Threatening Imagery without Visual Features of Threat: Media Images of Refugees since WWII beyond the Threat or Victim Divide

Noora Kotilainen, University of Helsinki
Saara Pellander, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR), Tampere University, Finland

Media representations on migration influence public opinion, general debates, even political decision making on the issue. The European refugee reception crisis in 2015 appeared as very visual in media. Visual media imagery on forced migrants is telling on our imagination on refugeeness.Research on media images has shown that refugees are most commonly represented through two dominant visual tropes: the threat trope, featuring faceless masses, and the victim trope, picturing refugees in atmosphere of weakness, suffering, and passiveness through female bodies. The 2015 crisis also introduced new ways of picturing refugees, such as refugee selfies and portraying them as active, capable, male and in fashionable clothing. Such unconventional imagery provoked discussion on the deservingness of the refugees “that look like us”, even induced outrage among the media spectators. Our historical analysis shows that against the common perception, in a longer historical perspective images of refugees have not fitted the dichotomous threat or victim -tropes and the categories of otherness they produce. We analyze media archival material from the 1930s until the end of 2000. We contrast these with newer material from 2015 and 2016, and analyze mediated debates. We show that the images of refugees that “look like us” were encountered and reacted to in ways which questioned the claims by refugees due to the rigid historically, culturally and politically established, conventional ways of picturing refugees, produced in the post-WWII period. We see that, imagery interrupting the conventional othering view on the appearance of refugees, provoked sensations of threat without the conventional visual features of threat, as the imagery of similarity reminded the spectators of their own precariousess in the current global world (Bauman 2016). The established ways of seeing determine the ways in which these images were contextualized, and reveal the global “symbolic borders” (Chouliaraki, 2017) of picturing refugees.

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 Presented in Session 243. Representations and Receptions of Refugees