Media and Migration
Representations, Practices and Reception in the Digital Era
Selected work
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Abstract: #IStandWithGreece promoted a representation of migrants as ‘pawns’; seen like a chess piece, with no value in their own right, literally pushed towards Europe by Turkey, who elevated them into a sizable threat. Despite being diffused by extreme antimigrant Twitterers, we argue that these tweets offer a more overtly racist expression of otherwise mainstream European (Union) discourses and politics on migration. Effectively, #IStandWithGreece’s influencers functioned as Europe’s alter-ego mouthpiece, saying the unsayable using social media, and their affordances contributing to the normalization of an oppressive and restrictive European border management.
#IStandWithGreece “Innocent” Hashtags?
Networks of Intolerance on Twitter
International Journal of Communication
16576-56060-1-PB (1).pdf
Migration & COVID-19
Migrant Racialization on Twitter during a border & a pandemic crisis
International Communication Gazette
Abstract: This work examines the ways the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic re/shaped the migration debate on Twitter. Through co-hashtag network analysis, time-frequency analysis and content analysis, it shows the co-existence of positive (humanitarian) and negative (threat) stances in Twitter relating COVID-19 and migration. These preliminary findings, fit the problematization of migrant representations in the Global North as Eurocentric. In the case of camps, refugees fit well within the victim/helpless frame which usually justifies humanitarianism, this time on health grounds. In the case of the border crisis, migrants fit the also Eurocentric frame of violent/male/inferior other who on top could spread a deadly virus.
Abstract: This article presents a critical analysis of how two elite media publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the New York Times and the Guardian/Observer respectively, represented the so-called European refugee crisis in their editorials. The study foregrounds a media aporia of why Europe did not abide with human rights and democratic values vis-à-vis the refugee drama and a subsequent nostalgia for a European past of democracy and transnational unity that never really existed. These media representations, although sympathetic towards migrants, are inherently Eurocentric, helping to reproduce the existing repressive global migration regime because they do not see the crisis as a continuation of its coloniality but as a rupture.