Gaetano Giancaspro
In the last decades, the role of international migration in the global political agenda and public debates has dramatically increased in salience, leading to radical social transformations in the representation and management of human mobility. Discourses and practices in this field, mostly from developing areas towards the Global North, include a set of humanitarian actions that, while on the one hand aim at saving migrants’ lives and alleviate their suffering through prevention, on the other bring about paternalistic, ethnocentric and colonialist views of the Global South, and reinforce securitised and externalised approaches to border crossing. These contradictions can be found in a wide range of migration-related activities, ambiguously merging humanitarian and filtering approaches, which involve a complex system of governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors. This work focuses on a set of awareness-raising campaigns on the risks of irregular migration, funded by European institutions and implemented by a wide range of actors covering all levels of governance. By following an aggregate approach for case selection, eleven web-based campaigns are selected. The core of the study consists of a Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA) of verbal, visual and audio-visual data from the campaigns’ websites and social-network posts. The analysis also involves communication for development (C4D) guidelines for social and behaviour change, and interviews with experts and practitioners aimed at reconstructing the implementation process of the campaigns and understanding the producers’ intentions and content-selection dynamics. The purpose is to investigate how irregular(ised) migration is multimodally framed on digital information campaigns, what assumptions, intentions, practices and communication strategies are involved in the production of contents, and infer the role played by these campaigns in the governance of migration.