Launch of Prof Parvati Nair's New Book
On February 11th 2025, Prof. Parvati Nair’s latest book Displacement, Environments, and Photo-Politics in the Mediterranean: Migrant Sea was launched at Book Marks bookstore in Bloomsbury, London.
This hybrid event was co-hosted by Book Marks and the research forum Borderlines (QMUL SBM). The series editor Prof. Liz Wells situated the book within her series. Prof. Shahram Khosravi and Sana Mustafa offered reflections as discussants.
Summary of the book:
Focusing on the Mediterranean region from 2015 onwards, this volume explores photography’s engagement with displacement, a process that denotes the environmental and social breakdown of places and the forced mobility of people.
The ongoing proliferation of photography of the displaced plays a crucial role in shaping opinions, by sensitising the public to the despair of displacement and hardening them to the trope through repeated exposure. Through a range of images by both established and amateur photographers, as well as ethnographic notes that draw from interviews with actors who are either displaced or working with the displaced, Parvati Nair questions the extent to which photography opens a space of possibility for the displaced in the face of globally dominant ideological drives that lead to the Anthropocene. Chapters focus on key aspects of this mass phenomenon, such as the question of crises no longer as exception but as historical process, the lived experiences of protracted relegation to borders and exposure to possible death, the prevalence of domicide and the spread of encampments, and the question of hope for the future.
The book will be of interest to scholars in photography theory, migration and refugee studies, art history, Mediterranean studies, and political science.
See more about Prof. Parvati Nair's work here.