(Re)locating photojournalism within a transmedia economy: a case study on the meaning-making process with stories of female Boko Haram survivors

Representing the Global South: (photo)journalism and humanitarian campaigns

Scholars have critically pointed to the ways in which Western media reinforces negative notions of the Global South with images and narratives that promote racist imaginaries (Cirjanic, 2017) and strip distant others from their roles as political, social and historical actors (Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2019; Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017; Sontag, 2003). Concerned primarily with social power relations and the moral–political response that the representation of suffering demands from us, this line of research recognizes the performative value of humanitarian discourse and the representational potential or power of images to constitute a given reality in meaning (Butler, 2009; Frosh, 2006). In their extensive study on journalistic stories of refugees, Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017) point to a coexisting dynamic of victimhood and threat which, on the one hand, removes agency from victims who are acted upon (e.g. as the receivers of the horrors of war and/or humanitarian outreach), while those who are depicted as actors are dehumanized as ‘evil’ threats to (our) security (Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2019). These critical findings of the predominantly negative depictions of the Global South are also confirmed by Cirjanic’s (2017) content analysis of the images promoted by the WPP competition over the course of almost 60 years, in which violent and explicit images of distant others were found to be the common denominator amongst the thousands of photographs. Despite the organization’s declared aim to support quality visual journalism (p. 26), this critical study points to WPP’s role ‘as a platform for spreading racial and cultural stereotypes’ ¹ (p. 445).

Studies addressing Western representations of women and girls in the Global South further expose the problematic power dynamics mobilized by these narratives (Berents, 2016; Chiluwa and Ifukor, 2015; Mathers, 2018). In her critical study of hashtag social media campaigns, Berents (2016: 5) exemplifies how the complex and unique experiences of girls in the Global South are dissolved by a narrative of girlhood as an ‘autonomous and educated experience’ in the Global North which is constantly endangered, if not completely absent, from the dominant reality in the South. Through their ‘ascribed aspirations to participate in neoliberal western practices’ (Berents, 2016: 6), such as the desire to receive (Western) education, girls in the Global South become ‘legible’ to Western audiences in stories that transform them into ‘idealized victims’ requiring intervention, and ‘iconic’ heroines empowered by their adoption of neoliberal ideals (Berents, 2016).

Chiluwa and Ifukor’s (2015: 282–283) analysis of Tweets reacting to Boko Haram’s kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok highlights an emphasis on the girls’ beauty and innocence, and an accentuation of their vulnerability in a common portrayal of the teens and women as ‘little girls’ who are ‘helpless’. A neocolonial, patriarchal girl-child politics (Berents, 2016) is thus mobilized as these young women become the focus of Western salvation from the (masculine) threat to their girlhood suffered within the Global South. In reducing their dynamic and diverse realities to ‘a single frozen moment’ through portraits (Mathers, 2018) and hashtags, these women and girls become symbolic faces of victimhood while their unique experiences and the greater crises in which their stories are embedded are pushed aside. This political and historical decontextualization of specific cases of victimization and survival in the Global South not only denies the complexity and difference of girlhood worldwide, but also invisibilizes the West’s hand in fostering conflicts while simultaneously legitimizing (continued) intervention (Berents, 2016).

Neoliberalism, new media and the process of meaning-making

Providing a critical account of an emerging trend in the mediation of distant suffering and humanitarian action in the West, Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) defines post-humanitarianism as an ironic disposition of solidarity that turns the spotlight inward towards the spectator and detaches distant suffering from its structural causes and solutions. Neoliberalism, as the expansion of a profit-centred market logic to ‘a whole way of life’ (Couldry, 2010: 5), is identified as a primary driver of this shift, placing brands, consumption and individualistic incentives at the forefront of interest. Chouliaraki (2013: 180) points to pragmatism and privatism within the neoliberal logic as prompting a post-humanitarian discourse primarily concerned with ‘empowering consumers’ through ‘artful’ forms of storytelling. Thus, rather than addressing distant suffering as a systemic issue with political and historical roots, post-humanitarian practices support ‘historical amnesia and apolitical activism’ by instrumentalizing individualized cases of suffering within a privatized market of ‘western self-empowerment’ (p. 184).

Also fundamentally transforming the mediation of distant suffering is the development of digital technology. New media has been praised for allowing photojournalism to better uphold the greater ‘social mission’ of the industry (Palmer, 2017: 198), as photojournalists gain autonomy in their practice and break away from the confounds of the traditional media format (Tait, 2017). Yet this optimistic perspective of the media’s use of digital technology ignores what Berents (2016: 12) refers to as ‘uneven topographies of digital power’ at the global level which facilitate ‘depoliticized appeal[s] to solidarity’. The technologization of the humanitarian industry has been criticized for replacing political solutions with easy, superficial public action referred to as click activism (Chouliaraki, 2013), or slacktivism (Chiluwa and Ifukor, 2015; Morozov, 2011). In this digitalized context, (hashtagged) campaigns and celebrity tweets from the Global North circulating in seeming solidarity with suffering in the South often divert attention away from the political sources of conflict and perpetuate the White Savior Industrial Complex (Cole, 2012, in Berents, 2016: 10) instead of instigating real social change.

The critical scholarship on the representations of (suffering in) the Global South serves to denounce representational practices and bring awareness to their ideological nature and social consequences. However, much of this literature tends to approach representations as instances with pre-determined, static meanings rather than addressing the greater process of meaning-making in which stories – produced within a web of economic, political, cultural and social relations – are developed and/or transformed as they circulate through diverse platforms. In order to better grasp this process, we draw from Lemke’s (2009) work on the political economy of signs, where the concept of traversals is introduced to identify meanings which are created ‘across institutional boundaries, across media, genres, settings, and contexts of situation’ (p. 292). According to Lemke, as individuals travel through their physical and virtual environments, they often encounter ‘co-branded content’ of transmedia franchises that guide this meaning-making process.

In reconstructing the traversal narrative of BH survivors formed by photojournalism contests, news stories, social media posts and humanitarian campaigns, our study explores the ways in which this traversal is defined by a greater transmedia project. ² This reconstruction constitutes a partial perspective (Haraway, 1988: 584), which recognizes our situated stances that are ‘not exempt of critical reexamination, decoding, deconstruction and interpretation’. Our positioning is that of researchers from the Global North who first followed this traversal narrative as consumers of representations through the various media platforms which later turned out to be our object of inquiry. We are aware that our interpretations of this transmedia project are not neutral and that, in some way, this article participates in the circulation and construction of this traversal. However, our analysis of the project does not aim to deny other possible readings but to question grand narratives of multimedia corporations, such as World Press Photo, which, while sheltering behind an alleged objectivity and neutrality of photojournalism, describes its mission as connecting the world to the stories that matter.

Pull the thread to reweave the story

Contemporary forms of online interaction pose new questions on what data means and on how to collect it within a virtual sea of   information in which boundaries are blurred (Burrell, 2009; Pink et al., 2016; Postill and Pink, 2012). In the same vein, the emergence of new socio-technical relations (Markham, 2016) brings to light the liquid nature of roles within the digital sphere that blurs the lines between users, producers and consumers of digital information. Becoming a digital researcher therefore poses challenges not only in conceptualizing our fieldwork experiences and the process of data collection but also in defining our own roles within the web of practices we study. Resonating with Haraway’s (1988: 584) metaphor on vision and making the location from where we see and interpret life transparent, we have opted to give an account of our embodied off- and online trajectory throughout this narrative rather than collecting a large corpus of images and texts referring to BH survivors through data mining, which risks falling into the illusion of the ‘infinite vision’. In reconstructing the given traversal narrative of the BH ex-captives, we digitally travelled through hyperlinks from one platform to another, consuming and documenting the story traces (Geiger and Ribes, 2011) under analysis. Then, by decoding and assembling this one-year tracing, we investigated the transformation of the semiotic and political value of the narrative over time.

When following digital flows of information, questions on when or where to start and stop tracing arise. Otherwise, following a story (see Marcus, 1995) may become a never-ending task as the networks of relations and their ramifications are potentially infinite (Burrell, 2009). We thus set a coherent point of entry to our fieldwork and an exit point according to our experienced trajectories as consumers of the transmedia project. Our entry point was the 2018 World Press Photo contest (WPP, see World Press Photo, 2018) where the Maiduguri girls’ portraits were awarded by this media group. This entry point provided us with relevant information for identifying the main social actors involved in that photojournalism project: WPP, the photojournalists (the assigned photographer, Adam Ferguson, and journalist, Dionne Searcey) and the NYT, which commissioned the project. We then turned to their public Instagram pages – the prominent social media platform for the diffusion of photographic works – where we identified LC as another important actor and came across a converging NYT-commissioned project by the same photojournalists: the Chibok girls’ portraits.

