"Bangladesh hosts about one million Rohingya Muslim refugees from Rakhine State of Myanmar, majority of them fled to the country following a deadly military crackdown on the community in response to Rohingya militant attacks on Myanmar security forces on August 25, 2017. The United Nations termed th
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e clampdown ‘genocidal’ and aimed at ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Rohingya. The violence against this beleaguered community and their forcible displacement to Bangladesh garnered global media attention and international outrage. Under intense global pressure Myanmar signed a bilateral agreement with Bangladesh for repatriation of Rohingya refugees, and later both countries also inked a deal with United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for the same purpose. Despite the deal and two attempts in November 2018 and August 2019, not a single Rohingya has been repatriated, largely due to reluctance of refugees for an “unconditional return” without a concrete guarantee of basic rights including citizenship and safety in Myanmar. While Bangladeshi officials and media at large continue to blame Myanmar for gross failure in creating conditions conducive for a return of Rohingya refugees, official and media position in Myanmar point finger to Bangladesh’s inefficiency in convincing Rohingya refugees for the return. Thus, this paper will present arguments to show connection and similarities of state policies and media agenda on the issue of Rohingya refugee repatriation by analyzing various discourses and examining contents of media in Bangladesh and Myanmar. This research is likely to be more interpretative than statistics, figures and numeric." (Abstract)
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"This study places the most common recommendation from practitioners—that migration communication should be based on values—within the broader scientific literature by introducing Schwarz’s psychological theory of ‘basic human values’ and then using European Social Survey data to visualise
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the relationship between these values and attitudes to immigration, a relationship already well established in the political psychology literature. It is argued that messaging with a value-basis that is concordant with that of its audience is more likely to elicit sympathy, whereas that which is discordant with the values of its audience is more likely to elicit antipathy. Given the value-balanced orientations of those with moderate attitudes to immigration, persuasive migration messaging should also attempt to mobilise values of its opposition; i.e. pro-migration messaging should mobilise Schwarz’s values of conformity, tradition, security and power, whereas anti-migration messaging should mobilise values of universalism, benevolence, self-direction and stimulation." (Introduction, page 9)
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"Wie unsere Langzeitanalyse zeigt, hat sich die Fernsehberichterstattung über Gewaltkriminalität gravierend verändert: Während die Herkunft von Tatverdächtigen 2014 praktisch keine Rolle spielte, wurde sie 2017 in jedem sechsten und 2019 in jedem dritten Beitrag erwähnt. In den untersuchten Ze
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itungsberichten ist der Anteil mit 44,1 Prozent besonders hoch. Doch die Herkunft von mutmaßlichen Gewalttätern wird meist nur dann hervorgehoben, wenn sie Ausländer sind. Damit ist der mediale Blick nicht klarer geworden, sondern verzerrter. Die Berichterstattung kehrt die Erkenntnisse der Polizei komplett um: Laut Polizeilicher Kriminalstatistik waren 2018 etwa 69 Prozent aller Tatverdächtigen bei Gewaltdelikten Deutsche und rund 31 Prozent Nichtdeutsche. In aktuellen Fernsehberichten hingegen werden nur etwa 3 Prozent aller Tatverdächtigen als Deutsche erkennbar und 28 Prozent als Nichtdeutsche. In Zeitungsberichten sind Ausländer mit 41 Prozent gegenüber 3 Prozent deutschen Tatverdächtigen noch stärker überrepräsentiert." (Fazit, Seite 14)
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"The aim of this report is to offer a broad overview of migration (both immigration and emigration) discourses in European media for researchers in comparative media and migration studies in the coming years. It also aims at those involved in journalistic news production as well as policy decisions
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related to European migration in general, and intra-European migration and mobility in particular. We focus on the concepts of salience, sentiment and framing to qualify dynamics in media discourses in seven European countries – Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and Romania – using semi-automated approaches to computational media analysis. In our report, we tackle three main gaps in the existing work: (i) a lack of comparative studies dealing with European migration media discourses of the last decade(s); (ii) insufficient attention to the intricacies of multilingual text analysis in computational text analysis; (iii) insufficient evidence on country-specific differences in discourses about intra-European mobility and migration compared to migration discourses more generally." (Executive summary)
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"The complexity and duration of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ created a climate of uncertainty, which left ample room for mass media to shape citizens’ understanding of what the arrival of these refugees meant for their respective country. This study analyses the national media disco
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urses in Hungary, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain for this time period. Applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling in five languages and based on N=130,042 articles from 24 news outlets, we reveal country-specific media frames to track the overall course of the refugee debate and to uncover dynamics and shifts in discourses. While results show similarities across countries, due to media coverage responding to real-world developments, there are differences in media framing as well. Possible sources of these differences such as countries’ geographic location or status as receiving country are discussed." (Abstract)
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"Somalia is facing a protracted displacement crisis. Since the new wave of displacement as a result of the 2016/2017 drought, 2.6 million people - one in six Somalis - have been forced to flee their homes.1 Displaced groups in Somalia are extremely vulnerable - lacking in sustainable livelihoods, pe
