Disrupting imagined geographies: media, power and representation in contemporary migration

Focused on campaign footage from five international non-governmental organizations (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 politicized within a 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 the West and ‘the rest’. Analysis of the campaign footage considers how limited understandings of the contemporary crisis are produced through a series of exclusionary practices. These practices operationalize a limited number of representational tropes that ultimately disrupt critical understandings of current migration patterns in Europe.