Details TBC. Lena Dobrowolska is a documentary photographer, filmmaker and researcher focusing on interactive and immersive ecomedia and critical climate research.

Dr. Nina Venkataraman is a Lecturer at Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore where she teaches academic writing and climate communication, with a particular focus on the ways language and images shape public understandings of sustainability and the climate crisis. 

Abstract. Scholarship on the media of climate mobility has documented how the migrant is misrepresented, securitised, and stripped of agency (Sakellari, 2021). This presentation turns from how the moving are shown to who is never shown. I argue that the media grammar of climate displacement can register suffering only as departure, and so erases the communities climate change traps without movement. Those who stay, unable or unwilling to leave degrading ground, constitute what migration scholarship calls trapped or involuntarily immobile populations, and they are now the object of sustained ethnographic study, from the ghost villages of the Indian Himalaya, where women and the elderly absorb the losses of everyone else’s departure (Upadhyay et al., 2023), to communities resisting relocation in Fiji (Yee et al., 2022), Iran (Transiskus & Gholamzadeh Bazarbash, 2024), and Ethiopia (Garcia et al., 2025). That these records exists is my argument. These populations are named, studied, and knowable, yet they remain mostly absent from the coverage that saturates the mobile migrant. Their invisibility is therefore not obscurity but erasure, since the knowledge plainly exists and media coverage does not follow. Building on Hirsch’s (2023) account of forced emplacement, which sets the ubiquity of migration imagery against the underreporting of the immobilised, I read the governing asymmetry, the sinking island that becomes a global icon while the village that stays becomes a footnote, as a structural property of the frame rather than an accident of attention. I close by asking whether generative image systems, already shown to reproduce the visual clichés of the refugee (Hart, 2025), are poised to automate this erasure, fixing movement as the only picturable form of climate harm.

In this workshop held at ECMN26, we first collectively explored some of the key themes that are coming up in our online sessions. In particular, we focused on why simplistic and problematic approaches to climate mobilities persist despite a wealth of work that now challenges them. We explored the impact that resurgent far-right, authoritarian and aggressively nationalist politics have had on the representation of climate mobilities. The rise of anti-immigrant, racist, Islamophobic and climate-sceptic narratives has surely had an effect on the framing of climate change as it intersects with migration – how has this manifested itself? What space is there for more nuanced approaches? And if there are important counternarratives circulating, who is producing them and what traction do they have?

In a second part of the workshop, we used “Collective Sticker Creation” (CSC), a tool of participatory action research which opens spaces for embodied, creative, and collective storytelling (Heiland et al. forthcoming). Building on the discussion of the first part, participants went through the process of creating stickers, an underestimated medium (in academia) that demands imaginative, concise, visual answers  to questions such as “what do we, as climate mobilities researchers and practitioners, want to see in the world?”, “what messages do others need to hear about our research findings?” and “what should climate mobilities ideally look like?”

Nandita Dutta (University of Osnabrück, Germany) presented her contribution to the Critical Climate (Im)mobilities Glossary special collection in Climate & Development: an entry on the Spatio-Scientific Imaginaries of climate and migration.

Abstract. Imaginaries of climate change are inherently spatial, invoking concepts such as climate hotspots, uninhabitable lands, or sinking islands. These spaces are infused with the potentiality of mass movements of people, with migration inherently spatialized, framed as movement from ‘here’ to ‘there’. Scientific imaginaries of climate migration, thus, not only create objects of study but also reinforce the status of the Global North as the spatiality of scientific knowledge and technological problem solving. Spaces of climate migration are imagined in contradistinction with the spaces of knowledge, policy and governance. This representational and scientific discourse is what I term as spatio-scientific imaginaries. Spatio-scientific imaginaries, however, are more than representational; they actively co-produce the realities they describe. Through their circulation, they begin to seem as ‘natural’ facts. To govern or manage, phenomena must first be situated spatially. In a field animated by uncertainty, spatio-scientific imaginaries create a perception of certainty through the materiality of space. Tracing the historical continuities of such imaginaries and their intersection with culture and power also tells us about their (neo)colonial character.