Having identified the broad picture, we started to ‘pull the thread’ of the story by moving back in time to learn more about the logics of production and circulation of these supposedly independent stories, but also by real-time monitoring of the Instagram profiles of these media groups. Understanding our corpus as a network of social practices ‘constructed from the observable connections performed by participants’ (Burrell, 2009: 189) and by the affordances and constraints of the platforms in which the relationships are deployed, the limits of this network were set according to activity criteria. Marking the limit of the network on one end is the first trace we found on the Maiduguri girls: a NYT report (NYT-1, see Searcey and Ferguson, 2017) released in October 2017. On the other end of our network, the I Am Not a Weapon humanitarian campaign (see I Am Not a Weapon, 2018), launched in October 2018 serves as our exit point, as the story’s media attention was beginning to fade away and to avoid burdening the analysis with saturated data.

In between these two chronological points, the corpus network includes nodes of the story with the online press reports on the Chibok female survivors, which we label NYT-2 and NYT-3 (see Searcey and Ferguson, 2018a, 2018b, respectively), Instagram publications posted by the actors previously identified, the 2018 WPP and LC photojournalism contests, and a video interview with the photographer by LC (LC Interview, see Lens Culture, 2018). Specifically, through the exploration of social media we were able to discover the connection between the Maiduguri and Chibok girls’ stories, and the chronology of traces revealed how the transmedia project was built and ramified. Moreover, since each new media product and the various recognitions achieved were announced through social media, Instagram publications served as indicators of the project’s peak times of activity, containing clues of subsequent changes in the semiotic value of the traversal narrative under analysis. Following the first trace of our corpus, we identified three peaks of activity within the transmedia project that correlate with: (1) the nomination of the Maiduguri girls’ portraits for several WPP prizes; (2) the announcement of the 2018 WPP and LC contest winners and the publication of two NYT articles on the Chibok girls portraits (NYT-2 and NYT-3); and (3) the launching of the humanitarian campaign I Am Not a Weapon several months after the award ceremonies (see circles in Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Chronological distribution of activity within the transmedia project and identified peak times. © Lucia de la Presa and Paloma Elvira Ruiz.

It is important to note that other multimedia contents covering this photojournalistic project were released by other media groups at the time our corpus was being constructed. However, these contents were not hyperlinked or referenced in the chain of publications we followed. While it would be interesting to know the motivations behind this information handling, we determined that these artefacts exceeded the traversal narrative we were following and thus the scope of our research.

Methodological tools for transmedia analysis

Our selection of analytical tools is based on an abductive approach (see Wodak, 2003), shifting back and forth between the data and the theoretical constructs in order to evaluate their appropriateness according to our inquiry. In our analysis of the multimodal representations (conjunction of visual and linguistic signs) we observe how social practices are recontextualized through the (re)telling of stories (Van Leeuwen, 2008; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). That is, what elements are represented/omitted/transformed? How? And with what socio-political consequences? However, recontextualization only explains the semiotic transfer from social practice to discourse by observing how the actors, their actions, settings and timings are reflected in different texts (Van Leeuwen, 2008). But what happens when a meaning, a story, travels and is transformed through multiple contexts? When is social practice in itself that process of meaning-making? Since our study explores a traversal with complex semiotic variants and values (Lemke, 2009), the concept of resemiotization (Iedema, 2003) provides a useful account of the semiotic process unfolding across the transmedial context of our study. Finally, entextualization comes into play every time a discourse is extracted, decontextualized, stripped of its interactive context and reified in a textual unit (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Park and   Bucholtz, 2009). The political character of entextualization is based on an exercise of power, whereby the voice of some actors is represented in written institutionalized texts (and therefore transformed) by more powerful ones. In our case study, the accounts of the BH survivors are (re)told by mainstream photojournalism and humanitarian actors.

