Narrative of Migration

Social media has allowed for global conversations and the sharing of personal opinions in a variety of new spaces. It is distinct from traditional outlets like radio, television, print media and public rallies because of its wide reach, intense decentralization, high level of interactions and the ability it gives users to personalize the type of information they receive. Social media is constantly transforming. Emerging platforms and functions allow migrants and non-migrants to represent migration processes and migrants themselves. For instance, newcomers are represented in online discussion forums and Twitter conversations as essential workers, contributing citizens and resilient communities. However, xenophobic and discriminatory views on migrants are rampant as well, such as the closed Facebook group Stand up for Sweden (Stå upp för Sverige). In this session, participants will talk about the salience of migration narratives on social media and their effect on public discourse, actors in the physical world and even migration policies.

Short audiovisual clips created by immigrants to narrate their own stories offer wide audiences unmediated encounters with immigrants’ voices, their points of view and their interpretations of their lives. This situates immigrants as subjects, highlighting their human dignity, and each individual story remains a unique part of a mosaic that does not disappear in the overall pattern. Immigrants maintain their singularity, resisting generalizations that can lead to stereotyping. Nevertheless, the usage of film entails pitfalls inherent to the media. For example, when situated as the clips’ protagonists, immigrants are distinguished via convention from the crowd and imbued with a hero’s aura. This solicits identification with them, while others remain blurred. Additionally, immigration-focused short films, like any audiovisual product, are inevitably manipulative yet do not warn their viewers of such manipulation. Audiences, especially young ones, are not well versed in critical thinking. This panel considers how a creative producer could construct messages of immigrants and immigration that are humanistic, pluralistic, respectful, reliable and thought provoking while also encouraging audiences to embrace critical lenses – and use them.

Contrary to dominant Western media frames and political narratives, a larger proportion of global migration takes place within the Global South and between low- and middle-income countries than from the South to the North. South-South migration plays a crucial role in global remittance flows and relationships between migration and development and other social processes as well as in the political and economic status of emerging regional powers. Countries in the Global South − particularly those emerging as regional powers − adopt their own narratives to make sense of both emigration and immigration, sometimes resisting the dominant perspectives of countries in the Global North and other times acquiescing to and adopting those views. This panel will decentre common narratives framing Global South states as places of origin or transit to the Global North and explore migration-related narratives in emerging powers through cross-regional perspectives from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia.