FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Occidental College Names Migrants of the Mediterranean Community Partner in Fall 2023.
The private institution promotes migration scholarship via the organization’s “Humanitarian Storytelling” methodology for documenting journeys of people in the migrant community.
LOS ANGELES, CALIF. 24 October 2023 — – Occidental College names Migrants of the Mediterranean (MotM) a Community Partner in Fall 2023 for its documentation and humanitarian outreach, leveraging its work to influence scholarship in the classroom.
The partnership expands the impact of the organization’s mission to drive migration scholarship in a humane, holistic way that ensures the authentic experiences of people in the migrant community remain at the forefront of the migration debate.
MotM Founder Pamela Kerpius will be in residence at the college at its Los Angeles campus on 24, 26 and 31 October, team-teaching a course entitled “Displaced Peoples in the Mediterranean,” to discuss the organization’s work, method and history.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity for Occidental students,” says Prof. Upson-Saia. “By embedding Migrants of the Mediterranean into the course, students will pair the academic study of migration with direct engagement with an organization that is doing innovative and important work on the ground.”
For the remainder of the semester, Kerpius and Professor Kristi Upson-Saia, Historian of the ancient Mediterranean world at Occidental, will supervise students in a 4-week project.
The partnership comes after a contentious summer in the Mediterranean, where a sharp influx of distressed and vulnerable people arriving in Italy have stoked public discourse on the viability of systems to support newcomers to the country, and across the European Union, as well as people’s ability to seek asylum across the bloc.
The traumatic impact on humanity, however, which is woven into the very fabric of each individual’s treacherous journey, remains largely absent from discussion in politics and media. While we continue to see numbers of arrivals in headlines, infrequently are we met with the people themselves whose stories speak of violence and human rights abuses for which we must as a society account.
The partnership presents an opportunity to correct this narrative, to introduce the faces and Journey Stories of the people in the MotM migrant community.
The organization is proud to have in attendance Andrew Iluobe (Nigeria), a long-time member of its community, remote from Naples, Italy, on 26 October, to speak about his participation with MotM, ongoing since 2019, as well as about how his own journey across Libya and the Mediterranean have impacted his life.
Iluobe remembers the day he met with MotM in Limatola, Italy, a remote town about an hour northeast of Naples, where he then resided in a state asylum seeker’s camp. “[MotM] asked, ‘How are you doing?’” said Andrew, “And that changed everything.” He explains the connection made him no longer feel alone in his experience, and that he could face the complex issues in front of him with support and a sense of dignity.
The organization considers it its highest measure of impact to be able to extend further platforms for its community members to speak in their own words. More than ever, their voices matter in the migration debate and MotM is proud to help provide it.
The Occidental-MotM partnership will also include project work, through which students in the classroom will develop additional resources to support the nonprofit’s mission and outreach, which will be made available to the public as they are released on its website.
Migrants of the Mediterranean has an ongoing presence in the academic sphere, with previous appearances at the University of Toronto, Dartmouth College, Brandeis University and University of Colorado, Denver among others. This is Migrants of the Mediterranean’s first extended academic partnership.