The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees

eSharp Issue 23 (Spring 2015)

In recent months asylum seekers have once again become front page news in many British newspapers with headlines including: „It‟s good but I don‟t like the food says asylum seeker: 130 migrants move into top hotel‟ (Daily Express, 25th September 2014). While this may reflect a broader increase in stories about immigration making headline news it is also reminiscent of press coverage of forced migrants at the start of the 21st century. This article explores the way in which asylum seekers and refugees have been discursively constructed by the print media in both the UK and Australia between 2001 and 2010. 40 articles were selected for analysis following a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). It was found that the print media, in both the UK and Australia, draw on a number of interpretative repertoires when constructing accounts of refugees and asylum seekers. The principal repertoire found to be used was that of the „unwanted invader‟, which was achieved through the use of metaphors of criminals and water. However, this repertoire was found to be used differently in both media; in Australia the focus was on border protection and keeping „these‟ people out of the country, whereas in the UK the repertoire was used predominantly to convince the reader that refugees and asylum seekers needed to be removed from the country. Consideration is also given to how these accounts changed over the period and what the implications may be now that the topic has once again returned to the front pages of our daily newspapers.

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. The ways in which humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them, their well-being and our sociopolitical systems. Here, we focus on the refugee crisis to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing, which depicts refugees in large groups, affects their dehumanization and the resulting political consequences. Across nine studies (N-total = 3,072), exposure to images of large groups of refugees, especially when depicted in a sea context, resulted in greater implicit dehumanization, as compared with exposure to images depicting small groups. This visual framing was also explicitly evaluated as more dehumanizing independently from textual information. Importantly, after viewing images of large groups of refugees, participants showed increased preference for a more dominant and less trustworthy political leader and reduced support for pro-refugee policie...

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought tog...

2003

This chapter looks at the way the media in the developed world portray refugees and asylum seekers. It is written from the perspective of a journalist working in Australia but with a view to providing some insight into the way the media function in a broader context. I argue that, in general terms, the level of concern and empathy expressed in the media for the plight of refugees and asylum seekers is in inverse relation to their proximity to the place where any given report appears. Viewed from a distance, displaced people are often portrayed as helpless victims of circumstance, deserving of compassion and assistance. This imagery changes dramatically when refugees and asylum seekers make their way to the developed world to seek protection under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Refugees and asylum seekers who display this level of agency suddenly shed the veneer of innocence and become a threat to the order and security of the receiving state. They are transf...

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics, edited by Jenny M. Lewis and Anne Tiernan, 2021

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. This chapter examines ensuing debates, focusing closely on how refugees and asylum seekers are perceived and responded to in relation to the spatial and emotional dynamics that prevail in Australian society and politics. Specifically, the chapter examines how the issue of asylum is intimately connected to and influenced by highly emotional im ages circulating in the national media. To do this, the authors first discuss the history of refugees at Australia's borders. In doing so, the authors underline the key role that politi cal and media representations play in shaping refugee debates and policy. The chapter then undertakes an empirical investigation of two crucial recent periods when refugee debates proliferated in both the media and in politics: August to December 2001 and Oc tober 2009 to September 2011. By conducting a content analysis of front-page coverage in The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the authors focus on the particular vi sual framing that has been used to depict asylum seekers and its emotional and political consequences, highlighting how recurring frames have been used to dehumanize and fur ther displace asylum seekers and refugees in the Australian context. The authors then ar gue that these visual media depictions associate refugees not with humanitarian chal lenges and responsibilities, but instead with threats to sovereignty and security.

This paper explores the visual representation of asylum seekers and refugees delineating how English newspaper imagery constructs such groups as deviant and dangerous. A qualitative visual analysis of nine of the major national newspapers demonstrates how mediated images of asylum seekers focus upon three distinct ‘visual scenarios’ in the discovery of deviance, which collectively demonstrate how the social portrayal of the criminal immigrant fuses the otherness of the stranger with the otherness of the deviant. First, the faceless and de-identified stranger enables the construction of a panoply of feared subjects. Second, stigma is implicitly illustrated, deviance obliquely intimated and ‘spoiled identities’ constructed. Third, the mask is removed, the asylum seeker is identified and their deviant status confirmed. Such a process is reinvented, repeated and reworked in news stories, with deviance becoming increasingly engrained and entrenched in the image of the asylum seeker. This paper details how the repetition of specific visual scenarios in newspaper reporting contribute to the construction of ‘noisy’ panics about asylum seekers and asylum seeking. Moreover, it argues that such imagery is key to the construction of asylum as an issue of security, which necessitates a policy approach that is exclusionary in nature.

2019

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Podlasie w działaniach wojennych w średniowieczu i w czasach nowożytnych, 2023