aylan kurdi

How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual 'inner states'. Emotional bundling-the coupling of different emotions in discourse-helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as 'the father'. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. 'Kurdi' became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.

Part of the Visual Social Media Lab's workshop for DONE2 at CCCB, Barcelona, Spain on 18 February, 2017. Introduction of iconography as a methodology for understanding images shared on social media platforms. The case study is Nilüfer Demir's photographs of Alan Kurdi and the derivative, memetic imagery that responded to it.
(NB Images have been removed)

Drainville, R. (2015) "On the Iconology of Aylan Kurdi, Alone" In: Vis, F. and Goriunova, O. (Eds.) The Iconic Image On Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*" (Sheffield: Visual Social Media Lab), 47-49.

The full report can be found here: http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic-image-on-social-media

Iconography and iconology have traditionally been restricted to interpreting works of "high" art. Here I use them to explore the impact of the Alan Kurdi images (or "Aylan", as he was originally identified). By examining iconographically their conceptual and formal antecedents, as well as the pictures that social media users have made in response to those images, we might come to understand their interpretations of this event in a broader visual context. A joint iconographic and iconological exploration might provide an insight into why they resonated within a broader European context to such an extent that they shifted the debate about the status of refugees.

How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual ‘inner states’. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as ‘the father’. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-...

Recent EU migration policies, traditionally centred on migrants' mobility governance, have increasingly been focused, since 2015,on the managing of the so-called refugee crisis. This transition has been accompanied by a new discursive and visual representation of migration, within which the impressive image of Aylan Kurdi and the chaotic and confused images of the Sylvester Night in Colonia, in 2015, take a significant role. This article analyses the impact of these two events, as they were narrated by the media, by identifying a nonlinear process which has led from the perception of a migrant crisis to the one of a refugee crisis and, consequently, from the implementation of EU anti-migration policies to the implementation of anti-refugee policies.

No contexto da crise dos refugiados, o dia 2 de setembro de 2015 marca de forma inequívoca a atenção dada a esta questão por parte dos media um pouco por todo o mundo. O aparecimento de um cadáver de uma criança síria de três anos numa praia turca contribuiu para transformar o enquadramento desta crise, que passou a ter um rosto, um nome que se transformaram em ícone da mesma: Aylan Kurdi. Sem nos determos na comparação entre o antes e o depois deste acontecimento mediático, o intuito deste texto é, antes, analisar a forma como a imagem desta criança influenciou a cobertura mediática da crise dos refugiados nos momentos subsequentes. Serão apresentados, através de uma amostra de conveniência, quatro momentos específicos, significativos da forma como a imprensa ibérica procedeu ao enquadramento da crise dos refugiados, apoiando-se na imagem de Aylan Kurdi e naquilo que a mesma passou a representar. Este trabalho analisa momentos específicos das versões online de dois jornais classificados como de referência de Portugal e Espanha (Público e El País), num período fulcral da crise. Através da análise de discurso dos elementos jornalísticos recolhidos associada ao estudo dos efeitos de framing e de priming, pretende-se explorar a possibilidade de acrescentar mais um conceito aos que já existem no vasto campo das teorias dos efeitos dos media: o conceito de imagem-despertador, enquanto elemento que detona um conjunto de memórias e de conhecimentos latentes associados a um determinado tema, assunto ou protagonista.