, we talk to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Molly O'Toole and Arizona State University professors Abby Wheatley and Gabriella Soto. Our guests are experts on the U.S.-Mexico border, and their work shows us how experiences of waiting, urgency, and delay shape the borderlands.

When we think about migration, we often have movement in mind, journeys by foot, boat or plane, the crossing of borders the idea of return. But what happens when people can no longer cross a border? What do we learn about migration when we focus on questions of time?

In this special bonus episode of the podcast, we are sharing a conversation with guest Nanjala Nyabola. We spoke with Nyabola, a Kenyan writer and activist, as part of our Race and Racism Across Borders event. Join us for this conversation on migration, vaccine nationalism, home, and more, also featuring Kim Yi Dionne and Rachel Beatty Riedl of the Ufahamu Africa podcast. 

On this episode, we learn from Kurt Jordan and Laiken Jordahl about dispossession: what it is and how it is affecting Indigenous people, wildlife, and ecosystems. Jordan works in the Finger Lakes region of New York, studying the effects of institutions like Cornell on the Indigenous populations of the region. Jordahl is an activist and ally helping to bring awareness to the harm caused by wall construction at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

In this episode, we look at surveillance and migration. We speak first with Monamie Bhadra Haines, whose work in Singapore looks at the surveillance of migrants before the pandemic and uses it to understand the surveillance state now. Also joining us is Lorenzo Pezzani, whose work on migration in the Mediterranean Sea asks unique questions about witnessing and narrative. 

Migration and global racial justice are critically linked. We learn from Camilla Hawthorne and Shailja Patel in this episode about the racialization of migrants, how racism against migrants is a global issue, and how creative practice plays a role in their work. (A note that this episode contains a mention of sexual violence, in a poem read at the end of the episode.)

We bring migration scholars Filiz Garip and Ingrid Boas into conversation this week to talk about climate. They teach us about the ways that climate affects human movements, discuss the politics of the term "climate refugees," and explain how gradual weather change compares to extreme events. 

In this first episode, we are in conversation with migrations scholars to understand how COVID-19 is shaping our understanding of borders and migration, informing the ways we live and move through the world, and highlighting our connections with local ecologies from the microscopic to the global. 

 Introducing A World on the Move, a podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. With each episode, we will speak with experts who highlight how multidisciplinary multispecies perspectives on migration help us understand key global issues. Subscribe now so you don't miss a single episode.