Abstracts

Day 1

Panel 1 On methodology and ethics

Dubravka Zarkov (Radboud University): Media, race, gender, and the war on terror: a theoretical contextualization

Reflecting on the contributions of the other authors of the special issue, this essay discusses the adopted theoretical and methodological approaches regarding media research and their impact in examining the entanglements of constructions of gender and race in narratives about the war on terror and the moral panic around migration.

Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths College – University of London): Extractive humanitarianism: participatory detention and refugees' unpaid labour

This presentation interrogates the political economy of labour and the modes of value extraction which are at play in refugee governmentality. It advances the notion of “extractive humanitarianism” to designate the central role played by data extraction and knowledge extraction operations in refugee governmentality. The talk focuses on Cash Assistance Programme for asylum seekers to data extraction activities in refugee camps in Greece, and explores the labour economies at stake there. It proposes to complement migration studies literature on labour and critical security studies works on digital technologies with feminist political theories on unpaid labour. It moves on by analysing multiple data extraction processes which are at stake in refugee humanitarianism. The second part focuses on knowledge extraction operations and on the unpaid labour that asylum seekers are nudged to do in refugee camps and hotspots in the name of their own good. In so doing, it argues, asylum seekers are asked to participate to their own confinement, that is to mechanisms of “participatory detention”. I will conclude by speaking about the invisible labour that humanitarian actors need to do in order to keep digital infrastructures up to date.

Barbara Pinelli (University of Milan): Vulnerability and political responsibility. Gendered ethic and methodology in the research on violence and asylum

Particularly since the nineties, alongside the securitarian discourses, new and old humanitarian rhetorics have fuelled the Global North political space on forced migration and asylum. Especially when it is referred to refugee women, the humanitarian reason proclaims to guarantee protection to vulnerable migrants and refugees using specific languages to speak about violence and vulnerability or promote emancipation and autonomy. This grammar still anchors the vulnerability to a continued and constitutive absence of agency and strengthens a persistent colonial canon that sees ‘the Global South refugee woman’ the one who can be eventually saved and protected by paternalistic interventions. Referring to recent feminist insights on vulnerability (as a human condition through which to rethink the responsibility and action) and to my research experiences in Italy on refugee women’s testimonies transgressing the humanitarian grammar and that of the Western feminism (especially the ways of conceiving emancipation, justice, agency) I put at the core the ways we can reframe (and act) wounds repair processes. By analysing how (a part of) the Western feminism is complicit in nourishing ‘colonial ways of seeing’, the point of my discussion concerns the ways in which gender methodology and ethics may be reframed to mobilise responses to violability and collective hurts and assert the political value of subjectivities having lived abuses, displacement, borders violence to think new forms of alliance and shared communities.

Panel 2 On media and internal borders

Carla Panico (CES-UC / ITM): Defending the body of the Nation: extreme masculinity in Italian politics, from Matteo Salvini to Giorgia Meloni.

In Italy, a new hegemony of the far right has been built, during the last years (2015-2021) by mobilizing a corpus of discourses and images aimed to maintain the white anxiety. The overrepresentations of landings of boats crossing the Mediterranean has been functional to prove the alleged invasion of migrants who pose a threat to the body of the Nation. Italian national imagined community always fought to represent itself as homogeneous and inherently white (Giuliani – Lombardi Diop 2015), and has now to fight against the danger of the ethnic Replacement.

This kind of war at the borders against the invaders, represented as monsters (Giuliani 2020), has been led by strong figures of masculine leaders who defend the body of the Nation. In the contemporary era, this figure is perfectly embodied by the leader of the Lega party (former Lega Nord) Matteo Salvini - the "Captain" (Santese, Valli, 2020) as he wants to be called. Through a critical discourse analysis of media scripts, the present paper unpacks the cultural material and the weaponized languages used to build his public figure, proposing a comparison aimed to show how this masculine power has been translated, thereafter, by a feminine leadership. In particular, the present study analyzes the rise of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the party “Fratelli d’Italia”, who became, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the new point of reference of the Italian far right. As a woman, Meloni re-functionalized the weapons of the militarized masculinity at the border in different ways, lying on an explicit anti-feminist discourse and proposing a new masculinized leadership, partially inspired by the leader of the French Party “Fronte Nationale”, Marine Le Pen.

Inês Amaral (University of Coimbra): (In)visibilities of Men and Aging in Mainstream Media

Mainstream media discourses tend to legitimise and convey social representations in line with hegemonic ideologies and are often guided by the definition of traditional gender roles of what a man and what a woman should be (Simões, 2017; Amaral et al., 2019). These selective invisibilities and visibilities fall within the framework of ‘symbolic annihilation’ (Gerbner & Gross, 1976), which describes the absence of representation or under-representation of social groups in the media.

