Middlebury Migration Conference

Middlebury Migration Conference

October 24th, 2025: 9am-6:30pm

MBH (BiHall) 216

Open to Middlebury College and Community Partner affiliates - seating limited

Migration has never been a more timely issue in Vermont, the United States, and globally. People hailed as migrants have been rendered both hypervisible and at the same time, overlooked. They are featured as “masses” in press cycles and “criminals” in political talking points, but their individual experiences, stories, and perspectives are frequently obscured, essentialized, and stigmatized.  Building on the work, outreach, and partnerships cultivated through the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ “Migrant Justice in Vermont and Beyond” Mellon initiative, this one-day conference seeks to nuance the histories and present-day realities of migration, from the local to the regional and global scales. This conference asks, what circumstances have compelled people to migrate, historically and in the present? How can stories of migration help us conceptualize the intersections of (im)mobility with indigeneity, empire, racialization, displacement, the environment, gender, sexuality, the law, political economy, and culture?  How might we complicate our own perceptions and received ideas about migration locally and globally? This conference is grounded in the belief that humanistic inquiry is foundational for conceptualizing migration with rigor, empathy, and curiosity, and that this necessarily entails the co-creation of knowledge beyond the academy. To that end, this conference centers the knowledge, experiences, and praxes of people who have experienced migration –– organizers, artists, activists, and scholars alike. This conference aims to bring people together to denaturalize conventional discourses about migration in the clear affirmation that our liberation is bound together, after Indigenous scholar, artist, and activist Lilla Watson.