The Weight of a Bird: Review of the Migrant Ecologies Project
Liu, Xinyue (2023) The Weight of a Bird: Review of the Migrant Ecologies Project. Visual Anthropology Review, 39 (2). pp. 440-446. ISSN 1548-7458
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| Creators/Authors: | Liu, Xinyue |
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| Abstract: | This review examines Lucy Davis's Migrant Ecologies Project through the framework of ecological grief, asking how grief work can deepen interspecies relationships and contribute to conservation. Focused on Tanglin Halt, one of Singapore's oldest social housing estates facing demolition, the project uses sound, film, installation, and community storytelling to make visible the marginalised human and more-than-human lives displaced by urbanisation and capitalist expansion. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's concept of reflective nostalgia, the review argues that Davis resists both closure and funerary finality, instead conjuring spectral presences that reframe disappearing lives as grievable and politically worthy. Rather than embalming loss, the Migrant Ecologies Project offers a way through grief—one rooted in playful, present-tense encounters with ecological others, sustained by the conviction that mourning, as Thom van Dooren suggests, is a deliberate act of remembrance that motivates resistance to the conditions that caused the catastrophe. |
| Official URL: | https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/var.12308 |
| Output Type: | Article |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Ecological Grief, Reflective Nostalgia, Interspecies Relations, Animism, Grievability |
| Schools and Departments: | Interdisciplinary (IDR) |
| Dates: | Date Date Type 4 October 2023 Published 1 June 2023 Accepted |
| Status: | Published |
| Identification Number: | 10.1111/var.12308 |
| Output ID: | 10793 |
| Deposited By: | Xinyue Liu |
| Deposited On: | 09 Apr 2026 08:45 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Apr 2026 11:33 |

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