Elena Giacomelli and Pierluigi Musarò (University of Bologna, Italy) presented their new book on Climate Mobility Justice: Narratives and Visual Politics of the Panicocene.

Abstract. The book explores how the intertwined challenges of climate change and human (im)mobilities are being narrated, governed, and resisted. From media and policies to art and activism, the book investigates the stories we tell—and the ones we silence—about who moves, who stays, and who tries to govern human mobilities. What emerges is a powerful critique of crisis narratives that legitimize fear, repression, and exclusion, and a call for new imaginaries grounded in justice, care, and planetary belonging. Engaging with voices from the Global South, Indigenous epistemologies, and feminist and decolonial thought, this book offers a bold rethinking of how to confront one of the defining issues of our time. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of climate politics, migration, and global solidarity.

David Durand-Delacre presented a paper co-authored with Sarah Haider-Nash (University of the Danube in Krems) titled Climate change and migration on YouTube: diverse framings behind climate refugee clickbait.

Abstract. YouTube is an increasingly popular source of both mainstream and independent news as well as entertainment. This includes content about climate change and migration which is increasingly being uploaded to the platform. Yet to date, the majority of discourse and frame analysis about climate migration has focused on written text in print media and minimal attention has been paid to alternative media sources and formats. Against the background of the growing trend towards online video-based news, we close this gap with an analysis of representations of climate migration available on YouTube. As a basis for the analysis, we built a database of 239 English-language videos published between January 2009 and December 2023. We apply frame analysis to a sub-sample of 65 videos from the database, identifying key assumptions made about climate migration; the terminology, rhetoric, and normative assumptions expressed; and the visual representation of phenomena, actors, and subjects. We identify six distinct frames: Overwhelming Millions, Struggles to Survive, Disappearing Islands, A Complex Picture, Climate Havens, and Wrong Direction!. This includes a mixture of well-known frames previously identified in the literature and new frames that have not received much academic attention. A securitised understanding of climate migration as a threat to the international order often functions as clickbait behind which more complex combinations of framings can be identified. We also highlight contradictions between visual and narrative elements. This analysis emphasises the importance of including visual media in analyses of discourse and rhetoric on climate migration and suggests that without them, we can only achieve a partial picture of public understandings of climate-related migration.

During this webinar Gabriela Roque from the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), an organisation representing immigrant and refugee rights organisations in the US, presened the NPNA’s Climate Displaced Leaders Program, which has collected and developed stories from within immigrant communities about climate justice, including advocating for climate finance and mobility solutions. The NPNA has produced a series of short videos as part of the program, which you can view in this presentation.

Presentation by Valentina Cappi of her 2025 paper, co-authored with Elena Giacomelli, titled ‘Othering’ in the Panicocene: intergovernmental and non-governmental awareness campaigns on climate change induced-migration published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Abstract. In recent decades, the nexus between human mobility and climate change has gained increasing prominence in public and policy debates. Mainstream media narratives and political discourses have often framed climate change induced-migration as a security crisis caused by inevitable natural events, with the risk of fuelling unfounded anxiety and discrimination towards environmental migrants and feeding the ‘Panicocene’, the age of panic. In this study, we explore how intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations raise awareness of the nexus between climate change and migration. To this aim, this paper presents a qualitative, interpretive analysis of four communication campaigns promoted by the International Organisation for Migration, and the NGOs Climate Refugees and WeWorld, by applying critical discourse analysis and frame analysis to the websites of these campaigns. Our findings highlight the potential risk of ‘othering’ the figure of the environmental migrant inherent in both NGOs and IOM’s narratives for different reasons. Finally, we suggest that a more insightful way of thematising the link between climate change and migration should focus on the interconnections between climate and mobility justice, thus taking into account the historical relationships between the capitalist development model, colonial extraction, and bordering processes.

