Movement with Meklit Hadero Podcast: Music & Migration

 Movement with Meklit Hadero Podcast offers listeners a unique audio experience. Movement is a multi-platform storytelling initiative that explores the intersection of migration and music.

Here's their thematic premise: "Through our podcast, radio broadcasts, live shows, and community-building initiatives, we center the voices, stories, and songs of immigrant, migrant, and refugee musicians, claiming public space for these artists to share their stories with complexity and nuance."

Movement debuted in 2020 as a nationally syndicated broadcast on PRX’s The World, and it is now a regular feature on The World, airing to 2.5 million listeners with each episode. It has also been featured on Snap Judgment, Radiotopia Presents, KCRW, WAMU, Immigrantly, Daily Zeitgeist, Podcast Delivery. It has been recommended by the LA Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. 

Movement is a meditation on the large-scale forces at play in individual lives. It honors themes of joy, curiosity, pleasure, epiphany, and wisdom, even as we make space for the very real presence of trauma, difficulty, and pain. Explorations of citizenship, gender identity, race, and border walls are conveyed through intimate stories: two brothers sharing a single guitar, a daughter trying on her father’s shoes, the lineage of a drum, the sacredness of water, and the sounds of a grandmother’s backyard.

Movement is hosted and co-produced by Ethiopian-American singer-composer Meklit Hadero and was co-created by Meklit, sound designer/producer Ian Coss, and editor/producer Julie Caine.


Meklit is joined on stage and in these audio stories by a wide range of guest artists whose identities are grounded in an experience of migration: a classical composer who fled religious persecution in Iran, a formerly undocumented Mexican singer returning to perform in her hometown for the first time, a Chamorro dancer reclaiming the language and chant of their ancestors, and many more.

Movement is a podcast, radio series, and live show that tells stories of global migration through music. 

Hosted by Ethiopian-American singer Meklit Hadero, the show is a meditation on the large-scale forces that shape individual lives. Issues of citizenship, identity, belonging, and borders are explored through the experiences of artists themselves. 

So far, my favorite episode is the one where Meklit talks with Sudanese-American MC Oddisee about self-doubt and the power of empathy, as well as his new album, "To What End." Oddisse, whose father was Sudanese and his mother was a white woman from Detroit, talked about growing up with a variety of music in the household, from urban soul to Carly Simon. 

In the episode, both the guest and the host express a particular anxiety about standing out from the crowd in their area. When Meklit visits Ethiopia, she is relieved to find an area where everyone looks a lot like her.

 

Throughout the show, Meklit, as host, rolls out revelations, insights, and cognizance about who we are in relation to others. She effectively uses music as a connecting thread to highlight societal and cultural uniqueness, creativity, and, most of all, migration. Meklit exposes a truth that many in the U.S. government, with their anti-DEI platform, don't understand. We are all better off when we are exposed to different cultures, customs, and the music that accompanies them. 

 

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: "Unity has never meant uniformity."