Popular Communications in the Populist Political Moment: Editorial Introduction to Special Issue 'Refugee Socialities and the Media'

Editorial Introduction to Special Issue on Refugee Socialities and the Media

This special issue presents a collection of empirical studies that consider the broad range of relational modalities offered up by diverse media and communicative forms against the backdrop of the so-called European refugee crisis and an array of refugee experiences in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States. At a time when the number of refugees worldwide has increased for six consecutive years—across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced (UNHCR, 2018)—media and artistic narratives serve as “resources for judgment” (Silverstone, 2007), especially when we consider the failure of the international community to advance responses to the global refugee crisis more coherent and collaborative than piecemeal approaches. Media and artistic narratives can, on one hand, forge for their audiences imaginative bonds of solidarity with refugees fleeing war and catastrophe, and, on the other hand, fuel fears and mobilize latent anxieties about the “strange” uninvited arrivals camped right outside the nation’s borders. Among the diverse, uneven, and potentially rivalrous communities of professional and precarious migrants and refugees, popular communication genres and networked technologies may open up or close down their “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004, 2018) by either making idealized images of security, belonging, and recognition seem ever plausible or keeping these hopelessly out of sight.

In this light, it is crucial to take stock of the potentialities for affective socialities and political solidarity that popular media and communicative forms offer in this current historical moment of increasing flows of displaced people and the chronic underfunding of the humanitarian sector that is at the heart of what Amnesty International has called a “global solidarity crisis” (Amnesty International, 2018). We ultimately hope that this special issue brings into focus the everyday life dimension of the migrant experience: It is through socialities of hospitality, solidarity, or hostility and their frictions that we see most clearly the embodiment of the processes of inclusion and exclusion and, ultimately, the possibilities for belonging in contexts of displacement (Amin, 2012; Amrith, 2015).

This special issue began as a conversation among several authors in the collection at the 2017 International Communication Association Annual Conference in San Diego, CA, together with the Popular Communication journal editor-in-chief Miyase Christensen. That conversation took place 20 months after the shocking image of Aylan Kurdi’s dead body slumped in the Greek shores prompted political outrage and humanitarian response upon its global circulation. We reflected then on the challenges and opportunities posed by tragic images of refugees as ideal victims with other competing imaginaries of refugees as economic and cultural threats to the nation-state. At the same time, that initial discussion took place with some level of bewilderment dealt by recent shocks of the Brexit referendum that took place 10 months before and Donald Trump’s election from 6 months before.

With greater distance to these events that at the time may have felt exceptional, this expanded collection of articles on Refugee Socialities and the Media grounds its reflection on today’s contemporary crisis on migration and its mediation within the broader historical antecedents and lineages of “mediatized global populisms” (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017). It also more comprehensively accounts for the affective and expressive dimension of the refugee crisis by discussing not only visual representations in mainstream news narratives (Zaborowski & Georgiou), artistic interventions (Horsti; Ong, & Rovisco), and grass-roots digital protest (Nikunen), but also the mediated socialities experienced by refugees themselves (Twigt) and those of their fellow migrants who regard them with some ambivalence (Cabañes). This collection also intends to build on insights raised from recent academic collections on media and migration, including the special issue of Popular Communication on “Connected Migrants” edited by Leurs and Ponzanesi (2018) and the Social Media + Society special issue “Forced Migrants and Digital Connectivity” edited by Koen Leurs and Kevin Smets (2018). Similar to Leurs and Ponzanesi’s stance (2018), we are concerned with how the mediated socialities of migrants and refugees occur in contexts where cosmopolitan openness and hospitality can operate in tandem with hostility, the fear of the “other,” and a retreat into ethnic absolutism. We take forward these collections’ interest to the nuances and specificities by which popular and digital media create opportunities for cosmopolitanism and openness but also heighten risks for encapsulation and domination (see also Christensen & Janson, 2015).

In this introduction to the special issue, we aim to specifically discuss three distinct yet interrelated themes surrounding popular communication in this current moment of mediatized global populism. We argue that popular media and artistic forms can enact diverse kinds of mediated socialities ranging from solidarity and hospitality to hostility. We discuss how the articles in this collection take different methodological approaches and analytical lenses to sketch out distinct motivations and tensions that inform particular enactments of the refugee status in this historical moment of rising authoritarian populisms and anti-immigrant sentiment.