In this session, we heard from a collective of artists and curators contributing to an arts exhibition organised under the Cultures of Climate programme at the School of Art & Humanities at the University of Huddersfiled in the UK. 

This workshop focused on visual representations. Much has been made of problematic discourses and images, but what is less clear is how to develop more accurate and positive visual representations of climate mobilities. We seek representations that acknowledge the severity and seriousness of climate mobility challenges, but also emphasise the resilience, rights, and agency of affected people. In the first half of the workshop, participants separated in groups to discuss a selection of visual materials created by ECMN members (videos, photos, and cartoons), based on a few guiding questions. In a second part, the session brought all the groups together for a moderated discussion and Q&A, featuring panelists who have been working with these visual methods. They shared their insights about the challenges and value of these approaches, whether for research, communication, or advocacy.

Workstream members met to discuss  the question “can we do without numbers?“, interrogating the role of quantification in shaping narratives of climate (im)mobilities. How do numbers—whether migration projections, displacement statistics, or risk metrics—constrain or enable nuanced storytelling? How have numbers dominated media representations of climate mobilities, and with what consequences?  When might qualitative, embodied, or creative approaches better capture the lived realities of mobility/immobility? To support the conversation, we discussed several papers: Climate Migration Is about People, Not Numbers (Durand-Delacre et. al. 2021) and The specter of mass climate migration across international borders: Dismantling an unscientific expectation (Farbotko 2022).

The workstream convened to discuss  the difficulties of visualising “climate migration”, specifically looking at the use of animation. We are interested in this medium because it provides considerable freedom of representation and has the potential to create new images as opposed to reproducing familiar tropes. We talked about whether such tropes are indeed avoided and what the pitfalls might be of using the medium, as well as its benefits. Example animations for discussion included the Ted-Ed video Where will you be able to live in 20 years? and short scenario narratives produced under the HABITABLE project. 

Workstream members met to revisit a classic paper on Being(s) framed: The means and ends of framing environmental migrants (Ransan-Cooper et al. 2015), to reflect on how the four key discourses of climate migration identified at the time (victimisation, securitisation, migration as adaptation, and political agency) have or have not evolved in the 10 years since.

We got together to discuss artistic and photographic representations of climate change and migration found on the Displacement Journeys Artists page, complemented by this short blog post about visualising climate migration. Our discussion focused on the role that art, and the visual more broadly, play in representing climate (im)mobilities, especially How images can help to build counter-narratives to the still dominant discourses that wrongly predict massive, overwhelming climate-induced migration.

This interactive workshop offered a hands-on way to explore media and cultural representations of climate migration. Together, we touched on questions such as: What impact do media narratives have? How does culture intervene in this arena? How do we move beyond the sensationalist and inaccurate portrayals of a world where climate and mass migration are inevitably and dangerously linked?

To enable a productive discussion, we used a guided collective collage method. We broke into groups, and each group answered, with limited and provided materials around a given research question. Participants were welcome to contribute their own printed examples of media representations of climate migration to use in this process. Examples that feel new, surprising or somehow against-the-grain of mainstream representations were particularly useful.

In this workshop, we explored to what extent such media narratives still dominate, what impact they have on political discourse and public understanding, as well as which narratives might challenge them. Bringing in work by writers, artists and filmmakers, we considered how cultural production reflects, anticipates and at times challenges simplistic renderings of climate migration, even while popular genres such as dystopian fiction and documentary film can at times – unwittingly or otherwise – reinforce problematic political narratives and assumptions.

Our aim was to bring together different disciplines and perspectives from within the research community to discuss how environmental change and migration are represented well beyond the academic and specialist spheres and to reflect on the varied implications and consequences of visualising climate migration. The collaborative collage was an opportunity to expand participation and the construction of the commons, creating connections, and multiplying perspectives and differences in imaginaries and perceptions regarding climate migration.

You can see the collages here.