Call for Papers

The CLAS-Laboratory organizes

The 1st International Conference on 

Movement and Integration Migrants, Agency, and Media: 

Building Ethical and Culturally Grounded Narratives of the Mediterranean. 

MICAM-Med. 

February 11 and 12, 2026

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Felicitas Hillmann - Technical University, Berlin, Germany.

https://de.linkedin.com/in/prof-dr-felicitas-hillmann-4209191b3

Background

Migration across the Mediterranean carries an ancient aura, as old as the sea’s ancient trade routes and imperial conquests. For many centuries, the region has been shaped by circulations of people from merchants and pilgrims to refugees and settlers. Yet in recent decades, particularly since the 1990s, this mobility has been increasingly framed through restrictive border regimes, leading to the consolidation of what scholars call the “Fortress Europe.” The end of the Cold War, the tightening of European immigration policies, and a growing gap in socio-economic opportunities have made Mediterranean crossings not only more frequent but also more dangerous. The missing migrants project of IOM has shown that the Mediterranean is among the deadliest migration corridors in the world. Further, conflicts, climate change, authoritarianism, and global inequalities are putting more pressure on national systems: we face an increasing number of individuals and families pushed to undertake perilous journeys. Simultaneously, so-called "transit countries" such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya have been transformed into zones of containment, reinforcing the border externalisation policies of the EU. Very often, it is the migrant him- or herself lost in the Bermuda-triangle of governance (Hillmann and Veronis 2025).

In this context, questions of agency have become highly important, trajectories and imaginaries are increasingly in the focus of migration studies. While state and media across the Mediterranean often reduce migrants to passive victims or security threats, creative and political practices particularly in southern Europe have increasingly foregrounded migrant voices, strategies, and storytelling as forms of resistance and re-humanisation. In contrast, expressions of migrant agency in Morocco (as peripheral actor in the broader system of migration governance) and similar transit countries remain significantly constrained due to structural exclusion, economic precarity, and limited access to platforms for representations.

The focus on the concept of agency, in this context, does not negate the structural violence, precarity, or exclusion many migrants face. Rather, it calls attention to the ways in which migrants navigate, resist, reconfigure, or inhabit these conditions—even when constrained by law, borders, or public opinion. 

Media, both mainstream and community-based initiatives, plays a central role in shaping these narratives, influencing public opinion, policy, and the imagination of the Mediterranean itself. While policy discourses tend to reduce migrants to numbers or passive victims, countless acts of cultural and narrative agency persist from grassroots activism to cinematic expression, and from digital storytelling to journalism. Yet, the power to shape how migration is perceived remains unevenly distributed. Media representations whether state-controlled, corporate, independent, or migrant-produced have played an instrumental role in amplifying, silencing, or re-configuring these narratives. Increasingly social media, digital services and AI lead to a distortion of imaginaries, they impact on trajectories. 

Conference Objective:

The premise of this international conference lies at the heart of critically engaging with migration and media across the Mediterranean, with a special focus on agency (both individual and collective). It seeks to explore how migrants and their allies resist the politics of invisibility and dehumanisation by actively constructing alternative narratives. The call invites academic contributions that unpack the ways in which films, documentaries, journalism, literature, visual art, and digital media become arenas of struggle, empowerment, and re-imagination. Contributions should answer the following specific questions:

• How are stories of migration framed not only as suffering, but also as acts of self-definition, memory-making, and political participation?
• How can media help us rethink migrant subjectivity beyond static categories, attending instead to forms of agency that may be subtle, collective, fragmented, or affective?

The conference is open to scholars, artists, filmmakers, activists, journalists, and students engaged in migration, media, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, visual studies, political science, gender studies, and history. We invite papers, panels, and creative presentations that address, but are not limited to the following themes and topics:

• Border externalisation and the evolution of EU-Mediterranean migration governance
• Continuities and ruptures in narratives of mobility across time
• Migrant agency through self-representation in media and documentary
• Cinematic narratives of migration: Victimhood vs Resistance
• The role of journalism in reinforcing or challenging state narratives
• Digital activism, social media, and transnational storytelling
• Collective memory, trauma, and storytelling among displaced communities.
• Disability, health, and voice in migrations narratives
• Intersections of class, ethnicity/race, nationality, gender and migration agency.
• Cultural responses to migration governance and securitisation

Submission Guidelines:

Interested participants are kindly requested to submit their papers following the guidelines below:

• Abstract should be 250-300words, including the title, keywords, and the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information.
• Abstracts should be submitted preferably in English. 
• A short biographic notes should be provided (no more than 150 words)
• Please submit your abstract to: micam.medconference25@gmail.com by 7 September, 2025.
• Notification of Acceptance will be sent by 15 September, 2025
• Submission of full papers will be sent by 28 December, 2025.
• Notifications on the papers will be sent by 25 January, 2026

Publication Opportunities:

An opportunity would be a special issue with a peer-reviewed, open access journal:

https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/index

Registration Fees:

Registration fees are to be paid at the registration desk on the day of the conference.

• Professors and Senior Researchers: 100 $ 
• Doctoral/Master Students: 50 $

Conference Venue:

Faculty of Languages, Arts and Sciences,

Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Ait Melloul Campus.

Conference Coordinator: 

Dr. Siham Marroune- Ibn Zohr University- Agadir, Morocco.

Should you have any inquiries, please contact me at s.marroune@uiz.ac.ma

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Felicitas Hillmann -Technical University-Berlin, Germany.