Despite the dramatic frenzy revealed in Global Trends of Migration, what image of interconnectedness does the compelling visualization truly reveal? While foregrounded in an equidistant projection to underscore the ties of the globe to a nexus of departure of refugees fleeing sites in Africa, Syria, and Ukraine who arrive in Europe, Australia, and North America, the formal emphasis on the converging flared red arcs to track refugees oddly downplays the sites of emergency, and assumes that all refugees have a fixed destination and point of arrival. To be sure, the map of refugee traffic seems a bit of an oblique obfuscation of the experience of those forced to flee their homes, hardly coming to terms with the growing global tragedy of the apparently unmitigated spread of refugees from an expanding range of sites--and the steep human rights challenges the exponential expansion of global or internal exiles creates. Even as UNHCR data serves to map those flows, it hardly offers one of the clearest ways to process, comprehend and synthesize the expansion of those individuals so tragically forcibly displaced over the past year. Does the image mislead, as much as inform? Continue reading ![]()
