How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants
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The book explores how we understand global conflicts as they relate to the “European refugee crisis”, and draws on a range of empirical fieldwork carried out in the UK and Italy. It examines how global conflict has been constructed in both countries through media representations – in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news. In so doing, it examines the role played by historical amnesia about legacies of imperialism – and how this leads to a disavowal of responsibility for the causes why people flee their countries. The book explores how this understanding in turn shapes institutional and popular responses in receiving countries, ranging from hostility—such as the framing of refugees by politicians, as 'economic migrants' who are abusing the asylum system; to solidarity initiatives. Based on interviews and workshops with refugees in both countries, the book develops the concept of “migrantification” – in which people are made into migrants by the state, the media and members of society. In challenging the conventional expectation for immigrants to tell stories about their migration journey, the book explores experiences of discrimination as well as acts of resistance. It argues that listening to those on the sharpest end of the immigration system can provide much-needed perspective on global conflicts and inequalities which challenges common Eurocentric misconceptions. Interludes, interspersed between chapters, explore these issues in another way through songs, jokes and images.
Kirsten Forkert is Reader in Media Theory at Birmingham City University
Federico Oliveri is Research Fellow at the University of Pisa
Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London
Janna Graham is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London