This paper aims to analyse media representations of older men in Germany and Portugal, endeavouring to detect visibilities and invisibilities. ‘How are older men represented in legacy media?’ is the research question that guides this study. In order to answer it, a case study was conducted through quantitative content analysis on four news magazines: two Portuguese (Visão and Sábado) and two Germans (Der Spiegel and Focus). Analysed media discourses tend to reproduce the hegemonic ideology concerning age and gender. Older people are underrepresented, and older men, when represented, are portrayed in line with traditional conceptions of manhood. The analysed journalistic pieces give evidence of a mediated social construction of reality filled with stereotypes that promote the near non-existence of women, non-hegemonic masculinities, or older people in the four news magazines.

Panel 3 On counternarratives

Gaia Giuliani (CES-UC / ITM): Images of invasion and embodied counter-narratives in Italy

Like in many other Western countries, also in Italy, feelings of being in a “state of siege” (Hage 2006) are very important cultural and political factors in both forging ideas of the nation. Here, that what has been defined “white anxiety” in the context of 9/11 Western discourses on and security practices against terrorism and in the context of the so-called migrant and refugee crises, is reinforced by an image of Italy as innocent. This image is based on the idea that the country - as a “victim of disembarkments” - has nothing to do with deaths at sea, and instead, despite the need to self-defense against the invasion, is benevolent towards people on the move. My paper will map and explore genealogies and current features of the iconography of intersectional colour lines and its function in building and contesting images of “invasion”. Drawing from the 23 interviews I conducted in 2020-2021 with experts, mainstream and alternative journalists, activists, artists and curators I will focus on images circulated in news media to offer a different understanding of the Italian “imagination of the siege”. In particular, I will try to rethink Italy through the contestation of mainstream discourses on the Italian imagined community as white, innocent and at siege, raised in anti-racist political movements, independent journalism, art and scholarly work.

Raquel Lima (CES-UC): Pandemic Solidarity - Counternarratives on solidarity during an existential crisis

Which counternarratives on solidarity emerge when society is faced with an existential crisis? This communication aims to contribute to a possible answer to this question, having as reference the book Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis (edited by Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar), and its extensive interview material from mutual aid initiatives during the Covid-19 crisis, in 18 countries. Written by a collective of mostly women, these are counternarratives from around the world showing how people have worked together, away from mainstream dynamics and media, to overcome the global pandemic. An analysis will be made of the various meanings and reconfigurations of the concept and practice of solidarity in different contexts and scales, starting from my personal experience on a mutual-aid local initiative in Coimbra; moving on to co-writing a chapter with Laís Duarte on intersectional solidarity in Portugal; and ending in solidarity experiences at an international level, on which the construction of the book itself and the consequent creation of the Colectiva Sembrar are inscribed.

Panel 4 On media and external borders

Júlia Garraio (CES-UC): Confluence and affinities between femonationalism and the discourses against “gender ideology”: the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland

In recent years, we have been witnessing concerted efforts to discredit feminist initiatives, agendas and militancy, often through the claim that feminism does not “really” stand for women's rights and is counterproductive for their needs and well-being. Actors pursuing femonationalist agendas (Farris 2017) and opposers of “gender ideology” stand out as contemporary outspoken detractors of feminism. This article argues that the confluence between the two positions, which can be observed in the political program of many contemporary European parties, derives from the structural affinity between feminationalism and discourses against “gender ideology”, namely their understanding of the female body as the tool for the reproduction of the “imagined community”. While in femonationalism the woman's body is seen a key element in the racially imagined nation, and as such as a treasure to be protected from the Other, the detractors of “gender ideology” position the woman's body (and personal fulfillment) at the core of the heteronormative family as the locus for the biological reproduction of the Christian family. This article examines the Facebook national page of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) [Alternative for Germany] in order to tackle how the abovementioned structural affinity is underpinned by a pervasive moral panic around nativist tropes regarding the “safety and the future of our children”. It argues that the protection of women as the “uterus of the nation” (Mudden 2019) results in de deprotection of women’s rights and legislative and sociocultural regression in the fight against sexism and sexual violence.

Rita Santos (CES-UC) and Sílvia Roque (CES-UC / ITM): The Portuguese far right and the intersection of anti-immigration and anti-feminist agendas

This presentation discusses the intersections of the anti-feminist and anti-immigration agendas in the Portuguese far-right through critical discourse analysis of the PNR and Chega’s positions. These political actors convey nationalist, racist and anti-multiculturalist messages at the same time that they show their hostility towards gender equality policies, using racial, cisgender and heteronormative categories as criteria to define whose citizens are worthy of defense/protection. Recently, they have also co-opted to different degree gender equality agendas to justify anti-immigration positions, specifically opposing the hosting of refugees, depicted as a potential threat to the imagined Portuguese and European white and Christian community. While there is some co-option of feminism in favor of anti-immigration agendas and labelling of feminist movements as selective, short-sided and not really at service of women, on the other hand, these actors resist current national and international feminist stances, portraying current feminist issues as non-necessary or ridiculous, and as missing the mark because of its concessions to ‘gender ideology’ – proposing a familialist take on feminist activism instead.

