Imagining Europe's Borders : Commemorative Art of Migrant Tragedies
Digital Islamophobia: The Swedish woman as a figure of pure and dangerous whiteness
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 im…
Witnessing the experience of European bordering: Watching the documentaryUnder den samme himmelin an immigration detention centre
This article draws on theories of bordering and mediated witnessing to examine a documentary film that mediates migrants’ experiences of bordering in Europe. My analysis of Under den samme himmel/Days of Hope shows how the film captures the multiplicity of bordering practices, from geographical to socio-cultural borderings. The analysis is informed by watching and discussing the film in an immigrant detention facility in Finland with people who experienced and eye-witnessed experiences similar to those depicted in the film. This creates a sense of co-presence of the experiential landscapes in the border zones, and the film invites viewers to consider borders not as lines in the landscape, b…
Visibility in mediated borderscapes : The hunger strike of asylum seekers as an embodiment of border violence
In 2012, two Afghan asylum seekers camped outside the Parliament building in Helsinki during a hunger strike that lasted for 72 days. Although the protest was very visible in the city space, the mainstream media and most politicians ignored it. This paper analyzes the protest and its mediation through the concepts of borderscape and visibility. Using methods of visual and discourse analysis, we examine the ways in which the hunger strike protest – and its mediation – negotiate the (in)visibility of borders. We show how the city can be a site for both policing and for politicizing asylum issues. In particular, we focus on the ways in which protesting asylum seekers embody borders and border …
Digital materialities in the diasporic mourning of migrant death
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 …
Anti-Racism from the Margins: Welcoming Refugees at Schengen’s Northernmost Border
Through events of solidarity with refugees that unfolded at the Arctic border between Norway and Russia in 2015, we critically address two common analyses of racism and humanitarianism. First, we argue that the often-claimed explanation that racism results from disenfranchised social class fails to identify solidarities across marginalized groups. Furthermore, as anti-Muslim racism has become more mainstream in the Nordic region, solidarity with refugees offers critical positions in relation to political centers. Second, the case demonstrates how humanitarian action and politicized refugee activism are not necessarily separate forms of action but more entangled forms of engagement. The case…
Live free or die motionless : Walking the migrant path from Italy to France
This essay and the photographs examine visual traces of irregular mobility in the border landscape between Italy and France. The ruined buildings and objects witness decades of movement of undocumented people on this old migrant path across the mountains. By taking the theoretical concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) the essay argues that the Path of Hope can be thought of as a memory site through which the issues of migration in contemporary Europe can be seen in a more sustainable light. The ruins and discarded objects link memories of different places – including different border zones – in ways that allow us to critically examine borders as a practice – rather than as exis…
Introduction: Border Memories
This chapter introduces the context of the book. It first argues that the public debate about refugees and border crossing in Europe tends to be ahistorical, treating the situation as a sudden emergency appearing from nowhere. Thinking in terms of bordering, as a verb, underlines that borders require continuous symbolic and material construction and that borders have consequences. The perspective of bordering calls for attention to temporality. This volume adds the analytical lenses of memory and temporality to the critical and political project to think beyond the oppressive bordering taking place in Europe. By doing so, the book broadens the scope of border studies, which tend to focus on…
The ethics of hospitality in changing journalism: The response to the rise of the anti-immigrant movement in Finnish media publicity
This article examines the role of the media in the rise of nationalist populism in Finland. The interplay between social media and mainstream media has facilitated the emergence of anti-immigrant agendas into the public debate, which has strengthened nationalist populist politics, despite mainstream journalism following professional ethics of balanced reporting. The article concludes that the traditional journalistic framework of agenda setting is not morally adequate for the new fragmented media environment. It proposes the ethics of hospitality (Derrida, Silverstone) with an emphasis on transnationalism as a moral goal for a multi-ethnic public sphere where everyone has the right to voic…
Transnational Mediated Commemoration of Migrant Deaths at the Borders of Europe
Overview of Nordic media research on immigration and ethnic relations : from text analysis to the study of production, use and reception