Representing Maiduguri girls: victims, heroines and agents of terror

Despite the photojournalists’ intention to ‘shatter’ what they identify as a dominant, negative perception of women and girls who are forced into bombing missions by BH, ⁴ NYT-1 ultimately (re)produces the very dehumanizing portrayals of ‘terror’ that this article showcasing the experiences of the 18 BH survivors from Maiduguri wishes to contest. Our analysis of the representations of female survivors of BH within this NYT report underscores several recontextualization strategies (Van Leeuwen, 2008) that, on the one hand, sustain a constant tension between narratives of victimization and terror, yet also serve to distance the article’s female protagonists from the multitude of other Nigerian women and girls who are captured by BH. The following textual analysis provides some examples of the specific discursive strategies (passivization, activation, collectivization, functionalization and entextualization) used to recontextualize the experiences of the Maiduguri survivors and those who are unable to escape their lethal missions.

The story of the Maiduguri girls’ capture and survival in NYT-1 emphasizes the girls’ role as passive receivers of BH’s terror. The repetition of BH’s action on these girls (e.g. ‘militants forcibly tied suicide belts to their waists’) serves to negate suspicions of their collaboration with BH and construct a narrative of innocence. In stark contrast to this passivized representation of the Maiduguri survivors, however, is the image of other female victims of BH as agents of terror underscored in the text. The article repeatedly refers to women and girls whose outcome was death rather than survival as ‘[female] suicide bombers’. Unlike the article’s 18 protagonists, actions of terror are performed rather than received by these women and girls through representational strategies framing them as (willing) agents. This activation is achieved grammatically, with the women and girls as the subjects of actions described (e.g. ‘other girls who have blown themselves up, taking bystanders with them’). But also lexically, through the functionalization of the women and girls in terms of the actions they perform, exemplified in phrases such as ‘The suicide bombers usually operate in the early morning hours . . .’, in which the act of bombing is lexically framed as a routine performance by those who dedicate themselves to this deadly operation. Indeed, the label of ‘suicide bomber’ is on its own problematic as it implies the deliberate decision and desire for death within the act of suicide, thus attributing a false agency and responsibility to these victims.

The inclusion of the Maiduguri survivors’ testimonies in the form of direct (and indirect) citations is another textual strategy that further distinguishes these women and girls from the others while also contributing to their victimization. On the one hand, the selected fragments of their voices and the way they are entextualized within the article, once again underscores the narrative of the girls as innocent and fearful receivers of terror (e.g. ‘I was so afraid it would explode on its own’). The multimodal framing of citations cut and pasted on top of individual portraits with the first name and age of the speaker seem to reject strategies of collectivization and voicelessness commonly characterizing the representation of victimhood (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski, 2017), yet the content of these quotes and the dark, impersonalized visual qualities with which they are paired create a homogeneous image of innocent victims that silences the complexity of each girl’s unique experience of survival.

On the other hand, the entextualization of the interviewed girls’ voices also promotes their representation as heroines in dialogic opposition to the many other nonsurvivors (e.g. ‘she didn’t want to become like the dozens of other girls . . . she argues that she and other girls like her should be praised for defying the militants’). As highlighted in this example of the reporter’s indirect representation of the survivor’s voice, survival is attributed to the girl’s decision to ‘defy’ BH, thereby constructing a polarized, hero-vs-villain dynamic between ‘girls like her’ and the ‘dozens of others’ who ‘chose to cooperate’ in their lethal missions. This emphasis on the girl’s individual decision defines her and the other survivors exalted in the article as heroic exceptions to the collectivized mass of ‘female bombers’ presented as a ubiquitous terrorizing force (e.g. ‘The relentless string of bombings . . . has cast a frightening shadow over life here’/‘I get afraid when I see women’). A meritocratic discourse upholding neoliberal values of individual willpower and free choice therefore energizes the iconic-heroine narrative and is further strengthened by references to the girls’ shared desires for education and insertion within the white-collar economy (e.g. ‘They are eager to return [to school]. They dream of becoming teachers, doctors or lawyers’). This alignment with neoliberal ideals supports the legibility of their heroic stories in the West (Berents, 2016) and thus their marketability to (many) readers of the NYT.