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rmanent housing and access to basic services. Their arrival and continued presence in cities and towns, such as Mogadishu, Baidoa and Bossaso, are straining services and infrastructure in municipalities that already struggle to deliver for the host community [...] In response to the context outlined above, AVF proposed and deployed an innovative social accountability and public opinion gathering intervention that is designed to meet the following objectives: 1. Devise a methodology for consultations with communities that uses radio shows and targeted SMS adverts to participants in previous radio series as a means to engage with communities, establish feedback loops and generate data; 2. Conduct data analysis in order to inform the elaboration of area-level outcomes supporting the attainment of durable solutions in the target locations, based on the perceptions of residents and people affected by displacement [...] It is important to note that this is a survey of perceptions and therefore does not always represent objective facts on the ground. Any social change initiative must however be based on a strong understanding of the populations’ perceptions, given that they guide their behaviors and attitudes. This also allows having a better grasp on challenges encountered, which enables work towards improving the situation, particularly taking into consideration age and gender specific experiences." (Introduction, page 6-7)
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"The five-minute film Mouth of a Shark (Isobel Blomfield, 2018) conveys a young woman’s experiences and precarious situation while she awaits an outcome on her refugee status determination in Australia. Aasiya (pseudonym) lives in community detention. Her interest in creating the film stemmed from
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her own acknowledgement that she had a platform as a young, literate asylum seeker woman with a “strong” story, and was therefore in a position to portray asylum seekers in a positive light. However, she cannot be identified in the film, even though it depicts her story, due to concerns over safety and her claim for asylum. We use this example to illustrate issues of anonymity and representation, and suggest strategies in line with our commitment to avoid depersonalising tropes in filmmaking. While we are committed to ensuring that people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds exercise agency in filmmaking, protecting Aasiya’s identity had to prevail. We wanted to avoid depersonalising tropes, and instead devised filming strategies that were more respectful of the protagonist and, within the constraint of anonymity, ensured that Aasiya could still represent her story in meaningful ways. We argue for an ethical model that reconciles the need for both anonymity and representation in filmmaking, especially through collaborative editing." (Abstract)
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"Representing stories through documentary film can offer a means to convey multilayered and sensory accounts of the lived experiences of people in extreme transition, especially former refugees. However, along with the potential of this medium comes the responsibility to engage with participants in
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an ethical and reciprocal manner. This article examines these prerequisites and applies them to two films about the experiences of people from refugee backgrounds in Australia. The first film, The Last Refuge: Food Stories from Myanmar to Coffs Harbour (2015), explores the Myanmar community, their sociocultural relationship to food and how this informs their identity. The second film, 3Es to Freedom (2017), documents a supported employment program for women from refugee backgrounds. Despite having different purposes and target audiences, the two films reinforced the importance of establishing informed and negotiated consent with marginalised people as the basis of all interactions and representations on film. Such negotiation seeks to minimise power imbalances and forms the ethical starting point for reflexive filmmaking practice that considers the filmmakers’ and participants’ intentions, and that promotes a heightened awareness of how knowledge is created through image-making." (Abstract)
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"The article considers one dominant tendency of independent filmmaking, and its impact on the treatment of the refugee (broadly conceived): the application of contemporary documentary methods to both fiction and nonfiction works. The goal is a preliminary exploration of the complex, context-sensitiv
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e political effects of the approach, sometimes dubbed the “documentary style”, as resistance of (and/or submission to) the hegemonic global-nationalist order. To this end, the paper investigates specifically how such filmmaking efforts may—or may not—redirect the phenomenological vehicle of imagination away from narrow nationalist imaginaries towards a broader humanist identification and emotional (and normative) investment in the stranger or “the other” per se. The focus is on two works in particular, Another News Story (Orban Wallace, 2017) and Before Summer Ends (Avant la fin de l’été, Maryam Goormaghtigh, 2017), identifying how the filmmakers’ broadly pluralistic techniques help avoid the potentially dehumanising pitfalls of more didactic approaches, but also generate their own potential limitations. While the slackening of the subject’s categorical—and the plot’s narrative—shape may be liberating, it also risks a phenomenological disconnection on the part of the potentially interested spectator. The cognitive effects—including impediments to memory and recall—may thus weaken the work’s potential as a vehicle of cultural awareness and social identification." (Abstract)
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"Films about refugees have been embraced by accented cinema. Indeed, exilic filmmakers continue to test the boundaries of cinema, and specifically its strong bonds with nation and land. But not all exiles are refugees. This article offers that for Arab refugees the journeys across the sea define the
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ir filmmaking and thus also the refugee film. If we acknowledge the sea as a central theme, motif and stylistic element in (some) refugee cinema, spectators may be able to experience refugee cinema more ethically. Using the concept of “Mediterranean thinking” as a central analytical tool, this article focuses on the visual representations of refugees in films made on and in the Mediterranean Sea, problematising the injustices in the representation of refugees since the so-called “refugee crisis”. With a film-philosophical approach to four films from North Africa and Syria, I emphasise how filmmakers directly or indirectly address the senses of their spectators with a cinema that highlights the instability of knowledge and power through movement and fluidity. An in-depth analysis of the visual qualities of water places fluid space and time at the centre of these refugee films. In Mediterranean refugee filmmaking, water enables an embodied experience that leads to allegiance and sympathy, in order to achieve solidarity. This approach is based on a desire to contribute to a new historiography in the service of a more just world. Transnational journeys shape the representations of refugees travelling, transforming and transcending the Mediterranean. Ultimately, this article examines how the migrant and the sea itself develop with the “refugee crisis”, visualised in a cinema adrift on the Mediterranean Sea." (Abstract)
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