AbstractNordic media and communication research had reacted to the ethnically/racially and culturally changing societies since the 1980s, and the multidisciplinary field of migration, ethnic relations and the media has been shaped. This overview draws upon existing body of research, particularly on recent literature since the early 2000s, and aims to sketch out the rough lines of Nordic media research by mapping and comparing developments in this area. In addition, it points out some major outcomes and, finally, suggests future developments. The longest line of research is based on text analysis, mostly quantitative and qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis of majority media’s…
Visibility without voice: Media witnessing irregular migrants in BBC online news journalism
In the analysis of journalistic representation of irregular migration to Europe, rather little attention is given to the variation of modes and genres of journalism. Most studies focus on text in ‘old media’ and the news genre. This article analyses affordances of different modalities and genres of online journalism in framing irregular migrants. Media framing in BBC online news coverage of a mediatised conflict in Spain, defined as a ‘migration crisis’, is analysed with multimodal social semiotics. While mediation makes global audiences witness tragedies at Europe's borders and online journalism affords more voice and deliberation for migrant sources, the frames of threat and victim domina…
Refugee testimonies enacted : voice and solidarity in media art installations
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…
Solidarities in the Arctic Border
Celebrating Multiculturalism: European Multicultural Media Initiatives as Anti-Racist Practices
Looking back on 20 years of European media policy, which reflects issues of ethnic minorities and immigrants there are significant developments in both policy and implementation. The recent European initiatives to increase cultural diversity in the media at a high institutional level stress that ethnic minorities and new immigrants should get access to both the screen and the newsroom. The increased policies and activity in this domain are a result of the perceived threat of the non-integration of the minority population in Europe. Signs of “lack of social cohesion” are interpreted from key events that have been heavily aired in the media: disturbances in French suburbs, the Danish cartoon …
Koulu turvallisena tilana karkotusuhan alla
Balancing the Frame of Threat: Uninvited Migrants in the Finnish News
This chapter analyzes Finnish news journalism concerning asylum seekers and undocumented migration. It focuses on 'the variety of others', the media not only construct a division between 'us' and 'them,' but also create varieties of 'others.' The solution to the problems related to otherness is not, however, to recognize that we are all different, as the currently popular discourse that celebrates 'cultural diversity' often claims. This chapter scrutinizes the frames of 'threat' and 'victim' which are typical of the media’s coverage of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. To identify the narrative, I have analyzed what is defined as problems and what is offered as the causes of and sol…
Memorializing mass deaths at the border: two cases from Canberra (Australia) and Lampedusa (Italy)
In this paper, we compare two seemingly very similar instances in which individuals and organizations within the borders of the global North have memorialized the deaths of irregular migrants at sea: the SIEV X memorial in Australia’s national capital Canberra, and the Giardino della memoria (Garden of Remembrance) on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Unlike ephemeral manifestations of grief, potentially these memorials have effects that reach well beyond their creation. We relate the differences between the memorials to the contexts within which they were created: an immediate local response involving people directly affected by the disaster’s aftermath, on the one hand, and a delayed natio…
Book review: Radha Hegde, Mediating Migration
The Slow Violence of Deportability
In 2015, Finland, like other European countries, received an unprecedented number of asylum seekers. Later, in the aftermath of what we prefer to call the ‘refugee reception crisis’, the deportation of those who had received negative asylum decisions began. The Finnish Immigration Service significantly tightened its policies after 2015. Increasingly strict asylum criteria have resulted in deportations at a level never seen before. Furthermore, protests against deportations have increased and become publicly salient. In this chapter we theorize deportation as a form of slow violence that hurts not only its main target but also people nearby. While a forced removal can be seen as a single, po…
Temporality in cosmopolitan solidarity : Archival activism and participatory documentary film as mediated witnessing of suffering at Europe’s borders
This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance o…
Managed Multiculturalism in Finnish Media Initiatives
This paper focuses on Finnish mainstream journalism featuring multiculturalism. Three different initiatives are analysed with a qualitative text method founded on discourse and frame analysis. Finnish mainstream journalism took a multicultural turn in the mid-990s, two decades later than in neighbouring Sweden where similar initiatives were launched in the 1970s. The paper takes a critical look at the power relations these initiatives assert or transgress, how multicultural discourses position various actors in society, and how the mainstream media encounter cultural and ethnic differences in a changing demographic situation with a positive intention.
