Abstract
The October edition of the Journal of Communication Inquiry explores the intersection of media and migration in a global context. As globalization has encouraged the exchange of people, goods and ideas leading to porous national boundaries in the past several decades, numerous efforts across the world have sought to contain this mobility. In the United States, President Donald Trump, citing threats of terrorism and unemployment, has openly attempted to curtail immigration. The United Kingdom, too, tightened its immigration policy following its 2016 decision to exit the European Union. In Asia, India and Burma are trying to regulate migration from neighboring Bangladesh by installing hundreds of miles of razor wire along their national borders. Articles in this special edition adopt critical-cultural approaches to examine media’s complex role in negotiating the migration process and experience. The papers also reflect on the relationship between media and migration in wide range of geographical, cultural and political contexts.
In the first article, Ivana Cvetkovic and Mirjana Pantic adopt “critical multimodal discourse analysis” to study the framing of the European Union borders in live-blogs produced for European news outlets. Over a million refugees and migrants fleeing from war zones and poor economic conditions reached Europe in 2015. Traditional news media’s adoption of live-blogs was crucial in the coverage of refugees and borders. Cvetkovic and Pantic discovered three main frames in the live-blogs—border management, borders as lived spaces, and borders as politically constructed spaces—and discussed their implications for the construction of discourse on migration. Addressing meaning-making through multiple semiotic modes allowed the authors to contribute to scholarly conversation on news framing because “the inclusion of both verbal and nonverbal modes is still understudied in the field of journalism studies as well as in the analysis of discourse on space and migration.”
Next, Haneen S. Ghabra and Marouf A. Hasian in their essay evaluate the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movements. As members of different generations living in the Palestinian diaspora, Ghabra and Hasian analyze the rhetoric of Palestinian nationalist movements to demonstrate that some of these movements undermine chances for two-state solutions. More generally, the authors show that diasporic critiques are able to “trace the fissures, the ossifications, and the ruptures that take place in the Middle East as various acts of territoriality, deterritoriality, and reterritorialization take place simultaneously.”
In “Immigration Builds a Nation: The hybrid impact of European Immigration on the Development of an Advertising Industry,” Osnat Roth-Cohen traces the development of the advertising industry in British Mandatory Palestine and how it was transformed by German Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1933 and 1939. To analyze the contributions of the immigrants, Roth-Cohen proposes a conceptual model, which consists several analytical dimensions namely mass communication, economy, technology, society, and international transfer. Using this model, Roth-Cohen shows that German immigration exerted a “hybrid set of influences” that played a pivotal role in the maturation of the local advertising industry in the Land of Israel. The essay provides an opportunity to rethink media history and center the unique contributions of immigrants to the advertising industry.
How do mainstream Haitian newspapers report about Haitian migrants in relation to Western media? This is the question of interest to Shearon Roberts in her article “La Apatrida and TPS: Counterhegemonic News and Reclaiming Dignity in Haitian National Newspapers.” Roberts analyzed two international news events involving Haitian migrants in two national newspapers: Le Nouvelliste and Le Nacional. Unlike international media, Haitian news narratives reinforced basic human rights and the dignity of Haitians abroad. The article offers a unique perspective into Haitian journalism because scholars typically study foreign coverage of Haiti at the expense of indigenous narratives.
Next, in “Searching for Ontological Security Via Homeland Media Use: The Case of Korean Temporary Visa-Status Migrants in the United States,” Claire Shinhea Lee uses a quasi-ethnographic approach to argue that homeland media, both television and the Internet, sustain “ontological security” of migrants throughout the radical transitions in the US. Lee’s study is an intervention in media and migration studies as she interrogates and problematizes the “easing lumped category” of mobile elites and cosmopolitans.
Valentina Baú’s article titled “Breaking the Conflict Cycle, Building Peaceful Communities: Participatory Photography and Storytelling with African Diasporas in Sydney” explores participatory photography as an alternative form of diasporic medium. Specifically, she discusses the experience of a participatory photography project that brought together young people from the Congolese, Rwandan, Burundian, and Ugandan communities living in Australia, whose lives are still marked by the legacy of the conflicts that have been ravaging the African Great Lakes region. Baú concludes with the suggestion that scholars should further investigate the role that young diaspora can play in breaking the conflict cycle that has been impacting their communities for generations in the host-land.
In the book review section, Mehdi Semati reviewed Moments of Silence: Authenticity in the Cultural Expressions of the Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988, which is edited by Arta Khakpour, Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, and Shouldeh Vatanabadi. Semati notes that the volume seeks to address the discourse of “the sacred defense,” which is the name given to the discourse of the state on the Iran-Iraq war, propagated through various political venues and state-sponsored cultural productions.
Finally, in a review of Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society, Lin Sun describes how Vincent Mosco examines the new digital landscape marked by the rise of Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things. Mosco criticizes the growing convergence of these three technologies as a catalyst for “the decline of a democratic, decentralized and open source Internet.” Concurrently, Mosco refuses to accept the “trend as inevitable and advocates for an alternative public utility model with the guiding principles of universality, equality, and open communication.”