Currents / Flows | Critical Productive

Currents / Flows

Our second issue, CURRENTS / FLOWS, published in March 2026, features conversations, critical essays, and photographic folios that take up the issues of human migratory flows, planetary and climate precarity, and resulting natural and cultural conditions. Today, human subjects, primarily from the Global South, traverse bodies of water, arid desertscapes, forests, and dirt trails to escape violence, trafficking, exploitation, political persecution, and lack of economic opportunities, while formal ports of entry are utilized regularly by digital nomads, expats, and tourists. Across the globe, low-income and minoritized populations often reside in neighborhoods and precincts organized around marginal industrialized zones, characterized by low air quality and racial exclusion through redlining, and often interrupted by highways and other urban infrastructure. CURRENTS / FLOWS represents an on-the-ground appraisal of how we humans manage…to get around, to escape, to produce a kind of fugitivity, and to find stability within unstable conditions.

Table of Contents

EDITOR / EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE
INTRODUCTION: CURRENTS AND FLOWS / DEMOCRATIC SPACE
Milton S. F. Curry

CONVERSATION + CRITICISM
CONVERSATION: CURRENTS / FLOWS
Arturo Ortiz Struck, Eliza Mizrahi Balas, William Brinkman-Clark, Miguel Rábago Dorbecker

CONVERSATION: COLUMNAR DISORDER
Milton S. F. Curry and Germane Barnes

CRITICISM: CROSSING WATERS: UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION IN HISPANOPHONE CARIBBEAN AND LATINX LITERATURE AND ART BY MARISEL C. MORENO
Reighan A. Gillam

BLACK CITIES AMERICAS
BLACK CITIES AMERICAS: AN INTRODUCTION
Milton S. F. Curry

MAPPING BLACK DIASPORIC MOBILITIES: ATLAS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
David Eltis and David Richardson

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY, WASHINGTON, DC: CONTEMPORARY AND ARCHIVAL IMAGES
WASHINGTONIANA ARCHIVAL IMAGES, MECANOO DRAWINGS OF MLK LIBRARY, ULYSSES CURRY IMAGES OF MLK LIBRARY

THE DREAM CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL
Peter Robinson

A HAUNTED HOUSE FOR DIS(RE)MEMBERING
Lee Onbargi

GLOBAL BRIEFING
MIGRATING FUTURES
David Eugin Moon / Nahyun Hwang

DESIGN, IDENTITY, AND EMPOWERMENT FROM WITHIN A REFUGEE CAMP
Amir Berbić / Karen Kice

CONFRONTING THE RUINSCAPE: ROBERT SMITHSON’S MEXICO PROJECTS
Elizabeth Deen Miller

FILTERING, SHAPING, AND LEVERAGING: HOW THE MÉXICO-UNITED STATES BORDER FORMS SUBJECTS
César A. Lopez

THE PAN-AMERICAN COOPERATION PROJECT: A VISION TO REDEFINE MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS
Marcos Emiliano Escamilla-Guerrero

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