Mourning Missing Migrants
While the term missing refers to various instances and practices, we focus on the bodies of deceased migrants that remain unidentified, and on the inability of families to mourn someone when there is no body to grieve for. We deploy some ethnographic fragments of how Italian communities sometimes mourn those who are buried without a name and we describe the many problems of mourning someone whose fate is unknown through a discussion of the notion of ‘ambiguous loss’. Our contribution articulates some of the politics around deaths in migration by considering how missing migrants and their bodies are mourned in multiplicity.
The role of social media in the rise of right-wing populism in Finland
Right-wing populism is typically entangled with xenophobic nationalism and neo-conservatism, which often usher in racism and misogyny. In this chapter, the authors take Finland as a case study to examine the role of media technology in the rise of right-wing populism. They demonstrate the strengthening of the far-right ideology on and through social media from the beginning of 2010s. It focuses on the mediated construction of two entangled ideologies in the right-wing populist movement racism and misogyny. In early spring 2020, the debate about Turkey opening its EU border to refugees made Jussi Halla-aho eagerly participate in this discussion in the parliament and on Twitter now as the cha…
Techno-cultural opportunities: the anti-immigration movement in the Finnish mediascape
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 re…
Karkotukset ja hidas väkivalta
Karkotuksiin liittyvä ”hidas väkivalta” on ennen muuta pelkoa ja epävarmuutta tulevaisuudesta, ja se uuvuttaa ja näännyttää kohteensa vähitellen. Hidas väkivalta ravistelee myös karkotuksen tai karkotusuhan kohteena olevien ihmisten lähipiiriä. nonPeerReviewed
Conditions of cultural citizenship: intersections of gender, race and age in public debates on family migration
This article analyses problem framings in public debates on family migration in Finland. The study focuses on the less-examined category of age and how it intersects with gender, race and religion. We examine the discursive context within which parliamentarians and the media negotiate questions of migration policies, belonging and citizenship. Our analysis identifies problem framings by combining frame analysis with the ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ approach, which understands policies as problematizations. We found that the debates held up the rather common notion of vulnerable women and children as groups that tighter family migration policies protect. The debates excluded cert…
Refracting the Analytical Gaze: Studying Media Representations of Migrant Death at the Border
Witnessing the experience of European bordering : watching the documentary Under den samme himmel in an immigration detention centre
This article draws on theories of bordering and mediated witnessing to examine a documentary film that mediates migrants’ experiences of bordering in Europe. My analysis of Under den samme himmel/Days of Hope shows how the film captures the multiplicity of bordering practices, from geographical to socio-cultural borderings. The analysis is informed by watching and discussing the film in an immigrant detention facility in Finland with people who experienced and eye-witnessed experiences similar to those depicted in the film. This creates a sense of co-presence of the experiential landscapes in the border zones, and the film invites viewers to consider borders not as lines in the landscape, b…
Performance of memory : testimonies of survival and rescue at Europe's border
The Cultural Diversity Turn:
Luonnonvoimat Välimerellä : metaforat, kartat ja pakolaisuus
The Slow Violence of Deportability
The Memory Politics of Migration at Borderscapes
Publisher's PDF nonPeerReviewed
Curating Objects from the European Border Zone: The “Lampedusa Refugee Boat”
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…
Communicative memory of irregular migration: The re-circulation of news images on YouTube
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 alte…