(Re)capturing victimization and terror through portraits

We first encountered the portraits of the Maiduguri survivors as consumers of the 2018 World Press Photo exhibition. This predominantly visual presentation of the Maiduguri girls’ stories left us both intrigued and unsettled. After discovering their original appearance in NYT-1, we were surprised to find that these portraits were part of a photojournalism project wishing to contest the image of terror of BH female captives circulated through public announcements in Nigeria. As scholars interested in the power dynamics mediated through visual and linguistic signs, we decided to take a more in-depth look at the portraits and turned to semiotic research tools to aid our analysis. As the reading of images is a more ‘open and fluid’ operation than that of texts (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 137), our analysis does not claim to reflect a necessary interpretation of all viewers. While the tools we draw on as well as our own reading of the visual signs (gestures, colours, etc.) are culturally situated, they are nevertheless relevant for an analysis of images captured through this Western optic ⁵ and to be (predominantly) received by this cultural gaze. We also do not wish to suggest that the results of our analysis reflect the photographer’s intentions. On the contrary, in exploring the semiotic qualities of the portrait series, we show how certain visual features support representations and set up dynamics that may oppose well-meaning creative intentions. This section of analysis provides a first glance at the crucial role of contextual factors (i.e. text used to define images, where and by whom this image is shared and viewed) that influence the semiotic value of the visual elements in our study.

The individual portraits in NYT-1, which later enter into the spotlight of the 2018 LC and WPP photojournalism contests, in some ways reinforce the narratives formed through the article’s textual representation. In line with the report’s girls-as-victims narrative, the portraits display static bodies, with many of the girls facing walls and/or posing with lowered heads. Victimization through narratives of fear and innocence underlined in the textual testimonies are also visually reinforced. Fear and shame are evoked through corporal expressions, as in the portrait of Maryam covering her face with her hands or the image of Maimuma standing in a dark corner with her head slightly lowered. ⁶ And idealized innocence is alluded to through iconic Virgin-Mary-like compositions of colours, tones and body positions. ⁷

However, there are some inconsistencies in the visual and textual representations of the Maiduguri survivors. Unlike the textual focus on the girls as heroines distinguished from a multitude of ‘female bombers’, the semiotic elements in the portraits blur the lines between victim and agent of terror. As highlighted in Figure 2, the blending of fear and shame through the girls’ corporal positioning maintains a tension between victimization and terror, with the narrative of terror also mobilized by the dark shadows and their clothing replicating textual descriptions of ‘female bombers’ hiding belted explosives under their long, loose robes. The girls’ hidden faces is another visual element that, in place of the iconic heroine, brings an image of ‘otherness’ through the representational strategy of objectification (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 141). According to visual grammar theory, this crucial feature of the portraits hinders the possibility of an interactional relationship between the photographed subjects and their spectators (Biondi, 2011; Van Leeuwen, 2008) by denying possible engagement through a ‘visual “you,” a symbolic demand’ of the eyes (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 141). Since hiding the girls’ faces is motivated by a need to maintain their anonymity (information we discovered later on in the LC interview with Adam Ferguson), we consider this critical observation of semiotic theory to be relevant to the ethical consideration of not only how to represent others but also in the decision of whom to photograph.

The selection and retelling of the NYT-commissioned project by WPP, which transfigured the story from text complemented by images to one in which the photographs are the central communicative mode, inherently brought forth shifts in the recontextualization of the Maiduguri girls’ representations, where multimodal elements are omitted, emphasized and/or transformed (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). In our analysis of WPP’s virtual and physical ⁸ exhibitions of the portrait series, we found an overall intensification of the narrative of terror in the short captions accompanying the photographs. The representation of BH and ‘female suicide bombers’ as agents of (escalating) terror is the central focus of these captions, supported by numbers and statistics of the abduction of women and girls by BH and their increased deployment for lethal missions over the years. With these textual captions supporting the reading of portraits – which become the primary mode of representing the girls’ stories in the WPP exhibit – accounts of heroic survival are further overshadowed by multimodal narratives of victimization and terror.

The most valued portrait of the series, nominated for ‘World Press Photo of the Year’, is that of Aisha, ⁹ a portrait that calls attention to the more ambiguous and open quality of images, and is thus an example of the importance of making semiotic possibilities explicit as well as recognizing how the accompanying text may influence these possibilities. On the one hand, this image represents Aisha through an empowering angle, according to visual grammar theory, with the camera’s frontal and eye-level focus through which she confronts her viewer. Yet her occulted gaze rejects the possibility for engagement with the spectator, and her garment alludes to the possibility of concealed explosives. This representation of the girl as a potential threat is semiotically reinforced through the textual caption under the photograph replacing details of Aisha’s survival with information on women and girls becoming BH’s new ‘weapon of war’ (WPP).

