On Sept. 22, Cornell’s Migrations Initiative is bringing together a panel of journalists and academics for a discussion on the challenges of reporting on migration.
The event, titled “Migration in the Media,” will center on how to produce stories about complex border issues to bring about change. The speakers will discuss questions of representation in reporting, the media’s effects on creating dominant narratives, the politicization of migration and other issues in migration reporting and storytelling.
The event will be moderated by Director of the East Asia Program, Prof. Andrea Bachner, comparative literature, and Eleanor Paynter, a postdoctoral associate at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Speakers on the panel will includes include Douglas Herman and Sonia Nandzik-Herman, co-founders of the ReFOCUS Media Labs Foundation, journalists Nazanin Froghi, Tanvi Misra Katy Fallon and Molly O’Toole ’09, the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in the College of Arts and Sciences along with other experts in migration and media studies.
The Migrations Initiative is part of Cornell’s inaugural Global Grand Challenge, a set of initiatives focused on global health and development issues. Launched in 2019, it has drawn from a task force of 16 faculty members, representing nine colleges and schools.
The event was co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Institute for European Studies, the Department of Sociology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the new School of Public Policy.
Other event discussions include how different storytelling practices and media may play a part in challenging dominant narratives present in the media and offer more complex perspectives, as well as how images may play a role in spreading a message migration and border issues to the public.
The event will take place virtually this Wednesday at noon, and students can register for the event online.