Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

By Prof. Katharine Sarikakis

“a drama is played out between me and you, it is the drama of authorisation. The question or assertion that we address to others is invariably coupled with an entreaty: deliver me from my abandonment, allow me to belong among you”

Lyotard (1993)

It is the paradox of globalisation, which has been associated with the narrative of freedom, and the course of a Europe towards unification, the narrative of a borderless ‘family’, where immobility is imposed. It is further the paradox of seamless, round the clock instant global communication and access to everything and anyone, where silencing and surveillance over ‘dialogues’ and ‘voices’ is effected.

The journey of a migrant person, one might say, never ends; as a migrant, the ‘other’ never reaches a destination, perhaps even never ‘belongs’ in the words of Lyotard. This is a journey of a constant in-transit status, plagued with multiple losses. Not only do fleeing persons lose their home, friends and often family, and generally everything that is considered basic for human existence. People in-transit lose their voice, their communication rights, their standing as citizens equal to those who already “belong”.

This voice is silenced in many ways. From the media’s and politicians’ often opportunistic games likening the flow of people to ‘flooding’ and natural disasters, people to rats, to conflating religious orientation to terrorism, othering people on the basis of where they are coming from dehumanises and so silences them. Because their voice has little value and their words little authority before they are even spoken.

People in forced transit are silenced and immobilised between countries, on borders, by purpose-erected fences, in detention camps, in refugee camps, in  ‘reception’ centres. The journey is plagued by immobilisation while at the same time involving forced, incessant ‘mobility’ through all im/possible means, even the inhospitable waters of the sea. Their deaths, the ultimate act of silencing perhaps, presented as a neutral, unfortunate, event.

A person who ‘simply’ has  ‘to go elsewhere’, in order to save theirs and their children’s lives or to escape poverty, assault, oppression or to search for a better life, if they survive, have to prove along their journey, repeatedly and painstakingly, the reasons why they would deserve to be treated as equal interlocutors. Before they arrive anywhere, representations and preconceptions about them precede their own voices. Only later, would they be allowed to speak, to become interlocutors, to be recognised as equals so that they can seek protection, would be allowed a voice to call upon international law and claim for their rights as human beings to be reinstated.

A migrant person experiences the dis-enablement of communicative acts: the act of accessing and imparting information becomes very difficult, in detention centres contact of detainees to the outside world is limited; migrant children are deprived from schooling, adults have scarce access to translation and legal services. And when the moment comes for the migrant person to speak – to explain their experience and situation- this turn is plagued by conditions of force and demand, which make them relive previous losses and abuse. It is not the act of interlocution among equals in these situations what one experiences, but the act of interrogation where one party has the power to determine the other party’s own life journey.

The state of exceptionality is stamped upon refugees. Along the way, many  ‘invisible‘ human rights are suspended, as is the recognition of the migrant person’s humanity.

On December 2, we try to find answers about reinstating the voice of migrants and refugees through the media and the law. Our public debate aims to give the floor to the many ways media are counteracting hate speech, prejudice, stereotypes and moral panics.

For a scholarly mapping and analysis see: Sarikakis, K. (2012). Access Denied: Gendered migration, immobilisation and the anatomy of silence. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(5), 800-816 (17).

Katharine Sarikakis is Professor of Media Governance at the University of Vienna www.sarikakis.info http://mediagovernance.univie.ac.at