1st Edition
Visual Border Politics Images and Migration Governance in Europe
Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Images, borders, and their politics 2 Analyzing visual border politics 3 Mobilizing ‘Alan Kurdi’ in pre-Brexit Britain 4 Mobilizing images of welcome culture and Holocaust postmemory in Germany 5 Images and doing border in the German media discourse Conclusion Index
Biography
Laura Holderied is Senior Research Associate at Giessen University (Germany) in the Research Group “Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies”. Laura’s research interests are in European migration and border politics, visual international politics, and conflicts about inclusion/exclusion, rights, and political community in migration societies. She has published on the role of visual discourses in migration and border governance, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ 2015, the politics of images and rights in migration-related conflicts, and visual methodologies.
Visual Border Politics: Images and Migration Governance in Europe provides a pathbreaking account of how migration is visualized in contemporary European media and the political implications thereof. Bringing together visual International Relations research and critical migration and border studies, Laura Holderied presents a powerful theoretical framework, thoughtful and hands-on methodological guidance and extremely rich case studies of the UK and Germany.
- Lene Hansen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Focusing on the European ‘refugee crisis,’ Visual Border Politics offers a rich analysis of the complex and polysemic power of images. Holderied convincingly argues - and empirically demonstrates - that this power is not uniform, but emerges from and depends on the context within which images of migration gain meaning.
- Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia
From images of discarded life-jackets on Mediterranean beaches to queues of people crossing fences along the ‘Balkan Route’, the visualization of Europe’s so-called ‘migration crisis’ features prominently in the contemporary political imagination. Conceptually sophisticated and empirically rich, Visual Border Politics moves beyond existing scholarly analyses to explore the political power of images and the social construction of Europe’s borders. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, Holderied makes a landmark contribution to the interdisciplinary study of European border and migration governance.
- Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
