News media offer daily accounts of migration crises in the Mediterranean and North America. Yet much of the reality of human agency, mobility, and power in border regions remains unseen and unknown. What are the historical roots of the brutal inequalities manifested at international borders? How do migrants and residents of border regions survive, subsist, and exist? And who benefits from migration crises, as well as the narratives that surround them?

During this meeting, organised by SPUI 25, speakers will shed light on occluded realities at the borders of non-EU and EU states, and between Mexico and the United States. Dr. Polly Pallister-Wilkins will present insights from her recently published book on humanitarian responses to border violence and immigration restriction, based on eight years of research with NGO activists, professional humanitarian agencies, EU officials, and border police. Nicola Moscelli will showcase the surveillance imagery, poetry, essays, and interviews that make up his recently published photobook on the Mexico-US border. Drawing on their respective disciplines of political geography and photography, Pallister-Wilkins and Moscelli will speak to common issues of colonial history, human vulnerabilities, and the intended – and unintended – consequences of inaction and reaction to migration crises.