Seeing is Believing? Picturing the Refugee in the Czech Migration Discourse

The purpose of the proposed paper is to map present day visual discourses on migration in the Czech Republic, with a view to cover all the “shades of grey” of the refugee/migration debate from the populistic xenophobes on the right to the hippies on the left, from the serious newspapers to social media spoofs. Migration fear is a rather new phenomenon in the Czech Republic that polarizes political as well as popular opinions, paradoxically in a situation when the Czech Republic is neither a target country nor a transit country and refugees as such as very hard to see. However, even if it’s hard to see refugees for real, it’s not a problem to see them in the media which are - reporting on the events abroad - full of refugee reports and images. Such physical lack of refugees in the Czech Republic is in direct contrast with the alarmist visions of some parts of the population represented for example by the President of the Republic Milos Zeman. Working from a poststructuralist perspective, my aim is first: to map the various ideologies, concepts and stereotypes used to animate the “debate” (and the people rallying in the streets). Second: to find patterns among these discursive “weapons” and to position them within the broader contexts they rise from to better understand how their meanings have been remixed to justify the peculiar representations they construct. Finally, I want to explore the existing fault-lines within the Czech society (i.e. between Czechs and the refugees, Czechs and Brussels/Merkel, between Czechs and the Roma as well as among Czechs themselves) and critically challenge their discursive consistency. Evidence proposed in this study is very limited and varied at the same time. Because I want to map the present day discourses on migration, I will focus my research on present day data – covering the years 2015 and 2016. Also, in contrast to the usual discourse analysis of language, I will focus my sample on visual discourses, and this is where the variety comes in: to be able to cover the whole spectrum of the Czech migration debate, my material will consist of several thousand photographs published in the online newspapers, hundreds of photos and collages from the social media, cartoons and photoshopped images limited only by public creativity. Looking at this type of evidence through a poststructuralist lens should illustrate well the different kinds of discourses that animate the public, the diverse yet the same patterns of Us versus Them constructions, and provide us with a complex “image” of the Czech migration debate.