As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental disaster reach unprecedented leve... more As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states step up their border controls. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories of migration among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they control the narratives of migration as “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants use digital platforms to make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the west, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Chouliaraki and Georgiou develop a holistic theory of the digital border as an as...
Abstract In this brief response to Hasan's critique of Bourdieu, we selectively address thre... more Abstract In this brief response to Hasan's critique of Bourdieu, we selectively address three issues: 1. We discuss Hasan's critique of Bourdieu's view of language as excluding the semologic, in terms of his epistemology of constructivist structuralism; 2. We discuss ...
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion a... more Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Draw...
This article looks back to the rich contributions of this special issue so as to offer reflection... more This article looks back to the rich contributions of this special issue so as to offer reflections on three kinds of challenges that traverse the emerging field of ‘distant suffering studies’: epistemological, conceptual and sociological challenges. It concludes by calling for due attention to be paid to the dialectics of mediation, the co-constitutive relationship among the different ‘moments’ of meaning-production in the circuit of mediation. Such attention, it argues, can substantially enhance the growing theoretical and empirical work in this important new area of Communication Studies.
As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental disaster reach unprecedented leve... more As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states step up their border controls. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories of migration among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they control the narratives of migration as “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants use digital platforms to make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the west, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Chouliaraki and Georgiou develop a holistic theory of the digital border as an as...
Abstract In this brief response to Hasan's critique of Bourdieu, we selectively address thre... more Abstract In this brief response to Hasan's critique of Bourdieu, we selectively address three issues: 1. We discuss Hasan's critique of Bourdieu's view of language as excluding the semologic, in terms of his epistemology of constructivist structuralism; 2. We discuss ...
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion a... more Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Draw...
This article looks back to the rich contributions of this special issue so as to offer reflection... more This article looks back to the rich contributions of this special issue so as to offer reflections on three kinds of challenges that traverse the emerging field of ‘distant suffering studies’: epistemological, conceptual and sociological challenges. It concludes by calling for due attention to be paid to the dialectics of mediation, the co-constitutive relationship among the different ‘moments’ of meaning-production in the circuit of mediation. Such attention, it argues, can substantially enhance the growing theoretical and empirical work in this important new area of Communication Studies.
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