Constructing refugees, violence and fear, in the Australian media-scape.

THE MEDIA is an inescapable information apparatus which, according to Stuart Hall and the social constructionist theories of Michel Foucault, simultaneously reflects and constructs culture and society, through the images and texts it disseminates (Hall 1997). The media has the power to create, strengthen or challenge socially constructed stereotypes, and understandings of global events.

It is a tool which has formed and circulated key ideas of refugees and asylum seekers across the world, influencing the public perception of the ‘refugee crisis’ in the process.

Drawing on Henry Tajfel’s ‘in-group out-group’ theory (1979), the following discussion will critically assess how political discourse and news reporting of refugees in Australia has perpetuated a dominant narrative rooted in a ‘racist’, ‘us and them’ discourse, which has led to violence against, and aggression towards refugees and migrants of colour. The following discussion will then detail the resistant discourses permeating social media, which are challenging the fear-mongering narratives perpetuated by political discourse and traditional media. 

Us and them 

“The relationship between media discourse and political representations of asylum seekers reflects the intersection between the imaginings of national identity and populist politics in contemporary Australian culture” (Gale 2004, pp. 334).

HENRY Tajfel’s ‘in-group out-group theory’ (1979) posits that individuals construct a social identity through a process of group membership. We perceive ourselves as belonging to an ‘in-group,’ that shares our values and ideologies, and come to define our identity by the labels we, and others, place on ourselves because of our alignment with this group. For instance, I use the label of ‘feminist’ to describe myself, and am likely to self-identify, or associate with other groups of people who label themselves the same way (Tajfel 1979). Through this process we also construct perceived ‘out-groups’ of people who are excluded from our in-group, and who represent alternative values and ideologies. Humans, therefore, tend to make sense of their social world by constructing cognitive stereotypes which embody the assumptions of what individuals, and their social group, represent. Collectively, this is how a national identity can be formed by a government agenda within a nation state (Strang 1996). 

IN Peter Gale’s, ‘The refugee crisis and fear’ (2004) he writes about the role the media has played in developing a racist social discourse which frames non-white immigrants as being a threat to a national identity. “Their cultures and values are commonly represented in media discourse as ‘alien’ and a threat to whiteness, and western, core values or democracy itself” (Gale 2004 pp. 323). Cartner (2009) discretely analyses the media coverage of The Tampa in Western Australia, highlighting the way the incident was depicted as a ‘siege’ of Australia’s borders the government was ‘fighting’ protect.

Through the perpetuation of this – or what Cartner calls an – ‘invasion rhetoric’ throughout Australian media, the label of a ‘refugee’ becomes associated with an out-group, which is a threat to the sovereign ‘in-group’ of the Australian nation-state characterised by whiteness, Westernism and sovereignty (Cartner 2009, Gale 2004, Pickering 2001). This invasion discourse reflects the terminology used in the Australian border protection policy ‘Operation Sovereign Borders,’ which positions asylum seekers as an ‘illegal’ ‘threat’ to the sovereignty of Australia (Chia et al, 2014). Through a symbiotic relationship, between journalists and politicians, newspapers produce stories which relay information about this policy. Therefore, it benefits the government “to frame a policy debate in a particular way to heavily influence public discourse, and hence public opinion, on a particular topic”. This war-like discourse which permeates ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ justifies the need for military intervention in order to ‘protect’ the country from the ‘threat’ of refugee ‘invasion’, and furthermore positions our leaders as Australia’s protectors. This same discourse is reflected in popular film consumed by an Australian audience, although often depicted in an American context. The Netflix series Homeland follows a narrative of anti-terrorism, where each episode follows an American CIA mission to protect the U.S from Middle Eastern terrorist attacks. Throughout the series, a number of episodes take place in refugee camps, which insinuates a ‘terrorist’ stereotype associated with Middle Eastern refugees in popular American film (Sánchez-Escalonilla 2010).

This process of ‘othering’ those who conform to the label of a refugee, means that refugeesare vulnerable to being morally excluded from the human rights and dignities afforded to those with citizenship (Opotow 1990). Refugees have been shot at by the navy in Australian waters, arbitrarily detained in offshore detention facilities, denied medical assistance and education, treated inhumanely in unfit living conditions and denied access to communication,as a result (Dastyari & Hirsch 2019). This process of moral exclusion also means that refugees who are resettled in Australia are vulnerable to experiences of violence and microaggression in Australian society (Opotow 1990). The Cronulla Riot Attacks which took place in 2005, were the manifestation of a society steeping in an ongoing build-up of media reporting which perpetuated Islamophobia and fear of Middle Eastern asylum seekers (Aslan 2009, Esses & Medianu 2013, Rowe & O’Brien 2014).   

Censorship, social media and pop culture.

The privatisation of offshore detention centres has allowed the Australian government to silence coverage of the inhumane treatment of refugees in offshore detention facilities (Carter 2009). The censorship of information relating to the treatment of asylum seekers allows governments to go unchecked and maintains the ‘invasion rhetoric’ as the dominant narrative relating to refugees in social discourse (Cartner 2009).

This censorship is not isolated to Australia but is present among governments all across the world, in their dealings with the arrival of refugees. However, since the dawn of the digital revolution, public access to the amount and variety of content in media has never been the same. 

Social media has arisen as an important vessel for navigating the censorship and political spin, by allowing the first-hand accounts of refugees to manifest as the resistant narrative to the fear mongering which dominates political discourse. 

