Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Releases CARGC Paper 5 by Mimi Sheller
The paper is entitled, "On the Maintenance of Humanity: Learning from Refugee Mobile Practices."
Photo Credit: Ai Weiwei Studio
The Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Press (CARGC Press) is pleased to present CARGC Paper 5, “On the Maintenance of Humanity: Learning from Refugee Mobile Practices, by Mimi Sheller,” who delivered it on September 7, 2016, as the 2016 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication.
This CARGC Paper presents an ongoing project with the Artistic Lab organized by the Mobile Lives Forum (Paris) based on an ongoing art commission and collaboration between Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, French curator Guillaume Logé, and Mimi Sheller. In the paper she explores “the image world that Ai Weiwei has created and… the ways in which it intervenes in the visual field around the refugee crisis.”
“Mimi Sheller embodies CARGC’s core values,” notes Marwan M. Kraidy the Anthony Shadid Professor of Communication and Director of CARGC. “Much of her work is grounded in the Caribbean but has global purchase and implications. She performs high-theory scholarship while emphasizing its relevance to public discourse. Her scholarship is comparative, inclusive, and innovative, committed at once to academic excellence, social justice, and sustainability.”
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is a founder of the “new mobilities paradigm,” founding co-editor of the international journal Mobilities, and a President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008-09); Media @ McGill in Montreal, Canada (2009); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and the Penn Humanities Forum (on Virtuality) at the University of Pennsylvania (2010-11). She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Sociology from Roskilde University in 2015.
