When it comes to the visual communication strategies behind campaigns on refugees, how do refugee-serving organizations navigate the politics of representation? In particular, how do their social media choices (Instagram, as example) land on the ground?
Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Visual bordering: How refugee-serving organizations represent refugees on Instagram
Peer-reviewed research by: Anya Jhoti and William L Allen
Theories of symbolic bordering highlight how xenophobic media coverage and humanitarian messaging create boundaries between migrants and receiving communities partly based on deservingness. Contrasting with studies of mainly text-based representations of refugees, we examine refugee-serving organizations’ visual communications work on Instagram. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, we collected 191 posts made in early 2021 by five UK-based organizations. Then, we applied quantitative content and qualitative semiotic analysis to these posts, complemented by two semi-structured interviews with communications staff members. We show how visual choices invoke divisions between posts’ refugee subjects and their intended audiences, while rendering some refugees legible and particularly worthy of protection or empathy. These choices include using stereotypical elements, obscuring identifiable people, and explicitly attributing quotations to refugees. We also identify “takeover” posts where refugees had controlled organizations’ social media accounts. Our study contributes understanding of how symbolic bordering occurs visually online and has implications for humanitarian communications practice.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2024 in the journal New Media & Society.
Full Reference //
Jhoti, A., & Allen, W. L. (2024). Visual bordering: How refugee-serving organizations represent refugees on Instagram. New Media & Society, 0(0).
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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