On 25 and 26 January the Mediterranean Institute hosted ‘Memory in Motion — Migration, Storytelling and Social Networking in the Mediterranean’, a two-day conference organised in collaboration with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at Busan University of Foreign Studies. The conference investigated migration narrativity within historical, geographical and cultural comparisons, exploring the various genres employed in the sharing of migrant and memorial experiences through the oral and verbal arts, photography and film, literature and art coupled with material culture, including artefacts carried by migrants during their crossing, and which today shape an elaborate corpus of cultural representation.

The Memory in Motion conference featured a line-up of presentations by noted international scholars from Poland, Canada, Tunisia, Singapore, South Korea, and academics from the University of Malta as well as the National Archives of Malta (Proġett Memorja). The focus of contributions at the event ranged from questions of migration and the archive, heritage in transit, literatures of the East Mediterranean, belief and symbolic rituals on the southern littoral, postmemory and political violence, art and performativity, Mashriqi narratives and further afield.

Convened by Prof. Norbert Bugeja and Prof. John Chircop, the Memory in Motion conference was also addressed by Prof. Yong Su Yoon, Director of the IMS. The conference marks another milestone both in the exploration of transdiciplinary Mediterranean studies as well as the strengthening of the long-standing international collaboration between the Mediterranean Institute at UM and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at BUFS. Further co-operation between the two entities is expected to continue by means of future collaborative events and initiatives.