Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised 'Refugee Crisis'

Burrell, KL ORCID: 0000-0001-5961-235X and Hörschelmann, Kathrin (2019) Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised 'Refugee Crisis'. Antipode: a radical journal of geography, 51 (1). pp. 45-65.

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Abstract

This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing 'European refugee crisis'. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting 'lines of sight' in an increasingly vitriolic anti-refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	'refugee crisis', visuality, decoloniality, graphic narratives, story telling
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	22 Aug 2018 09:14
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 01:26
DOI:	10.1111/anti.12429
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3025397