https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5157-2365
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ABSTRACT
This article explores how migrants were visually presented during the so-called migration crisis in southeast Europe in the fall of 2015. It considers photographs from two public broadcasters’ news portals: Slovenia's rtvslo.si and Croatia's hrt.hr. The focus is on a specific category of images we label subjectless images; that is, images visually representing migrants and migration that avoid showing migrants as subjects. In these images, subjects are substituted by objects that metaphorically, metonymically, or symbolically stand for migrants and migration. The article explores the ideological operation of subjectless images, which operates through the logic of substituting human subjects with metaphorical, metonymic, and symbolic objects. What is presented to viewers as a certain object's mimetic image is explored within the production of a specific narrative and signification.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Andreja Vezovnik is a sociologist and an Assistant professor in Media studies at the University of Ljubljana. Her main research areas include: migration discourses, semiotics of migration, food studies, studies of everyday life in socialist and post-socialist Yugoslavia.
Ljiljana Šarić is a professor of South Slavic linguistics at the University of Oslo. Her research areas are discourse analysis (specifically, discursive construction of cultural identity), cognitive linguistics, and South Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures. Her publications include Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim: Cultural Identities in Public Discourse (2010) and Transforming National Holidays: Identity Discourse in the West and South Slavic Countries, 1985–2010 (2012).
ORCID
Andreja Vezovnik http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5157-2365
Ljiljana Šarić http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4373-9182
Notes
1 We use the term migrant for all categories of people that crossed the Slovenian and Croatian borders in order to transit the countries or apply for asylum. Intentionally we did not categorize them according the popular distinction between refugees from unsafe countries (forced migration) and migrants from countries considered safe (economic migration).
2 Slovenia and Croatia are both former Yugoslav countries, now EU members. Slovenia joined the EU and NATO in 2004 and the Schengen area in 2007. Croatia has been an EU member since 2013 and a NATO member since 2009, but it is not a member of the Schengen area.
3 Between 6 September 1 2015 and 5 March 2016, a total of 658,068 migrants entered Croatia. On average, there were approximately 5,500 daily arrivals, with a peak of 11,000 on September 17th (Šelo Šabić and Borić Citation2016, 11). Between 17 October 2015 and 25 January 2016, 422,724 refugees crossed over into Slovenia. The peak period for migration was in October and November (Government of the Republic of Slovenia Citation2015).
4 Data were collected in March and April 2016.
5 From September to the end of November, rtvslo.si had a coverage of approximately 33% of the population. About 500,000 different users from Slovenia visited rtvslo.si at least once in this period. This ranks rtvslo.si as the third most popular news website in Slovenia (data obtained from MOSS). Rtvslo.si is produced by the Multimedia Center, which is one of the program production units of the Slovenian public broadcaster RTV Slovenija. Rtvslo.si has several sections: Slovenija (Slovenia), Svet (World), Kultura (Culture), Šport (Sports), and Zabava/Razvedrilo (Entertainment; see Letno poročilo RTV [Citation2015]), in which an average of approximately five articles per day covered migrants.
6 Hrt.hr is less widely read than rtvslo.si: it is the tenth most popular news website in Croatia. In September, October, and November 2015, it had approximately 9,150,000 page views per month. In the period examined, hrt.hr published approximately seven articles per day related to migrants. Hrt.hr consists of the following sections: Vijesti (News), Sport (Sports), Raspored (TV program), Magazin (Magazine), HRT prikazuje (HRT channels), Orkestri/Zbor (Orchestra/Choir), and Vrijeme i promet (Weather and Traffic).
7 In both languages, morphological variants of the stem and all cases were included in the search.
8 Emphasis was defined according to size, foregrounding, clarity of focus, and centrality of the subject/object depicted.
9 “A metonym consists of a source concept/structure, which via a cue in a communicative mode (language, visuals, music, sound, gesture …) allows the metonym's addressee to infer the target concept/structure” (Forceville Citation2009, 58).
10 We follow Forceville’s (Citation2016, 58) understanding of multimodal metaphors and metonymies: their target and source are each represented predominantly or exclusively in different modes. Forceville considers, for instance, verbo-pictorial metaphors (in which the target is only given visually and the source is only given verbally, or vice versa) to be multimodal.
11 This framework has been expanded by Caple (Citation2013), who introduces the Balance network, which particularly focuses on balance in visual composition, and Bednarek and Caple (Citation2017).
12 A thorough analysis of these multimodal texts in their entirety is a separate topic and beyond the scope of this study.
13 Interestingly, some viewers with whom we discussed this image claim that the image also suggests the negatively evaluative metaphor migrants are waste.
14 We consider the metaphorical construal in which the toy would be the source domain, and migrant children / migrants the target domain (migrants / migrant children are toys) less likely.
15 Although this image might have some critical potential in addressing the ongoing process of securitization (see Vezovnik [Citation2018]; Buzan et al. [Citation1998]), the majority of other images on rtvslo.si showing security objects are affirmative toward the security measures adopted by Schengen countries.
16 Texts on the internet are almost always multimodal, and are a typical object of study of multimodal studies (see Jewitt, Bazemer, and O’Halloran Citation2016). Our texts consist of verbal elements, images, hyperlinks, and videos.
17 The article headline below the image reads: “Opatovac: Building of Stable Objects Still Not Considered.”
18 These bodies, of course, do not necessarily have to be migrants’ bodies. However, these images are parts of larger multimodal pieces predominantly or exclusively discussing migration, and these pieces contain additional images of migrants. This is why this interpretation automatically emerges.
19 Language expressions of such actions are immigrate, leave, arrive, etc.
20 The term “viewer(s)” in this study is used as in visual images studies: it refers to potential viewers and does not imply analyzing any concrete audiences. The “viewer” and his or her position is “imposed” by the sign-maker. This position is, for example, standing behind a person in the image if the person is not captured by the camera frontally.
21 To us, this image is primarily metonymic; however, a few viewers with whom we discussed this image indicated that it also suggests a metaphorical link between people and mud.
22 Metaphors include mappings (regular correspondences) from the source (often concrete) into target domains (often abstract) that imply that we transfer our knowledge of the source to the target. Through the source domain of water, we transfer our knowledge about water to the target entity (e.g. migration, or any other entity for which we use water-related words and ideas in our conceptualization).
23 The headline reads: “Everyone cannot do whatever they want on the ground.” The caption reads “One cannot expect small Slovenia to solve anything alone, this is a European problem, says Wolfgang, a volunteer from Austria.”
24 Santa Ana’s (Citation1997) specification of the anti-immigrant metaphor (immigration is dangerous water) is significant in this respect.