Does the subaltern speak? Migrant voices in digital Europe

Abstract

This article examines a number of digital initiatives where refugees and migrants speak with/to Europe in the context of the "migration crisis". The analysis of four institutional and grassroots initiatives illustrates digital Europe's symbolic articulations of borders that divide people and territories. As argued, the mediated visibility and voice of refugees and migrants matters precisely as the order of appearance (Arendt, 1958) in digital Europe represents a fundamental dimension of the continent's communicative order: revealing who speaks and who is silenced, which actors are heard and which are side-lined in the context of Europe's "migration crisis". The incorporation of refugee and migrant voices in digital Europe shows that voice does not guarantee recognition; rather, its incorporation reveals the complex politics of digital representation: in occasions challenging hegemonic power structures but most often digitally reaffirming bordering power and its symbolical articulations.

The digital border: Mobility beyond territorial and symbolic divides

“…On the other side of the divide, literature on migration and the media has identified, what we call, the symbolic border both in the networked stories and voices of migration produced and circulated through digital technologies (Georgiou, 2018; Leurs and Smets, 2018) and in the journalistic narratives about migration that continue to shape public conversations about human mobility in Europe (Berry et al, 2015; Musarò, 2018; Tyyskä et al, 2018). Literature on digital technologies, to begin with, focuses on the use of smartphones and social media platforms in ‘crisis’ contexts so as to explore the potential of such personalised technologies to shift the power relations of the border.…”

The politics and poetics of migrant narratives

“…Myria Georgiou in her assessment of digital migrant voices in Europe also finds that ‘voice does not guarantee recognition’. She argues on the basis of an analysis of two institutional and two grassroots migrant digital initiatives that while some are ‘challenging hegemonic structures’, most are ‘digitally reaffirming bordering power’ (Georgiou, 2018: 45). In her quantitative analysis of news on refugees in the United Kingdom and the United States, Roopika Risam (2018) found that refugees’ selfies (not news photographs of refugees taking selfies) allow subjects to ‘avoid co-optation’ in stereotypical one-sided narratives (p. 58).…”

Media, communication technologies and forced migration: Promises and pitfalls of an emerging research field

“…But this right to speak is itself embedded in specific power relations. Indeed, those who have succeeded in exerting it are ‘selective voices’ who ‘hold a certain symbolic capital’ (Georgiou, 2018: 45, 54).…”