How Can Technologists and Journalists Come Together to Better Cover Climate Migration in the Media?
In an era where Jeff Bezos jaunt to near space received almost as much coverage as 2020's total climate change media coverage, how can concerned journalists and technologists come together to change the world?
This panel discussion will explore effective communications on climate change and resulting migration. This includes actually increasing coverage of climate-induced displacement and migration in the media and reframing dangerous climate narratives that have extended the climate "crisis" to a "migration crisis" for Global North countries. This particular framing lends to a skewed securitized and anti-migrant perspective, especially dangerous in a time where anti-migrant and xenophobic sentiments have been steadily rising.
At the same time, some have used data and climate modeling to support these narratives because they overlook some simple truths: most displacement is internal, displacement and forced migration are multi-causal, where it is essential to recognize that climate change increases existing vulnerabilities.
Panelists:
Todd Miller, is a journalist and author of several books, including "Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security." Miller has researched and written about border issues for more than 15 years, the last eight as an independent journalist and writer. He resides in Tucson, Arizona, but also has spent many years living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work has appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, and Al Jazeera English, among other places.
Miller has authored four books: Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security.
He’s a contributing editor on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its column “Border Wars”.
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers migration, mass incarceration, climate justice, and more. She joined the magazine in 2012; that same year, her piece about labor abuses on United States military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Invisible Army," received the National Magazine Award for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. In 2019, she received another National Magazine Award for public interest, for her 2018 New Yorker piece, “No Refuge,” which documented how deportation can become a death sentence for asylum-seekers and other immigrants. Stillman launched the Global Migration Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which has produced more than thirty public-interest investigations with more than a dozen outlets; she is a MacArthur Fellow. A contributor to the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, she is currently reporting on the labor dimensions of the climate crisis, including the role of immigrant resilience workers in rebuilding after extreme weather events.
Dr. Maryanne Loughry AM, is a member of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea (ISMAPNG) and a psychologist. She is presently a research professor at the School of Social Work, Boston College, USA and a research associate of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK. Dr. Loughry has worked in refugee work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) commencing in refugee camps in South East Asia in 1988 and was the Pedro Arrupe Tutor at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, from 1996-2003.
Dr. Loughry is a member of the Governing Committee of the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), Geneva and an advisor to the Kaldor Centre for Refugee Law, University of NSW, Australia and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, University of Melbourne. Her research interests include climate displacement in the Pacific. In 2010 she was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for service to displaced persons.
Carlos Genatios, PhD, is Director of Engineering, Technology and Design at Miami Dade College, as well as Co-founder and General Director of Geopolis: International Network for Natural Disasters Risk Reduction, and member of the MetroLab network that leads the Resilient305 strategy for Miami Dade County, Florida. Dr. Genatios has been professor of civil engineering and a Natural Disasters Risk Reduction and Science and Technology Innovation consultant for the Interamerican Development Bank, United Nations, CAF, Microsoft, Sumitomo, H.P., Ghella. He has delivered more than 100 projects in structural engineering, natural disasters risk reduction, and science and technology (with activities in Venezuela, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, and eight Latin American Countries), including structural and offshore engineering, environmental impacts, and disaster risk reduction. Author of 16 books, 150 scientific articles and 300 op-ed articles.