Refugees on the Highway: Visually Mediated Experiences of Migration

The majority of citizens in advanced democracies do not have personal or face-to-face relations with refugees. Yet refugees and migration are one of the most salient political issues today. In many recent elections across Europe, it has been a decisive factor. In the absence of direct experience, citizens rely on reports in the media and accounts from other citizens published on social media. Much has been written about the negative tone in these debates and about how the negativity bias in media reporting creates a distorted account of problems associated with refugees and integration. In our contemporary societies, where in particular social media circulate a constant flow of visual comments and documentation, the issue of refugees and migration is increasingly experienced through images. The paper looks at a set of images that created significant controversy during the 2015 refugee crisis in Denmark. These images, both still images and video, showed groups of refugees walking on Danish highways, accompanied by police officers. While countries in Central and Southern had long experienced refugee flows entering their national territories, the refugees on the Danish highway was the first example of the refugee flow and crisis directly affecting Danish national space. The images gave rise to heated debates about Danish values and identity, with some expressing a wish and need to act in solidarity and others lamenting the breakdown of order and calling for harsh measures against the refugees. The paper offers a detailed analysis of the debates that occurred on Facebook in reaction to the images. Precisely because such images gain prominence and resonance on social media, we have access to extremely rich data about the way citizens interpret and give meaning to images of refugees. Facebook debates in other words provide a very direct access to the unfiltered opinions of Danish citizens during the refugee crisis. Analyzing these debates is relevant for several discussions. First, it contributes to the still relatively small literature that looks at the visual representation of refugees. Second, it offers a comment on the increasingly powerful role of images in the new media environment created by social media. Third, because images of this kind motivate both on-line and off-line acts of protest the paper also offers insights into new patterns of activism and mobilization in the contemporary period.