Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Parallel Session Panels and Abstracts
PARALLEL SESSIONS 1
1A
Mediating refugee and migrant experience (Chair, Robyn Ferrell)
Elisabeth Klaus & Ricarda Drueeke*
Refugees in the Austrian Press
Mediated spaces of identity and cultural citizenship: Representations of
In 2015, the public debates on flight and migration in Austria were accompanied by images of refugees
mainly from Syria and other Arabic countries in camps at the borders, or at train stations. This presentation
aims to disclose how identity is constructed in discourses about refugees coming to Europe. We understand
media as symbolic spaces in which identities are (re)produced, contested and modified. We will present
finding from a content analysis of the Austrian media coverage from July to September 2015, in which the
so-called “Balkan route” was a frequently discussed. The findings show mainly, that reports on refugees
focus on “unaccompanied men” with their presumably patriarchal, backward attitudes. In contrast, Austrian
society is conceived as equality-based and modern. In this way, media discourses on refugees demarcate
geo-political spaces and make identity-political determinations. Finally, the talk discusses opportunities and
limitations of media as spaces of identity-formation.
Lin Prøitz
and Sheffield
The sleep of death: the image of Alan Kurdi and the civil society response to the refugee crisis in Oslo
“He does not look dead. He had been in the sea for only a few hours, and escaped the indignities to which
the drowned body is exposed. His body is not bloated; there are no visible wounds; his skin is not peeling off;
sea scavengers have not violated him. …This is the “sleep of death” in Hamlet, where the one is viewed as
unnervingly similar to the other.” (Drainville 2015:48). On the 2nd September 2015, the body of a threeyear-old
boy was found washed up on the beach in Turkey and photographed. Alan Kurdi and his family –
Syrian refugees of Kurdish extraction – had been on an inflatable boat bound from Turkey to the Greek
island of Kos. Like 3,400 others last year, Alan lost his life when the boat he was travelling in capsized in the
Mediterranean. However, unlike these others, Alan’s death became sensationalized as the photographs
taken were shared across the globe with lightning speed (Vis & Goriunova, 2015). The image of Alan Kurdi
not only changed the debate on Twitter from being a debate on migrants to a debate on singular subjects
fleeing from war and terror (D’Orazio 2015), the image sparked global response on and offline. This paper
focuses on the reception of the photograph of Alan Kurdi by a group of social media users in England and
Norway. Photography is said to have a transformational quality. One explanation for this is that images offer
individuals the chance to construct new alternative ways of making sense of complex events, reflecting on
them and developing the means to confront them by building new meanings and discourses (de Andrés et al
2016: 30; Kharroub and Bas 2015). Another central aspect, is that iconic images activates “cultural structures
of feeling” (Hairman and Lucaites 2007: 36) and that public structures of feelings contribute to define what
type of images that become iconic. The iconic image of Alan Kurdi, did function as a catalyser and
intersection where central yet disparate political currents and actors met on and offline. To analyse the
views of the research participants on the Alan Kurdi case, I draw on theoretical literature on social
movements, online participatory culture and affective approaches (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2012; Khamis and
Vaughn 2011; Loader et al 2014; Trottier and Fuchs 2015; Thorson 2014; Tufekci and Wilso 2012; Wetherell
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