The popular as a working through

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Gerard Araud, the French ambassador to Washington, DC, tweeted his shock and dismay at a collapsing world order, then appeared to delete his tweet: “Après Brexit et cette élection, tout est désormais possible. Un monde s’effondre devant nos yeux. Un vertige,” he wrote, which translates as “After Brexit and this election, anything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness,” in English (in The Telegraph, 2016).

His seemingly personal and off-the-cuff tweet is but one among a large chorus of disbelief that reverberated in social media not only through pithy stream-of-consciousness 140-character tweets but also through highly emotional posts and darkly humorous memes including from Mexican immigrants in the United States. Latina host and actress Grace Parra tweeted, “Seriously … how do we, as Mexicans, rebuild after this? How do we regain confidence? How do we feel wanted or welcome? #electionday” (in The Telegraph, 2016).

Many attempted to find a suitable frame by which to contain that which escaped prediction and genre. The fictional dystopic drama Black Mirror (Netflix, 2011–present) even chimed in through its official Twitter account with a cryptic post, “This isn’t an episode. This isn’t marketing. This is reality,” seemingly responding to popular expressions that attempted to fictionalize what had just occurred.

A central tenet in media and cultural studies is that popular culture and mainstream media are significant social forces in domesticating the exceptional event, be it shocking election or the so-called “crisis” or emergency of mass migration into Europe. Familiar frames provide comfort and continuity, as John Ellis remarks that “television’s genres, known to all, provide stability in a system in which witnessed events of all kinds and their interpretation ceaselessly whirl around” (Ellis, 2000, p. 103).

While this process of working through the unfamiliar into the realm of the familiar is the natural and even necessary work of popular communication, Roger Silverstone (2007) nevertheless identifies the moral dilemma that lies at the heart of this project: In the rush to contain the catastrophic into predictable tropes and moral blacks and whites, do the media not commit an ethical failure through their easy simplification and stereotyping? Applying this to the current political moment marked by xenophobia, authoritarianism, and populist leadership, it is important to think about the reliance of mainstream media on the typical frames and genres at their disposal: Should they double down on traditional standards held dear by their profession, or should they take up the risky new challenge of reimagining their relationships with their mainstream and minority audiences?

Rafal Zaborowski and Myria Georgiou make a major contribution to this discussion in the first article in this special issue. They find that European audiences and refugees are positioned by mainstream news in amoral positions of distant videogamer hero figures versus objectified masses of zombies in virtual social relations. Through visual analysis of media images in 11 countries, the article argues that the figures of the zombie and the videogame player structured the encounter between European audiences and refugees and thus contributed to the reproduction of familiar narratives of fear and control. Zaborowski and Georgiou show how the visual identities of refugees as zombies, and Europeans as active hero gamers, are deeply entrenched in a grammar of nonnegotiable difference that reduces the figure of the refugee to the condition of an unrecognized entity. They also suggest that mediated strangeness needs to be understood against the backdrop of the architecture of humanitarian securitization and discursive constructions of the European citizen as someone who should take control of the crisis. Ultimately, the mediated socialities cultivated here—of hostile militarization at worst or patronizing heroism—at best fall short of the normative prescription of Shani Orgad, who argues that media representations should aim to foster ambivalence in how we think and feel about our “others” (Orgad, 2012, pp. 108–110).

The second article of this issue follows the trail of popular media as their narratives and images reach the homes of settled migrants in the United Kingdom. Using the insightful tools of audience reception analysis, Jason Cabañes exposes how settled migrants imagine the lives of refugees and in the process reflect on their own precarious position in post-Brexit UK society. Cabañes discovers a “compromised solidarity” that is expressed in this media reception: Filipino migrant professionals draw from their own distinct experiences of social exclusion and marginalization to express discourses of empathy while also asserting a privileged position of “superior belongingness” to the United Kingdom. Cabañes’s article offers rare insight into how media narratives of desirable British multiculturalism in the Great British Bakeoff and undesirable refugee swarms invite these professional migrants into a position of easy complicity with the status quo rather than forging strong political solidarity with their vulnerable proximal others. We see Cabañes’s article as deepening our understanding of how popular communication is refracted into latent anxieties of populist publics easily seduced by neat distinctions of the common people and constructed enemy others—a project that media studies urgently needs to contribute to (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017).

The articles by Zaborowski and Georgiou and Cabañes highlight how media representations shape and constrain the popular imagination of the refugee. In Cabañes’s article, distance from refugees is underpinned by a compromised solidarity that prevents United Kingdom-based Filipino migrants from imagining fuller solidarity with newly arrived migrants, while in Zaborowski and Georgiou’s contribution, mediated strangeness is sustained by a visual grammar of absolute and incompatible difference that cements fear and hostility toward refugees. Taken together, these two articles highlight how media responses to current flows of refugees point to the limits of the mainstream media in potentially building solidarities between citizens and asylum seekers. This resonates with research that has looked into how media representations of refugees tap into a repertoire of securitized fears and anxieties about migration and asylum in the European continent (see, e.g., Tyler, 2017). Notably, while the universalization of the figure of the refugee is not new (Malkki, 1995), we must also acknowledge that current flows of asylum seekers and displaced people are categories that are growing more conflated, and that a more generalized notion of everyone on the move goes in tandem with the retreat from ideals of multiculturalism (Mountz, 2011, p. 256) and the rise of European populism. For better or worse, these two articles emphasize how the media continue to convey deeply entrenched discursive constructions of refugees as a threat to the community of citizens, and that such representations fail to do justice to the human face and voices of individual refugees.

The popular and the alternative

Nick Couldry’s (2003) important work Media Rituals has previously highlighted the significance of popular media when they make claims of special access to and the ability to speak for the “center” of society. Media criticism of mainstream media is, therefore, an important intervention when it exposes symbolic processes of inclusion and exclusion in the dominant representations of nation and community (Chouliaraki, 2006; Orgad, 2012). While the contributions by Zaborowski and Georgiou and Cabañes hint that mediated encounters with refugees in the mainstream media prevent the emergence of alternative imaginaries of difference and restrict the expression of solidarity, the contributions by Horsti and Ong and Rovisco deliberately move outside the media “centers” by thoughtfully considering the significance of artistic spaces for challenging mainstream narratives and fostering alternative mediated socialities.

Karina Horsti’s article reflects on the social value of artistic installations and in particular the creative productions of documentary arts for outlining an ethical vision in our troubled times and promoting solidarity with refugees. Through a close reading and comparison of artistic productions of Finnish artist Timo Wright and South African artist Candice Breitz, Horsti is able to reflect on the productive tensions between the popular and the alternative in cultivating social solidarity. Both artists make strategic use of celebrities to mediate and “give voice” to refugees in their creative installations that, on one hand, potentially expand reach and appeal to broader audiences while, on the other hand, risking distraction by ultimately becoming the center of attention. Horsti shows how the distinctive representational strategies employed in both installations result in very different forms of mediated listening and storytelling. While in Wright’s The Long Journey Home the fusion of historically situated memories of fleeing in a single and unified narrative invites solidarity with contemporary refugees among Finnish audiences, Breitz’s Love Story/Wilson Must Go is more multivocal. Here, the potential for developing a more global solidarity with refugees emerges in a context of reception where audiences are invited to interrogate the privileged positions of the celebrity, the artist, and the spectator.

Karina Horsti’s contribution is concerned with examining how contemporary art can foster solidarity with refugees by inviting the audience to develop a critical position toward the complex condition of present-day refugees, whereas Jonathan Corpus Ong and Maria Rovisco’s article follows this analytical thread by examining the promises and perils facing artistic productions that specifically promote convivial socialities. In the context of crisis, convivial artistic productions that trigger affective registers of humor or escapism potentially reconstitute and humanize their subjects of representation by conferring agency. But there is a fine line between summoning hope and trivializing tragedy. Ong and Rovisco trace the convivial productions about the refugee crisis that occur in both centers (artistic productions aimed at privileged audiences in the West) and peripheries (artistic events aimed at refugees in the camp) by revealing how they cultivate diverse qualities of togetherness that have productive yet fragile potentials for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. For Ong and Rovisco one of the consolations of convivial culture is precisely its potential for providing templates for future action and forms of sociality. They illuminate how artistic convivial interventions that exude healing, empathy, and reflexivity, despite the risk of getting trapped into an “aesthetic of injury” (Salverson, 1999) that constructs the refugee as a victim, can nurture the imagination of alternative forms of togetherness within and beyond contexts of artistic production and reception.

