In September 2019, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge held Migrant Knowledge, Early Modern and Beyond as an event “at the crossroads” of art, scholarship, and activism. It brought together people from all three groups “to think about migration and what it does with, and to, knowledge.” In this short movie, the people involved reflect on both the event and topic from different angles.
Documents from the Qing dynasty's borderlands are crucial for understanding migrations in these regions, but accessing and contextualizing them is complicated by a unique set of political and archival challenges from the past and present.