‘Space Construction in Media Reporting: A Study of the Migrant Space in the “Jungles” of Calais
Ibrahim, Yasmin and
Howarth, Anita (2015) ‘Space Construction in Media Reporting: A Study of the
Migrant Space in the “Jungles” of Calais. Fast
Capitalism. 12 (1). http://www.fastcapitalism.com/
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| Calais Refugee Camp,
By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
|
Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as
well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media
through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses
of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that
newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a
bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such
as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew
the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become
instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant
discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an
imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode
politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in
sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and
construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to
exclude the ‘other’.
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