Paper short abstract:

The Crossroads device replaces the usual story of latter day arrivals adjusting to established settings. The exhibition visitor will have a vantage point from which they regard multiple movements without the othering, highlighting how everyone has a migration story somewhere in their family history.

Paper long abstract:

Most exhibitions about migration and displacement put the visitor at a destination where they consider who was there earlier, who came later, how these later arrivals adjusted to new surroundings, and how the hosts adjusted to the late-comers. We propose the "Crossroads" device, where the exhibition visitor has a vantage point from which they regard multiple movement flows without the othering, highlighting how everyone has a migration story somewhere in their family history. The traveling exhibition, a project also involving the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society, and the American Library Association, aims to bring current scholarship to light and help change the public conversation about migration and displacement. While commonly framed as a modern-day crisis, we know that human populations have always been on the move. Gathering, hunting, and pastoral nomadism involved patterns of seasonal and multi-year migratory cycles. Commerce, contact, conflict, and natural disasters have propelled further movement, sometimes voluntarily but often under duress and coercion. Our treatment of this history will highlight a range of responses, intentionally framed broadly, reflecting the grand historical scope of the story of human migration. The framing device of the Crossroads fixes the visitor's gaze on movements across the landscape over time, whether seeking economic opportunity, refugees & asylum seekers fleeing conflict and avoiding harm, coerced by traffickers, enslavement, or displaced by gentrification, natural disasters, and global environmental change.