The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration
- Kevin Smets - Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Koen Leurs - Utrecht University
- Myria Georgiou - London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
- Saskia Witteborn - The Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Radhika Gajjala - Bowling Green State University
Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingly digitally tracked and surveilled, and national and international policy-making draws on data on migrant movement, anticipated movement, and biometrics to maintain a sense of control over the mobilities of humans and things. Also, social imaginaries are constituted in highly mediated environments where information and emotions on migration are constantly shared on social and traditional media. Both, those migrating and those receiving them, turn to media and communicative practices to learn how to make sense of migration and to manage fears and desires associated with cross-border mobility in an increasingly porous but also controlled and divided world.
The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration offers a comprehensive overview of media and migration through new research, as well as a review of present scholarship in this expanding and promising field. It explores key interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies, and how these are challenged by new realities and the links between contemporary migration patterns and its use of mediated processes. Although primarily grounded in media and communication studies, the Handbook builds on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, urban studies, science and technology studies, human rights, development studies, and gender and sexuality studies, to bring to the forefront key theories, concepts and methodological approaches to the study of the movement of people.
In seven parts, the Handbook dissects important areas of cross-disciplinary and generational discourse for graduate students, early career researcher, migration management practitioners, and academics in the fields of media and migration studies, international development, communication studies, and the wider social science discipline.
Part One: Keywords and Legacies
Part Two: Methodologies
Part Three: Communities
Part Four: Representations
Part Five: Borders and Rights
Part Six: Spatialities
Part Seven: Conflicts
Due to the range of its themes, approaches, voices and contexts, this volume will be an indispensable guide to all scholars working on migration and media, and will furthermore open up a new space for methodological and conceptual reflection on a world in which movement and mediation are two sides of the same coin.
Scholarship on media and migration research has exploded in recent years. This outstanding volume captures the breadth and urgency of this important and rapidly-evolving work. A must-read for anyone working on media, migration and displacement.
This volume of over 50 chapters traverses enormous terrain in interrogating the entanglements of migration and media, highlighting the politics of encounter and the powerful combinations and permutations that shape contemporary migrant lives across the globe. What is truly excellent is the timely focus on social media, data science and digital technologies, and the impact on knowledge hierarchies and social justice in migration research.
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Highlighting questions of power inequalities, processes, and dynamics within the intersections of media and migration, this book is a path-breaking vital and welcome contribution to migration and media studies. This Handbook provides insights into a central question of both these fields, that of representation and mediation. With careful attention paid to definitions, methodologies, and emerging issues, this book will be invaluable to scholars and students alike.
The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration’ consists of 54 chapters divided into seven parts. It showcases an overview of recent research on media and migration by exploring diverse concepts and methodologies, grounded in media and communication studies, and aided by sociology, anthropology, political science, urban science and technology, human rights, development, and gender and sexuality studies.
By standing against a Eurocentric perspective, the editors have enabled the encounters of researchers from different regions of the world as well as of diverse epistemologies and methodologies in this area of study.
The urgent matter the editors aim to highlight with this work is how questions of mediation and the politics of representation are being led by global and local politics and how the media contribute to the development of acts of xenophobia and the reproduction of far-right ‘crisis’ discourses. By standing against a Eurocentric perspective, the editors have enabled the encounters of researchers from different regions of the world as well as of diverse epistemologies and methodologies in this area of study. This is why the prologue by the artist Tabita Rezaire is an invitation to a healing process, a ‘decolonial healing’, as she labels it.
This handbook is certainly timely given the number of migration crises around the globe, the rise of xenophobic far-Right political groups, and the ever-increasing role of digital media in both representing these crises and the people caught up in them, and providing an opportunity for the disenfranchised to represent themselves. […] In keeping with the principles of social justice and the ethos of cultural studies and media studies, the collection seeks to counter the Eurocentrism of current media messages about migrants.
Through this assemblage of scholarship, The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration represents a provocative gaze on the intersection of media and migration in diverse spheres, places, discourses, and narratives that are subject to micro-, meso-, and macro-analyses. In its attempt to critically challenge and resist a Eurocentric perspective, the book imagines new ways of addressing migration and media research that involve academic awareness and decolonial perspectives
I felt ‘at home’ reading this impressive collection of chapters, stimulated by their findings, diversity of topics and approaches, journeying from one country or refugee site to another, engaging with efforts to map uncertainty, empathizing with both researchers (many migrants themselves) and their study participants. The ‘at home’ feeling stems from the messy duality of meaning an individual may experience as a migrant that was so well captured by researchers in this handbook: at the mercy of institutions who themselves cope with the arrow of time, in the path of intended and unintended consequences of mediated (re)presentations, both agent and object, manifesting defeat and resilience, both a case number and dignifiedly alive.
