Suchergebnisse

Survival and Witness at Europe's Border focuses on one of the most mediatized migrant disasters in Europe. On October 3, 2013, an overcrowded fishing boat carrying Eritrean refugees caught fire near Lampedusa, Italy, where 368 people died. Karina Horsti shows with empathy and passion how this disaster produced a kaleidoscope of afterlives that continue to assume different forms depending on the position of the witness or survivors. Pasts and futures intersect in the present when people who were touched by the disaster engage with its memory and politics. Horsti underscores how the perspective of survival can envision a way forward from a horrific unsustainable present. Survival and Witness at Europe's Border develops the concept of survival to rethink border deaths beyond the structures and processes that produce the murderous border and constitute the focus of critical migration studies. It demonstrates how the process of survival transforms people and societies. Survival is productive, Horsti argues, shifting the focus in migration studies from apparatuses of control to emphasize the agency and subjectivity of refugees

"Through the analysis of representation and memorialization, this book examines the afterlives of a deadly migrant shipwreck in Italy in 2013 among different witnesses: Eritrean survivors, families of victims, Eritrean diaspora, rescuers and locals in Lampedusa and Sicily, and citizens across Europe"--

"A crisis cause by refugees! Unprecedented flows of migrants! This important book offers a corrective against many of the misconceptions that dominate our public debates on borders and mobility. However, more than challenging false and distorted claims, it also tracks the feelings of people who have crossed borders and examines communities where different people have built lives together. This timely collection of essays addresses the aesthetics and politics of border memories and opens new horizons of hope and understanding." —Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne, Australia "This compelling collection of essays provides insightful perspectives on border regimes and memory practices. Each chapter offers a rich exploration of the complex manner in which memory, aesthetics and mediation shape the politics of bordering practices in Europe. With its theoretical and methodological range, this book significantly extends the interdisciplinary understanding of migration and borders." —Professor Radha S. Hegde, New York University, USA and author of Mediating Migration (2016) Increasingly, the European Union and its member states have exhibited a lack of commitment to protecting the human rights of non-citizens. Thinking beyond the oppressive bordering taking place in Europe requires new forms of scholarship. This book provides such examples, offering the analytical lenses of memory and temporality. It also identifies ways of collaborating with people who experience the violence of borders. Established scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, migration and border studies, arts, and cultural studies offer important contributions to the so-called "European refugee crisis"

This article examines memorialization among the family and friends of those who have died at the world's deadliest border in the Mediterranean Sea. Digital media platforms are central spaces for new, innovative forms of coping with ambiguous loss or the inability to mourn over a dead body. The analysis focuses on the role of digital media technologies and the relationship between digital and material elements in memorialization. I examine the creation and circulation of digital objects of memorialization: visual assemblages in which the material and digital intertwine. The analysis demonstrates that digital media practices are not separate from the material world, nor do they make mourning and memorializing less human or less authentic. On the contrary, in transnational and mobile circumstances, digital technologies facilitate human, ethical engagement with complicated grief. Memorializing is crucial for both the private and the public lives of diasporic communities. In Europe, public recognition of the memorialization of refugee deaths would increase understanding of the human consequences of the border, allowing the dead to be seen as individuals with human relationships rather than as numbers.

This article examines how two media art installations in which celebrity actors enact refugee storytelling create awareness of the complexities of representation and solidarity with refugees. The celebrity actor produces familiarity, or "audibility," for contents of the stories. Yet at the same time, the familiarity of the actor alerts the visitor to the politics of listening. The artworks therefore produce the potential for ethical listening, which requires interrogation into the privileges of the listener. The artworks produce a kind of sociality different from that of typical celebrity advocacy. Instead of being at the center of attention, the actors' presence draws critical attention to the politics of listening. ; peerReviewed

The cultural politics of the present encourage museums and artists to seek an ethical vision within Europe navigating the knowledge of ongoing mass death at the border. This is one explanation for the interest in objects symbolising present-day irregular border crossing among museum curators, artists, designers and activists. Wooden fishing boats, inflatable dinghies and life jackets appear regularly in exhibitions and installations. This chapter focuses on the meaning of "the Lampedusa boat" and argues that the narrative context within which the boats are exhibited guides the work of imagination that animates the object. While exhibiting the boats carries the critical potential to relocate the border and make it visible, this potential is disrupted by a political context that simultaneously militarises and humanitarianises the border. ; peerReviewed

This article analyses user-generated YouTube cut and mix videos of irregular migration as producing communicative memory of those who have suffered at Europe's external borders. Visual and textual analyses examine a neglected perspective on the study of media representations of migration by examining a particular practice through which people engage with news images and participate in (re)construction of collective memory in relation to irregular migration. The analysis shows that while hegemonic Eurocentric imagery prevails also in the vernacular amateur productions, re-mixing different cultural productions nevertheless complicates the representation of irregular migration and affords alternative positions. The article examines an emerging area in memory studies: practices of vernacular commemoration and its convergence with more institutionalized and professional media and memory practices. The videos are communicative reactions to emotionally disturbing news images of suffering – the public's re-articulations of migration and migration control, which nevertheless are constrained into the existing mainstream media framings and entertainment economies. This type of performative citizenship is crucial for social equality, particularly since non-performance of memory in relation to contemporary migration tragedies has dominated European public spheres. ; peerReviewed

This article addresses the digital culture of Islamophobic bloggers, focusing on the online circulation of a forensic photograph of a Swedish woman who was assaulted. The analysis shows how through appropriating this image, the bloggers created a unifying, imagined whiteness in the transnational Islamophobic network. The empirical analysis clarifies how this one image migrated and transformed in the blogosphere and legitimated the recurrent discursive trope of "Muslim rape." This image became a subcultural "memory freeze frame" crystallizing the contemporary Islamophobic ideologies articulated in connection to race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality. The viral circulation of this image constructed a cultural, gendered, and racial Swedish whiteness, imagined to have become victimized by both Islam and liberal feminism, and therefore requiring global protection.

Horsti's article analyses how transformations in the media environment shaped the political success of the anti-immigration movement in Finland from 2003 to 2013. The qualitative textual analysis of blogs and mainstream media debates that relate to racism and the national populist Finns Party demonstrates how changes in the mediascape in general and in new media technology in particular have provided opportunities for the emerging anti-immigration movement. These changes facilitated the earlier development of the Finns Party but the fragmentation of online space later hindered the internal coherence of the movement and its integration into the populist party political family. In order to regain unity, the Finns Party performed the public scapegoating of individuals for racist speech, thus distancing itself from racism. Horsti shows that, rather than being isolated and marginal, the anti-immigration movement and the 'uncivil' public sphere overlap with traditional politics and the mainstream media. ; peerReviewed