The distinct communicative contexts of NYT and WPP not only imply inevitable differences in the recontextualizations of the experiences of the Maiduguri girls but the shifts in the semiotic modes used to tell these stories as they pass from one media platform to the next suggest how, in this process of resemiotization, certain narratives become more (or less) visible within one market or another. As further explored in the following section, new meanings can also emerge in this process. While our analysis of Aisha in the WPP exhibit points to a predominant agent-of-terror representation, the multimodal pairing of this image with textual details of Aisha’s survival and bravery may promote a different reading of the visual story.

Renewing the spectacle through social media: the terror–dignification cycle

Social media propaganda constitutes the common denominator across our corpus, serving as the main channel for the circulation of the multimedia products that form it (see Figure 1). By following Instagram posts and their hyperlinked contents, we continued to reconstruct the traversal narrative extending backward and forward in time from our initial point of entry (the WPP exhibit). In this exploration, we identify elements of a greater transmedia project with (self)promotion fortifying a neocolonial relationship.

In opposition to the narrative of terror and victimization observed in NYT-1 and the WPP exhibit, we found a discourse of ‘dignity’ promoted by the photographer. The first instance of this appears in the first social media peak time following the nomination of the Maiduguri girls’ portraits for several WPP prizes. In a post on Ferguson’s public Instagram page announcing the nomination for the ‘World Press Photo of the Year’ award, there is an emphasis on the girl’s ‘bravery’ in escaping BH (e.g. ‘Aisha, young and brave, defied her captors’) as well as ‘dignity’ in the act of being photographed (e.g. ‘she sat brave and dignified’). ¹⁰ The lexically supported semiotic construction of ‘dignity’ in this post emerges again in an interview with the photographer during the second peak of social media activity published on the LC website. The sombre images of the Maiduguri girls are projected in the video interview with a voiceover of Ferguson describing his intention to ‘show them as very dignified, beautiful brave young women, which they were’ (LC interview). While these descriptions support a positive image of the girls and emphasize Ferguson’s intentions as such, they also position the photojournalists as the bearers of this ‘dignity’.

As isolated cases, these ascriptions of ‘dignity’ operate as self-promotional moves in that they represent the photojournalism project in a post-humanitarian (Chouliaraki, 2013) light where the photographer is the agent of ‘dignification’. The positive focus on the creator of the photographs (rather than the Maiduguri girls’ experiences) generated by this (self)promotional activity is clearly reflected in the comments from followers reacting to Ferguson’s Instagram posts. An overwhelming majority of the comments we observed direct the attention towards the photographer, congratulating and thanking him for his work (e.g. ‘Go man! You’re great.’/‘respect Mr Ferguson. Respect.’/‘Congratulations Adam so proud of your amazing work!’/‘Well done and thank you Adam’). ¹¹ These examples of followers’ reactions specifically respond to Ferguson’s announcement of the nomination for ‘World Press Photo of the Year’ with Aisha’s portrait. While there are very few comments directed towards Aisha and her story, those that do show this attention reflect the post’s textual description of Aisha’s bravery and details of her hardship and escape, thus pointing to the semiotic relevance of textual elements in the multimodal (re)telling of this story (e.g. ‘What indescribable courage this woman has and unfathomable grief she will live with.’/‘Such a heartbreaking yet powerful story of an incredibly brave young girl Adam’).

Apart from shining a positive light on the photographer and his work, the lexical reference to ‘dignity’ used to describe the Maiduguri portraits function as intertexts (Lemke, 2009) to a parallel media project within the greater context of the traversal narrative: ‘Portraits of Dignity’. This NYT-commissioned portrait project of the Chibok girls by the same photojournalists (NYT-2 and NYT-3) promoted during the second peak of social media activity, crucially (re)directs the narrative of terror and victimization of women and girls kidnapped by BH towards a ‘happy ending’ in which survivors are rescued with the aid of Western powers. The rescued Chibok girls are no longer numbers on a list of missing girls; now they are individualized with first and last names and voices which are entextualized in the report (e.g. ‘I’m happy,’ said Ms. Ntakai, who was No. 169 on the list’ [NYT-2]). In representing these women and girls as ‘daughters of the whole world’ (NYT-2), the texts focus on their new (privileged) lifestyles (e.g. ‘Now, she is a 20-year-old student who rises at dawn for Saturday yoga class and argues about the benefits and dangers of social media during debate night at the [American] university [in Nigeria]’, [NYT-2]).

