Disrupting Imagined Geographies: Media, Power and Representation in Contemporary Migration

Focused on campaign footage from five International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) this chapter examines how the contemporary refugee crisis is constructed and represented in the media. In highlighting the range of responding interventions, discourse around migrants and refugees has become increasingly politicised within a human security context. The impact of this labelling ensures the maintenance of a status quo that supports ideas of western superiority and further entrenches imagined global divisions between West and the rest. Analysis of the campaign footage considers how limited understandings of the contemporary refugee crisis are produced through a series of exclusionary practices. These practices operationalise a limited number of representational tropes that ultimately disrupt critical understandings of current migration patterns in Europe.