Sofia José Santos (FEUC/CES-UC): Voice, agency and the deconstruction of gendered and racialised otherness: negotiating digital micro-narratives within the macro-narrative of the war on terror

Narratives are pivotal in (re)producing and understanding the world. Holding a political nature, they are intrinsically subjective and related to power, thus usually embodying what Cantat (2015) labelled as the norms of « tellability» to synthesise the power to tell, to choose the stories, and get them heard. Narratives of otherness and risk targeting migrants and refugees in Europe have gained prominence in mainstream media coverage, particularly since 2013. These representations often hold a gendered and racialised othering connotation that embody the alleged risks that migrants and refugees represent for what is conventionally read as the social cohesion and security of Europe and its citizens. Against this backdrop, the internet provides the opportunity for potentially rebalancing agencies and narratives concerning this dispute. Indeed, social media provide a space for first-hand narrative sharing, allowing subaltern groups to account for their histories and trajectories, express their own identities and political perspectives, and overcome the invisibility and/or securitised gendered and racialised otherness to which the dominant structures and narratives often relegate them. Nevertheless, although presented as two different narratives concerning specific agencies, bodies, groups, and events, the difference between them is not just one of the angles chosen. There is a difference in scale and power. This presentation will shed light on the possibilities and limitations of the digital agency of subaltern groups in negotiating with the dominant representations that frame their agency within the macro-narrative of the “West and the Rest” and one of its most recent leeways – the “war on terror”. To do so, it will theoretically engage with post-colonial and critical media and internet studies and extract data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and analyse how self-representations of migrants and refugees within the digital realm can be told and heard and how they are able to negotiate with the securitising dominant representations of themselves.

Olga Solovova (CEIS-UC / CES-UC): Hegemonic narratives and counter-narratives at the crossroads between Russia, Norway and Finland

It’s become somewhat commonplace to describe borderlands as zones of contact between the cultures that interact from across the border. At the same time, borders separate ways of living, economic and cultural practices.

The area around the trilateral Russia-Norway-Finland border in the Arctic, where the data for this paper comes from, is no exception. People on each side live in different time zones, pay using different currencies, speak different languages, write using distinct writing systems and perform differing religious rituals. Yet the area had been inhabited well before the borders were established and redrawn. Nowadays, thanks to the long-standing trans-border cooperation in ecology, arts, sports and industry, an ongoing creation of a common ‘Barents’ identity narrative takes place here.

The formulation of a trans-border identity is riddled with discursive tensions, as the Barents narrative is encouraged and promoted by the regional and transnational elites while being contested by the local minoritised groups and disrupted by the securitarian discourses emanating from Oslo and Moscow. By providing a glimpse into the linguistic landscape, language portrait and biographical interview data collected in the borderland, the paper attempts to show how all these flows somehow get reconciled in biographical narratives of the people who live in the area.

Appadurai suggested ‘scapes’ as a way to conceptualise the fluid, fragmented and globally

perspectival societal formations. To acknowledge the border as a social, cultural and political construct, Perera (2007) proposed ‘borderscape’ as an “entry point to study the border as mobile, perspectival and relational”. Departing from Agamben’s reading of the border as a line that distinguishes norm from exception and on Ranciere’s understanding of border as always in state of flux and dispute, the ‘borderscape’ can be a productive concept to combine the semiotic construction, performance and contestation of geographic and symbolic borders (Schimanski&Wolfe 2010).

Keynote

Monish Bhatia (Birkbeck): Representations of Bangladeshi Migrants in the Indian Press

The partition of India took place in 1947, and it was at the time seen as the only remedy to the Hindu-Muslim 'communalism' and a 'departing gift' from the British. The Indo-Bangladesh boundary vivisection was conducted by a colonial civil servant called Cyrill Radcliffe, who had no knowledge of Indian administration and neither did he have the expertise of resolving border disputes. The entire exercise was hasty and messy and was not tidily concluded - on the contrary, it had only just begun and remains unfinished to this date. People on both sides of the border have kinship, cultural and economic ties, and the movement of people happens largely undocumented and clandestinely, and through negotiations with border security officers and/or border crossing facilitators. Since the nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was elected to power there has been a sustained attention on 'illegal' migration from Bangladesh and the 'threat' pose by so-called 'infiltrators'. Many have argued that under BJP administration press is not free anymore, and state shapes the information that 1.3 billion Indians receive. The aim of this paper is to explore the media representations of Bangladeshi migrants and Muslim 'other' in the India press and the dissemination of xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim discourse.