Yet this ‘dignification’ process is not only implicitly constructed in the text in relation to the girls’ rescue by Western powers, it is also framed as the work performed by the portrait project itself. As directly expressed in NYT-3, the photojournalists wanted to replace the girls’ visual representation of ‘sad faces’ ‘in dark robes’ in the video released by BH, with portraits that portrayed them ‘in a dignified manner’ (NYT-3). The aesthetic qualities of the new images of the Chibok girls are characterized by an increase of brightness and colour and, unlike the Maiduguri girls’ portraits, the girls’ unobscured gaze (although often still directed away from the viewer) becomes a central element of the visual composition. In further contraposition, not only with the images disseminated by BH, but also with the previous portraits of the Maiduguri survivors, the clothing decisions for this portrait series follow a more secular ‘modern’ style, with many girls in short-sleeved dresses and others with suit jackets, visually supporting the textual descriptions of the girls’ new lives. These portraits thus provide a renewed image of BH survivors that visually defines what dignification is – and implicitly what it is not. Responding to an Instagram comment critical of the Chibok girls’ portraits, Ferguson describes his desire to ‘present people on the margins in ways that the privileged are represented’ as guiding the composition of these portraits, claiming that this representation is ‘the opposite of victimizing, its [sic] empowering.’ ¹⁰ Yet the striking contrast between the visual representations of the Chibok and Maiduguri girls observed through this logic promotes a semiotic crack (see Lemke, 2009) in the traversal where the Maiduguri girls’ portraits become redefined through the photographer’s textual descriptions of ‘dignity’ and ‘empowerment’.

While the Chibok survivors’ portraits may contest the image of the ‘female bomber’ supported through the Maiduguri project, they do so under a neocolonial, post-humanitarian optic which (once again) fails to capture the complexity, uniqueness and dynamism of each girl’s history and current life. Instead, their stories are clouded by the attention given in NYT-3 to the photojournalists both textually, as we see in the title, ‘Portraits of Dignity: How We Photographed Ex-Captives of Boko Haram’, as well as visually, through an image providing the reader with an insider’s view of the making of these portraits that foregrounds the photographer in action. As seen in the promotion and reaction to the Maiduguri girls’ portraits, the Chibok girls are ‘dignified’ through standing still before a camera, while the photojournalists become protagonists of this process of ‘dignification’ in a White-savior narrative that blurs the work of photojournalism with that of (post-)humanitarian action.

Although the NYT photojournalism stories on the Maiduguri and Chibok girls are separate projects in so much as they were carried out in different timeframes and under distinct conditions, their (inter)connection, fortified through intertextual and hyperlinked references within the NYT publications and social media activity, is integral to the formation of the traversal narrative. During key moments of social recognition (e.g. nominations and awards), we see how these stories converge in the sharing of a singular narrative, as observed in the first and second peak times specifically with descriptions of ‘dignity’ promoting a lexical coherence between the two projects. This convergence is observed again within the final peak in social media activity, in which textual descriptions operate to soften the visual contradistinction between the two projects, yet this time returning to narratives of victimization. The four Instagram posts during this final peak time are by Ferguson but through the WPP official Instagram page. There are no descriptions of ‘dignity’ in any of these posts and, unlike the focus on the Chibok girls’ lives after being rescued in NYT-2, here there is only mention of their capture. The shift in narrative, which more closely reflects the WPP exhibition than the photographer’s previously developed narrative of ‘dignity’, once again points to the semiotic value of victimization and terror within WPP spaces.

Our exploration of the social-media promotion of the two NYT-commissioned portrait projects reveals how their coexistence is both explicitly and implicitly linked during crucial moments in the production–diffusion of the various products forming the transmedia project. As portraits are paired with one text or another in the various communicative contexts, their resemiotization becomes a process of spectacle renewal. But, rather than giving birth to new representations, this renewal is a cyclical process in which previous narratives are transposed, combined and omitted. Our analysis suggests that this process correlates with promotional functions, where the launching or success of one project publicizes the other. We also observe the way in which spectacle renewal supports self-promotional ends, with the spotlight on the photojournalists rather than the photographed girls, their experiences and the greater socio-political context in which their stories are immersed. Across the traversal narrative, however, semiotic inconsistencies also emerge in the adaption of representations through narratives that hold greater semiotic value within the distinct online and offline media contexts.

