Gamers versus zombies? Visual mediation of the citizen/non-citizen encounter in Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’

Abstract

This article identifies the visual representation of Europe's 'refugee crisis' in the media as a key dimension of the communicative architecture of the crisis and its aftermath. Effectively, it argues, the powerful, even iconic, imagery that the media produced and shared during the 2015 'crisis' affirmed ideological frames of incompatible difference, perpetually dividing European citizens and refugees. The paper focuses on some of the fundamental elements of the 2015 crisis's visual grammar to demonstrate how they have (re-)produced popular fears of strangeness and the need for containment and control of foreign bodies. This visual grammar, we argue, imitated and procreated recognisable representations of popular culture to exaggerate newcomers' strangeness and incompatible difference from the national subject. On the one hand, many news media simulated zombies' threatening strangeness in images of refugee massification; on the other, many news media images reaffirmed the decisive power of the national subject over refugees' fate, not unlike the video game player who unilaterally controls a game and takes action when confronted by zombies. This grammar, we argue, symbolically predetermines encounters between citizens and refugees, by emphasising their incompatible difference and newcomers' strangeness.

The digital border: Mobility beyond territorial and symbolic divides

“…If, in digital technologies and migration studies, the symbolic border manifests itself through networked sources of knowledge that may harm migrants’ lives, the second strand of research on media and migration identifies the symbolic border in practices of storytellling – especially, though not exclusively, the journalistic storytelling of migration, in western mediascapes. Literature on the migration ‘crisis’, despite its internal diversity, converges on the fact that such storytelling systematically misrepresent migrants as either victims or villains (Crawley et al, 2016; Berry et al, 2015; Georgiou and Zaborowski, 2016; Musarò, 2017; Zaborowski and Georgiou, 2019). Caught between the positions of helpless sufferer or evil threat, migrants never appear in their own terms and always exist within orientalist narratives that silence and objectify them (Malkki, 1996).…”

Media and immobility: The affective and symbolic immobility of forced migrants

“…and figures (the refugee as victim, the refugee as invader, cultural other, etc.) (see, for example, Zaborowski and Georgiou, 2019). We can ‘refract’ our analytical gaze (Horsti, 2019) by also incorporating the perspectives of forced migrants themselves.…”

The politics and poetics of migrant narratives

“…The narratives crafted by media professionals, notably in the news media, have significant consequences. In their overview of the dichotomous visual grammar of European news media depicting the so-called European refugee crisis, Rafal Zaborowski and Myria Georgiou (2019) notice that through visual ‘refugee massification’, refugees are made into threatening ‘zombies’, requiring nation-states to take firm action, not unlike players of video games (p. 92). It is important also to attend to the transformative potential of how migrant media professionals narrate migration (Ogunyemi, 2015).…”