Migrant Voice on Social Media

Sounds of the ‘Jungle’: Restoring The Migrant Voice on Social Media

Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2015) Sounds of the ‘Jungle’: Restoring The Migrant Voice on Social Media. JOMEC. (7), http://www.qmul.ac.uk/docs/167415.pdf

Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick / Calais - Manifestation contre les clandestins, l'immigration

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais, France. ‘The Jungle’, which was strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses  of illegality and the violation of white suburbia. The British mainstream media have rendered the migrants either voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders, while silencing the human trauma of migration through the distancing of the human subject in media discourses. Through the Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS) case study we highlight how new media spaces can rehumanize migrants, enabling them to tell their stories through their own narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance-framing techniques of the mainstream media, which dehumanize the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies.

Space Making, Policy and the Jungle in Calais

Space and the Jungle in Calais: Space Making through Place, Policy, Human Movement and Media

Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2015) ‘Space and the Jungle in Calais: Space Making through Place, Policy, Human Movement and Media’ in Einar Thorsen (ed) Media and the Margins. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. 

Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick / Calais - Manifestation contre les clandestins, l'immigration-invasion et l'islamisation de l'Europe, 8 novembre 2015 (19) / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

This chapter analyses how the online versions of Britain’s two mid-market newspapers framed the migrant camps or ‘jungles’ on the French sea border as marginalised spaces. The French town of Calais has been the focal point of debates about illegal entry to the United Kingdom and in tandem cross-border tensions. The jungle as a physical entity is drawn into space-making in a multitude of ways which are complex and entwined. We examine discursive and material space constructions in framing human migration and how borders as interstitial spaces become continually redefined and reconstructed through the interactions of the corporeal body with the physical environment, policy enactments and cross border patrols. Spaces at the margin functioning beyond metaphors become heuristic entities where their material and intangible construction and destruction have consequences for shaping human empathy and engagement as well as distance and detachment with the migrant as a human and with immigration debates.