Lives in mediated liminality : conditional humanitarianism and collateral suffering -

Abstract

This study explores the photographic engagement of mainstream news media with migrants, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers (often referred to as sufferers throughout the study) since the beginnings of the Syrian conflict and throughout the mass movement of people to Europe in 2015. Eschewing prevalent focus on negative representations, it investigates problematic ‘human-centric’ discourses on the plights of vulnerable people. It explores how a human-centric discourse, widely assumed to be of noble goals and concrete remedies, can be as problematic as a dehumanizing one. Grounded in the concepts of biopower and shared precariousness, the study examines a selective approach images take in visualizing suffering, and analyzes the assumptions they make about deservingness. It argues that specific tropes images use participate in a discourse that presents sufferers as bare lives stripped of their agency, unrecognized unless they bear the marks of suffering. Such process transforms human suffering into a spectacle in which the needs of the liberal spectator with humanitarian sensibility take precedence over those of sufferers. This human-centric discourse thus contributes to perpetuating the conditions of suffering by failing to honor the universality humanitarianism upholds or to cater to the populations it claims to protect.