@EverydayMigration joins The Everyday Projects Instagram community
One in every 113 people who inhabit our shared world is forced to live uprooted from their homes. Internally displaced populations, asylum seekers, and refugees comprised an estimated total of 65 million people according to UNHCR’s latest report — the largest global displacement since World War II. About half of those displaced are children.
And the numbers are rising steadily. Four times as many people are displaced now than were just a decade ago. A staggering 24 people per minute are escaping war and armed conflict, ethnic cleansing and genocide, endemic violence and human rights violations. Or, another way to think about it: two people lose their home every time you take a breath. Individuals and families, internally displaced Colombians and Congolese, people looking for safe shelter in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia…. They might be fleeing a decades-long conflict in Afghanistan or a more recent civil war in the Central African Republic. The faces that dominate the daily news may be from Syria or Iraq today, but they could as well be from Honduras, Myanmar, Yemen, Ukraine or Eritrea….
@EverydayMigration will curate stories from the field to shine a light on the myriad circumstances that compel people to leave their homes. The Instagram feed will showcase photojournalism, participatory projects and workshops, documentary and conceptual work, portraiture, daily life and social media images. We’ll feature long-form visual narratives, as well as shorter vignettes and contributions culled from Instagram. We’ll highlight the work of professional visual storytellers as well as refugees’ personal projects and reporting – which increasingly overlap as journalists, photographers, artists and film makers continue to be forced into exile. In conjunction with this Medium publication, we are setting out to create a dual platform that will feature innovative work, while also providing a space for discussion about how visual media influences how we understand migration and refugee issues, forced displacement, exile and statelessness.
In an increasingly interconnected, globalized world, large scale displacement is not only affecting the people on the move or their host societies, which overwhelmingly tend to be neighboring countries. The 2016 U.S. presidential elections and the Brexit vote were but two examples of an ever growing chorus of nationalistic voices, deploying xenophobic paranoia to pressure policymakers into closing borders and clamping down on services meant to facilitate long term social inclusion. One of the ways to contribute to a more nuanced dialog that focuses on the human rights of displaced people worldwide is to be aware of how we picture the issues propelling displacement and the people most impacted by them.
Within the field of visual storytelling and communication, we bear a shared responsibility to depict one of our time’s most complex issues in ways that don’t play into reductive narratives and stereotypes. In a time of slogans and fear-based politics, understanding the realities on the ground includes looking at the lived experiences of some of the millions of people who are affected by local, regional and international policies and power relations. In addition to those who are forced into migrating by circumstances that qualify them for the relative safety of a refugee status, we will also look at stories about labor migration, and the increasing impact of climate change and natural disasters.
We’re looking forward to seeing this project grow, and are looking for contributors from all over the globe, speaking various languages but communicating, first and foremost, through the power of visual storytelling.
Follow along on Instagram.
Join the conversation by hashtagging your images #EverydayMigration.
Send us ideas for this publication at migration@everydayprojects.org.