What is ultimately at stake in these two contributions is how the arts constitute an important site for fostering forms of sociality, such as mediated listening and conviviality, which have the potential to build solidarity between refugees and citizens more readily than other genres of media and popular communication. While this is a process fraught with tensions and limitations, Horsti and Ong and Rovisco’s articles reveal how artistic contexts of production and reception produce alternative imaginaries of difference that can potentially challenge hostility and fear of refugees. Taken together, both articles encourage media and migration studies to consider the diverse and unconventional locations by which alternative representations to discourses of xenophobia on one hand, and ideal victimhood on the other hand, might emerge. This is also to say that more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which artistic genres express culturally embedded (and often socially contested) models of how social change may occur in culturally diverse societies (Mische, 2009). What responsibilities do popular figures such as celebrities have in making plausible such narratives and imaginaries of care, hope, hospitality, and fraternity? And what gets lost in translation when creative mediations produced in the peripheries traverse to the sites of the popular or commercial? Interestingly, not all media responses to the refugee crisis fall back on the restricted templates of those media discourses that tend to privilege one-dimensional representations of the refugee that are strongly underpinned by either infantilized images of pure victimhood (as is the case in humanitarian discourses) or images of the dangerous others. We recognize, for example, Thomas Olesen’s investigation (2017) of the diffusion of the Alan Kurdi photographs, where he traces how creative activists recreate and remediate photographs into new forms and genres beyond the limits of mainstream media institutions. He shows how in the context of a highly individualized, creative, and memetic protest dynamics, the photographs of a drowned refugee child, although bound to exaggerations, dilutions, and manipulations of the factual basis of the original photograph and event, have the potential to generate solidarity toward the performer and the original event. In the special issue of Popular Communication on “Connected Migrants,” Leurs and Ponzanesi (2018) further note how the phenomenon of digitally connected refugees unsettles mainstream images of destitute and powerless refugees fleeing from war, famine, and other atrocities. This special issue adds to these debates by zooming in on diverse possibilities in the media ecology where creative mediations of the refugee crisis have surfaced.

The political and the ordinary

The final two articles in the volume contribute to the emerging field of “digital migration studies” (Leurs & Smets, 2018) in their focus on digital networked technologies as used in zones of safety to convey identification and solidarity with refugees (in Kaarina Nikunen’s article on selfie activism) and in zones of danger and displacement by refugees themselves (in Mirjam Twigt’s article on media in the everyday lives of Iraqi dwellers in Jordan).

We recognize here that discourses around humanitarian technologies have changed quite dramatically from the initial celebration that greeted them in the sector and that many academics have argued against (Chouliaraki, 2013; Latonero & Kift, 2018; Madianou et al., 2015; Ong & Combinido, 2018). With greater awareness of the vulnerabilities of digital and mobile platforms to circulating disinformation and “fake news” (Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Ong & Cabañes, 2018), even promoting “state-sponsored trolling” (Nyst & Monaco, 2018), we are alarmed at the potentials of digital platforms to cause or exacerbate humanitarian crises. From the coordination of lynch mobs via Whatsapp in India, to the normalization of hate speech in Facebook against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and to the spread of antirefugee sentiment by Facebook influencers in Germany, communities in crisis now face heightened physical and digital threats while at the same time remaining dependent on these same technologies for lifesaving information, family connection, and—for refugees and other ethnic minorities—assimilation and acculturation to the host society. Thus, one of the aims of this special issue is precisely to encourage future studies to further explore the interrelation of digital and physical threats in contexts of crises. In this issue, we specifically consider the ambivalent potentials of digital media for both political organization and coping.

