Media and migration

Migration has become a highly mediated phenomenon, as it is regularly narrated, framed and imagined on screens and platforms. Scholarship has tackled two distinct but interconnected dimensions of migration’s mediation. First, powerful representations of transnational mobility as a crisis and of migrants either as victims or as threats have generated both academic and public debates that address critical questions on public discourse, most notably asking who speaks and who is silenced in storytelling of migration. Second, use of digital communications by migrants themselves has attracted great interest, raising questions on whether and under what conditions different voices and experiences that appear on social media destabilise hegemonic conceptions of migration. This chapter outlines the main arguments made in these two subfields of media and migration research and highlights their key contributions and limitations.