Media, Migration and Nationalism: A Special Collection
Koen Leurs, Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Tomohisa Hirata, Social and Information Studies, Gunma University, Japan
INTRODUCTION: In the return on the stage of nationalisms in recent years, migrants have been discursively constructed as scapegoats. Specific mobile populations, particularly migrant workers and refugees have been minoritized and racialized as threats or burdens to nation-states in dire attempts to grasp, make tangible, or deny failures and/or limitations of systematic planetary conditions. As Arjun Appadurai has acutely observed, “migrants, especially refugees, in the contemporary globalized world are inevitably second-class citizens because their stories do not fit the narrative requirements of modern nation-states” (2019, 558). Simultaneously, supported by media formations including targeted social media campaigning, we see nationalist rhetoric take centre stage for example, in the election of populist, protectionist, racist, and sexist presidents in the United States, Brazil, and Russia as well as in the UK Brexit vote.
The co-shaping of nationalism, mediation and migration is particularly striking in several recent manifestations of ‘global crises’: most notably the economic crisis, climate crisis, refugee crisis, the COVID-19 crisis and most recently the global #BlackLivesMatter human rights movement. In their mediation, crises politicize difference. A global perspective on media, migration, and nationalism demands that we become critical of what these crises are and are not doing (on the discursive and material level) across geopolitical and situated manifestations. Notwithstanding the unchanged interconnectedness of global capitalism, media, technologies, and networks, these global crises have variously resulted in populist deglobalization stances, action, and rhetoric, resulting in nationalism, parochialism, and isolationism.
CONTENTS:
Media, Migration, and Nationalism: Introduction to the Special Collection
Koen Leurs & Tomohisa Hirata
Digital Cosmopolitanism: Notes from the Underground
Sandra Ponzanesi
Intimacy and Rivalry: Becoming a “Self” in the Virtual Reality of Migration
Tuija Parikka
Jülide Etem
Huub Dijstelbloem
Christine Quinan & Nina Bresser
Sanne Boersma
Racing through the Dutch Governmental Data Assemblage: A Postcolonial Data Studies Approach
Gerwin van Schie, Alex Smit & Nicolás López Coombs
I Heard Homer Sing’: Tsjêbbe Hettinga and the Paradoxes of European Multilingualism
Jesse van Amelsvoort
Elisabetta Costa & Donya Alinejad
Jeffrey Patterson & Koen Leurs
Drawing Migrants and Carceral Spaces: Tings Chak’s Undocumented
Pramod Nayar
Hosting Migrants in Kyoto City: Different Migrant Cohorts and Mutual Support
Fiona Seiger & Atsumasa Nagata
Camila Sarria Sanz & Amanda Alencar