Kaarina Nikunen’s article examines how the digital environment “expands our understanding of the political” by fusing and recombining creative insurgency, carnivalisque revelry, and ethical spectacle.” With a focus on the Finnish articulation of the “Once I Was a Refugee” selfie campaign, where former refugees in Finland circulated personal narratives of belonging and solidarity on Facebook and Twitter, Nikunen discovers the collective force of bottom-up political expressions. She argues how, in this particular case, selfie activism expands the political space where voice can be exercised and recognized while also challenging, discursively and visually, dominant narratives and images of singular citizenship. Nikunen examines this case tenderly, recognizing that it is difficult to speak from a refugee position without being drawn into a discourse of deservedness or being rendered voiceless and marginal. The article unfolds the conflicting dynamics of a selfie campaign that, on the one hand, conveys mundane expressions of multilayered citizenship and brings pride and joy to the former refugee subjects, and on the other, exhibits a neoliberal trope by equating public performances of good citizenship with the fragility of belonging of those who must continuously prove that they are good, grateful, and deserving refugees.

The final article in our volume offers rare and unprecedented access to the everyday lives of refugees themselves and the significance of media in securing ontological security. Drawing on ethnographic research with Iraqi urban refugees living a displaced existence in Jordan, Mirjam Twigt’s piece examines the phenomenon of absent presence—this refers to the feelings and ambivalence that experiences of prolonged displacement bring about—by exploring how gendered and generational mediated socialities become crucial for acting against such feelings of displacement. She shows, for example, how the use of highly personalized smartphones enabled young Iraqi refugees not only to carve out a private sense of place by being visibly engaged with people, place, and practices elsewhere, but also to evade parental practices of intense television news consumption within the same physical space. Twigt’s article offers a compelling argument for the ways in which the mediated socialities of urban Iraqi refugees in Jordan helped them maintain a sense of normality in everyday life, while also fostering their separation from the physical world where they struggle to belong. In their nuanced analyses, both Nikunen and Twigt’s contributions show how digital networked technologies offer a whole new range of possibilities for refugees to connect with others, whether in ordinary everyday life contexts or in spaces of digital activism. Yet both authors are cautious to emphasize that the digital connections thereby enabled can be empowering as much as constraining or disabling in the makeup of refugee socialities.

Conclusions

To conclude, our hope is that the contributions to this special issue offer a springboard for scholarship in media and migration studies to interrogate the tensions between bottom-up creative and resistant practices (Ong and Rovisco, Horsti, Nikunen) and ordinary mediated practices (Twigt), which open up the possibility of new forms of sociality and imaginaries of difference, and the top-down architecture of governance and control, which continues to inform the popular imagination of refugees as a dehumanized and undifferentiated mass or as undeserving strangers (Zaborowski and Georgiou, Cabañes). In her recent book (2018, p. 173) the literary scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge insightfully argues that “although we are rarely conscious of it, being a sovereign citizen requires navigating the border between two states of being at once: self-governance (we exercise our agency as political citizens) and submitting to governance (in liberal societies we also agree to contract that agency out).” The suggestion that being a citizen is also a matter of self-governance resonates with our proposition that certain artistic spaces and spaces of online activism (e.g., performative selfie activism) constitute diverse and unconventional sites where solidarity between refugees and citizens can emerge and where refugees can matter as subjects. Yet all the contributions recognize that, in some way or another, mediated refugee socialities of solidarity, hospitality, and hostility are powerfully constrained by the intensification of citizenship as a technology of governance that ensures that certain categories of people remain disqualified and excluded from national citizenship (see Tyler & Marciniak, 2013, p. 144). Thus, one must recognize that the phenomenon of digitally connected refugees (Leurs & Ponzanesi, 2018) does not necessarily empower refugees in absolute terms (see Twigt, this issue; Nikunen, this issue), and that traditional media institutions such as the printed press and television continue to hold immense power in the production and consumption of popular representations of refugees that foster hostility and fear of the “other.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [Visiting Senior Fellowship 2018] and the British Council [Newton Fund Institutional Links 216314572].