(Post-)humanitarian salvation: recycled narratives and ‘I’ activism

The I Am Not a Weapon initiative – promoted in the third peak of social media activity – further highlights the circular rather than linear process of a traversal narrative, in which meanings are not simply lost or gained, but also recycled as they are ascribed to the different media products forming the transmedia project. While building on our previous analysis of spectacle renewal with (self)promotional functions, this campaign further exposes the White Savior Industrial Complex (Cole, 2012) as a neoliberal enterprise sustained through post-humanitarian dispositions and digital tools.

The I Am Not a Weapon (2018) interactive webpage displays both images and audio-videos of nine of the Maiduguri survivors. The photos and film recordings that contribute to the retelling of each girl’s experience draw on both the original photographs and recreations of the photojournalism project featured in the NYT and by the WPP and LC (2018) competitions. The aesthetic qualities thus serve as a conductive thread – a form of branding – that visually allows spectators to identify the campaign as part of the larger transmedia project. In the recontextualizations of the girls’ stories with recycled images, however, we once again encounter semiotic cracks. Exemplifying this disjuncture, are what we identify as two terror-inspiring portraits of Aisha and Amina from the original photojournalism project, with each girl’s entextualized declaration of hope in the foreground. The girls’ voices in their multimodal, profiled stories clearly display their role as victims in need of Western intervention by emphasizing their vulnerability (e.g. ‘only means of survival left’) and highlighting their shared desire for education. ¹³ Yet these textual representations of hope clash with the dark visual narratives through which the girls embody the figure of the ‘female suicide bomber’. As observed in the spectacle renewal of the Maiduguri girls as part of a collectivized project of ‘dignification’, here we see how the repackaging of their stories as objects of a humanitarian campaign also carries with it semiotic incongruencies in the attempt to maintain the visual brand of the multimedia project.

As instanced in I Am Not A Weapon’s multimodal portrayals of Aisha and Amina, providing education for these women and girls so that they may have ‘a chance to rebuild their lives’ ¹⁴ is a central focus of the campaign. The neoliberal values upholding this campaign are not only evidenced by this priority given to education as a tool for optimizing (see Ong, 2019) the girls’ adherence to the labour market as its main ‘humanitarian’ goal, but also in the way in which the campaign is linguistically marketed. Individualism and self-governance are prominent themes of the girls’ featured testimonies and the framing of public action. Perhaps the most linguistically explicit illustration of this is the ‘I Am’ trope of the campaign. From the campaign name, I Am Not A Weapon, to the titles of the subpage portals on the website homepage, ‘I Am’ is used to represent both victims and (Western) campaign collaborators in what appears to be a fusion of ‘empowered’ voices. Yet a clear distinction can be made between the two. The ‘I Am’ as the voice of victims primarily serves to negate negative conceptions and accusations through identification claims (e.g. ‘I Am Innocent/Courageous/Not a Weapon’). ‘I Am’ as the voice of interested collaborators, on the other hand, is paired with their actions rather than identities (e.g. ‘I am staying informed/taking action’). Whereas the identification claims are artificially constructed and ticketed onto each girl’s profile function to defend the girls’ position as victims so that they may be read as objects of (Western) benevolence, the representation of individuals ‘taking action’ is used to solicit this aid. This ‘I’ activism central to the campaign’s marketing pitch therefore locates the Nigerian conflict on a moral rather than a geopolitical axis and evokes post-humanitarian dispositions where click activism (or slacktivism) becomes a form of (buying) self-empowerment.

The salvation paradigm which underpins the I Am Not a Weapon campaign not only promotes apolitical, ironic engagement with distant others and their stories of suffering (Chouliaraki, 2013), but it also reflects and establishes a neocolonial, patriarchal relationship (Berents, 2016) in which the ‘I’ activism of the West saves (innocent) girls from the terrorizing, masculine hands in the Global South. Indeed, this campaign is not solely focused on the future of the Maiduguri girls who are showcased on its website. Rather, the Maiduguri photojournalism project serves as a springboard for the campaign’s (and their Western donors’) salvation of ‘at-risk girls in Nigeria and around the world’. ¹⁵