Visual social media and affectivity: the impact of the image of Alan Kurdi and young people’s response to the refugee crisis in Oslo and Sheffield

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reception of the image of Alan Kurdi by a group of young volunteers in Oslo and Sheffield, and their understanding of the subsequent civic and political engagement. Methodologically, the study draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with a group of young volunteers who saw the photograph when it went viral on Twitter and who had followed the media coverage and participated in on- and offline activities related to the case. To analyse the views of the research participants on the Alan Kurdi case, I draw on feminist theoretical perspectives on affectivity, theoretical literature relating to news images and iconic photography, and online social movement theories. The study shows that the iconic image of Alan Kurdi offered a way of transforming complex and unsettled aspects of the refugee crisis into something concrete and understandable, contributing to galvanize affective resonance and immediate public response among the involved subjects. The infrastructure of social media, enabling the rapid global circulation of the image, contributed to shaping social assemblages to which connective emotions and common meanings were ascribed.

KEYWORDS:

• Young people
• image studies
• affect and emotion
• media studies
• social media

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all of the participants for their part in this research, and she would like to thank the University of Sheffield, Information School, Farida Vis and Matt Flinders for supporting her work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lin Prøitz is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Sheffield Information School. She holds a Ph.D. in Gender and Media Science (2007) from the University of Oslo [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. Press Association, The Guardian (15 December 2015): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/15/alan-kurdi-image-appeared-on-20m-screens-in-just-12-hours.

2. https://www.ssb.no/valg/statistikker/stortingsvalg.

3. In Oslo, I interviewed one man (31) and five women aged 19, 26, 28, 31 and 31; and in Sheffield, I interviewed three women aged 18, 18 and 28 and three men aged 24, 24 and 28.

4. Oslo (658,390, whereof 74,169 are students) and Sheffield (563,749, whereof 34,718 are students).

5. In this article, I do not discuss this further. A comparative study between the young Norwegians’ and Britons’ political engagement is expected to be published elsewhere.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 under Grant Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) [grant agreement No. 659671].