Human migration has already become a defining feature of the 21st century. Global conflicts and climate change have created the largest number of displaced people since the Second World War, and these numbers are likely to increase in the coming decades. In light of this, society urgently needs to rethink its understanding of migration and mobility.
On 21 and 22 May 2025, Professor Dániel Margócsy organised the Diasporic Natures Conference to discuss this subject. Hosted at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the conference brought in speakers from around the world. Between them, they covered a broad spectrum of disciplines in both the humanities and the social sciences.
Mobility in migration
Speakers at the conference challenged the common conception of migration that views people as attached to a certain area, only moving in the event of disruption or economic necessity. Many speakers argued that this is far more restrictive than the level of mobility seen in nature. Examples ranged from the movement of plate tectonics to migratory birds.
Margócsy and many other researchers argue human communities also display this mobility, with many communities continuously on the move. Speakers at the conference, such as Projit Mukharji, discussed how scientists in 20th-century India compared human populations to rivers traveling across regions. Similar discussions about rivers focused on Colombia's Magdalena River and the sailors traveling across it, and the role of the Selenge River in migration across Russia and Mongolia.
"In the histories of colonialism, it is often assumed that European colonial powers were the primary movers, and other populations only moved when they were forced," explains Margócsy. "But we wanted to explore what other kinds of mobility exist, how people across the globe had been moving across the globe for millennia, and what insights we can gain about mobility."
Margócsy chose the phrase 'diasporic natures' to reflect this perspective, and to explore the many communities whose identity was built around more than one place. The concept of diasporas became prominent in the English-speaking world in the 1930s, in response to the growing number of Jewish refugees from Europe, but it has now come to encompass people who are not refugees. This novel understanding reflects a more mobile identity than is typically understood, the sort which the Diasporic Natures Conference was looking to explore.
"This history of the concept of diasporas and, as speaker Marton Farkas elucidated in his talk, the fact that it emerged in discussions around poetics also remind us of the importance of creative fields and the humanities for our understanding of human and natural mobilities," says Margócsy. "It seemed to me that poetry and the creative imagination are fields of inquiry that are truly productive for understanding what's going on around in the world, and are therefore necessary to complement the approaches the social sciences and the natural sciences."
Colonial natures
The Diasporic Natures Conference builds on Margócsy's previous research, most notably the 'Colonial Natures project', which examines how many current environmental issues have their roots in colonial activities. Several speakers expanded upon this subject, such as an establishment of sugar cane plantations by the Dutch East India Company in Batavia – now Jakarta – and the complex involvement of migrant Chinese merchants in this practice.
In this process, colonialism restricted mobility in specific ways. People, nature, and knowledge were still mobile, but specific nations controlled this movement. The Transatlantic slave trade is the ultimate example of this.
Another consequence of colonialism was the concentration of natural history knowledge in certain locations and institutions. Large numbers of specimens made their way into collections in the Global North over the centuries. This meant methods of natural history came to reflect the preferences of scholars in these regions. The knowledge that local communities possessed was either overlooked or taken over for exploitative purposes. This issue is particularly relevant to the University of Cambridge, where several collections draw from the colonial era of resource extraction. These include the Cambridge University Herbarium, Museum of Zoology and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
One lecture focused on an archive within the last of these: the Skeat Collection. Consisting of photos and ethnographic artefacts collected around 1900 from peninsular Malaysia, the Skeat Collection is one of the most important archives of this region. Yet it remains underutilised by researchers.
The lecture was given by Dr Liana Chua of the Department of Social Anthropology and Katherine Enright from the Department of History. Between them, they gave a thorough analysis of the Skeat Collection's contents, and how it could provide a more in-depth understanding of Malaysia's cultural and natural history. The resulting knowledge would be useful for scholars in Malaysia as well, allowing them to regain some of the unique knowledge concentrated in a European institution. Such an act would also represent a shift towards greater mobility of resources and research.
Reading the world
This loss of knowledge was the subject of Dr Edwin Rose's book Reading the World: British Practices in Natural History, 1760–1820, which he launched during the conference. In his book Rose, a former AHRC Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, discussed natural history during the reign of King George III.
This was a prosperous time for natural history. One defining feature was the proliferation of scientific papers and natural history textbooks to document this newfound knowledge. Yet this shift also intensified the loss of local knowledge around environments.
"It's about asking what knowledges you can collect," explains Margócsy. "How much natural historical knowledge can you preserve between two sheets of paper? Anything that you cannot preserve between two sheets of paper gets lost.
"It's a fundamental feature of science, that it takes nature to be that thing which it can measure, observe, record and publish. Then it pretends that there is nothing else, nothing that slips out from instrumental observation, nothing that the microscope cannot record."
A new view of migration
When it comes to applying this conference's findings to contemporary migration policy, Margócsy believes there are two important lessons. The first is to understand that people are not inherently fixed to one place. Historically, many people have moved around the world for reasons other than escaping violence. The second lesson is being able to apply this logic to nature, which is equally mobile and unaware of borders. Margócsy criticises much of the rhetoric surrounding introduced species that describes them as 'aliens' and 'invasive non-natives'. He argues that this reflects xenophobic language used against human migrants.
"We need to think carefully about how to preserve biodiversity and cultural diversity in the world, without relying on such metaphors," says Margócsy. "That means understanding that plants, animals and humans move, as opposed to simply presuming that the solution is to stop people, plants, and animals from travelling across the globe."
Understanding these complexities requires debate and collaboration between different areas of expertise. Margócsy is hopeful that the Diasporic Natures Conference enabled this.
"This conference allowed us to actually discuss things of real importance, in a way that it emerges from our own research," says Margócsy. "And in that sense, I think the real importance was to enrich everyone's repertoire, from an interdisciplinary and international perspective."