The Instagram page @conversationsfromcalais is a platform for sharing the stories of UK volunteers who have delivered humanitarian assistance to refugees in Calais. Each story highlights the asymmetrical power relation between the volunteer, who is privileged and empowered to deliver aid, and the refugee who is dependent upon the aid being given. Through these stories (which are printed out and plastered around cities, then photographed to be shared digitally) the humanity of the refugee is accentuated in what Peter Gale (2004) calls a ‘human face’ rhetoric.  

From a humanitarian perspective, one would argue that the @conversationsfromcalais response to the refugee crisis using social media is by far better than the response of aforementioned traditional media outlets in Australia, however one must still be critical of the representation this produces. 

Jailani (2016) writes about how the constant positioning of refugee people in need of saving by white western society, contributes to a white-saviour complex which maintains white supremacy and inferiority of non-white cultures and societies. As such, the burqa has become a symbol which is perceived as congruent with oppression. The veiled woman is represented as a charity case in need of saving and liberation by Western civilisation (Jailani 2016). In the context of Australian Nationalism – or what has been termed ‘Hansonism’ after Pauline Hanson – the veiled woman symbolises everything that is un-Australian… a repressive ideology that will threaten ‘our way of life’ (Jailani 2016, Gale 2004). 

Therefore, the media’s depiction of white saviourism in one context elicits a humanitarian response towards Islamic refugees, in another context can once again elicit ‘fear of the other’ based on an Islamaphobic stereotype. What is coherent with both of these examples, however, is that neither empowers refugee people to tell and share their own stories. 

In response, and resistance to both narratives, is the song Borders by M.I.A, who is a former refugee herself. This is a song about the experiences of refugees, being told in a way that highlights the power and strength of those who are stateless. It is a social commentary on the arbitrary nature of borders, and raises awareness of the unnecessary violence refugees are met with, when trying to access their legal right to asylum. 

To conclude…

The discourse which powerfully permeates society, is the discourse which shapes the narratives we construct to make meaning of the world. While the discourse surrounding the refugee crisis changes in different social contexts, and in different forms of media, the stories which are allowed to dominate, continue to shape our understanding of the issue. The invasion rhetoric in policy and traditional media, surrounding Middle Eastern migration and Asylum Seekers in Australia has shown to have real-life violent consequences in the form of the Cronulla attacks. Furthermore, fear mongering, Islamophobic narratives are developed through popular film with a strong focus on terrorism that conflates the refugee crisis with the threat of terrorism. Since these representations and narratives contribute to violence, and fear, they are also not a positive response to the refugee crisis. In saying this, the humanitarian narrative which depicts refugees as dependant, also strips away agency, empowerment, and dignity from the representation of refugees, while homogenising all refugees into a singular category. This negates the sense of individuality, culture, agency, and resilience which in reality, are present in the stories of all refugees (Scalettaris 2007), and is highlighted in the song, Borders, by M.I.A.

Citations

1. Aslan, A. (2009). Islamophobia in australia (1st ed.). Glebe, N.S.W: Agora Press.

2. Cartner, J. M. (2009). Representing the refugee: Rhetoric, discourse and the public agenda (Master of Arts (MA)). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/43

3. Chia, J., McAdam, J., & Purcell, K. (2014). Asylum in australia: 'operation sovereign borders' and international law. Australian Year Book of International Law, 32(1), 33-64. doi:10.1163/26660229-032-01-900000004

4. Esses, V. M., & Medianu. S., (2013) Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees. Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 69, No. 3, 2013, pp. 518--536 

5. Gale, P. (2004). The refugee crisis and fear: Populist politics and media discourse. Journal of Sociology © 2004 The Australian Sociological Association, Volume 40(4): 321–340DOI:10.1177/1440783304048378 

6. Hall, S., (1997) ‘The work of representation’, in S. Hall (ed.) Representation: cultural representations and signifying practises. London: Sage, in association with the Open University. 

7. Barton, M., & Cowan, S. ‘KEEP OUT Boat people not our problem: PM’, The West Australian, 28 August 2001, p.1. 

9. Opotow, S. (1990). Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction. Journal of Social Sciences. Vol. 46, No. 1, 1990, pp. 1-20. 

10. Pickering, S. (2001). Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Discourses and Asylum Seekers in Australian Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 2001 © Oxford University Press 2001.

 11. Rowe, E., & O’Brien, E. (2014) ‘Genuine’ refugees or illegitimate ‘boat people’: Political constructions of asylum seekers and refugees in the Malaysia Deal debate. Australian Journal of Social Issues Vol.49 No.2, 2014. 

 12. Scalettaris, G. (2007). Refugee studies and the international refugee regime: A reflection on a desirable separation. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26(3), 36-50. doi:10.1093/rsq/hdi0241

 13. Strang, D. (1996). Constructing the nation-state: International organization and prescriptive action.connie L. McNeely. The American Journal of Sociology, 102(2), 601-602. doi:10.1086/230964

 14. Tajfel, H., Turner, J. C., Austin, W. G., & Worchel, S. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. Organizational identity: A reader, 56-65.

 15. Dastyari, A., & Hirsch, A. (2019). The ring of steel: Extraterritorial migration controls in indonesia and libya and the complicity of australia and italy. Human Rights Law Review, 19(3), 435-465. doi:10.1093/hrlr/ngz024

 16. Sajir, Z., & Aouragh, M. (2019). Solidarity, social media, and the "refugee crisis": Engagement beyond affect. International Journal of Communication (Online), , 550.

17. Jailani, Y. (2016). The struggle of the veiled woman: 'white savior complex' and rising islamophobia create a two-fold plight. Harvard International Review, 37(2), 51-54.

18. Sánchez-Escalonilla, A. (2010). Hollywood and the rhetoric of panic: The popular genres of action and fantasy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 38(1), 10-20. doi:10.1080/01956050903449640