The Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) connects networks of scholars, artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, and advocates to the engines of creative and cultural economics at the heart of migration.
Defining the arts as all forms of cultural production, the center seeks to effectively create new models and power alignments that return value—entrepreneurship—to cultural producers to build more just global futures. Through community-responsive programming, research, and creative production, the center facilitates and extends the innovation, resilience, and ingenuity of diasporic and migratory communities.
CAME takes an intentionally broad approach to its disciplines, recognizing both the challenges and opportunities each term carries.
The Arts value and include both creative production—commonly associated with the page, the stage, and the frame—and cultural production that takes place in the streets, neighborhoods, foodways, faith contexts, popular culture, and in practices most commonly aligned with cultural heritage and tradition preservation. All forms contain powers and histories that both actualize and challenge canons and privilege.
Migration is redefined as the full range of voluntary and involuntary human movement, including historic and contemporary diasporas. The movement of ideologies, media, and technologies presents an opportunity to anchor new narratives. Rooted in multidimensional pasts and prospective futures, CAME’s inclusive approach permits a diversity of power alignments.
Entrepreneurship attaches value to cultural production, whether that value is heritage preservation, cultural innovation, economic and social justice, or commercial venture. CAME proposes new models that return the ability to determine value to those producing culture and facilitates sustainable economic benefit to creatives living and working within migratory and diaspora communities.