As a researcher, my interest lies in the process of being –felt, listened-to, seen, and kept– in the world, by finding connections among text-based materials, media-rich elements, and experiential objects. My dissertation project looks at the afterlives of leftover migrant objects –that either became waste or ended up being disposed– and the memory that comes to matter. In a moment when migration remains as the defining disruptive feature of contemporary global life, we find fragments brought by these disruptions, leftover pieces of whole spirits before embarking on a journey of fissured paths. This project focuses on reclaiming leftover objects as a source of history, as containers of stories which materialize from the subjects that left them behind. This dissertation traces the process of the materialization of memory centering on leftover migrant objects through which I work to uncover “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennet 2010:6).

However, the research questions that I keep coming back to are how memory is materialized, based on the ability of objects to communicate, to expand on the narratives about specific populations, of transnational mobility, and the role that the material plays in the history of militarization and global access​. By focusing on this process about life and death, where pain, loss, and trauma are constituted as a methodological approach, the process of becoming and the non-static attributes of memory, because memory becomes –and materializes– through the moments bolstered by the aforementioned affective methodological approximation, where objects take on meanings, and how they are materialized through this process. There is value in looking at this process that intersects archival research and media studies research in a way that the mediated nature of migration is understood through matter, by the subjectification of objects, those leftover to be given new meaning to. Structures of power come into play when exploring who materializes these objects, for whom, and the purpose that they serve. To understand how the memories are materialized through the objects, and how the stories told by the leftover objects are dependent on the moment of their retrieval.