Sanctuary Songs: Refugees and asylum-seekers in/and the mediaInfo Location Contact More Info Event Information
DescriptionThis academic conference, focussing on the relationship between refugees, asylum-seekers and the media, will take place between 19-20 June 2023 (during UNHCR Refugee week) at Newcastle University, a University of Sanctuary. The conference will be in person only, although we will record the keynote presentations.
Event Location
ContactPlease contact the event organisers at the address below if you have any queries: More InformationThe experiences of refugees and asylum-seekers remains salient in and for the media as journalists report from one conflict zone to another, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine adding immediacy to the coverage of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, (re)animating public and political debate about how ‘we’ should respond. At the same time, major crises in regions such as DR Congo, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, Burundi and Ethiopia go largely unreported (Wanless et al, 2022). Generations of Palestinians have now grown up in UN-administered refugee camps in the Middle East, around one million Rohingya people from Myanmar are living in refugee camps in Bangladesh, and the accelerating climate crisis is leading to the further displacement of millions of people worldwide. Some scholars suggest that media coverage of war often lacks context or historical perspective, so that discussions about the economic and cultural aspects as well as the wider structural issue of migration, are largely ignored (Fengler et al, 2022). It is scarcely original to suggest that mainstream media outlets play an important role in informing the public about refugees and asylum-seekers – for example, the number of people attempting (and sometimes tragically failing) to enter Britain informally via the English Channel are a regular feature of UK national news – but the way the issue is reported is seen by many commentators as contributing to the rise of hostile populism across Europe and beyond. However, refugees, asylum-seekers, activists and others interested in calling media to account are not standing passively by, but are increasingly using both legacy and social media platforms and technologies to challenge and contest misinformation and negative and polarising and narratives, not least in order to tell their own stories in their own words. There are a small number of fee waivers available for members of local refugee and sanctuary-seeker communities, Please contact us at [email protected] if you would like to be considered for a bursary. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
