Separating the Innocents from the Illegals : visual representation of the victims of sex trafficking in anti-trafficking campaigns

This thesis critically explores the discursive formations around the visual representation of the victims of sex trafficking in six anti-trafficking campaigns totalling 18 photographs. Critical discourse analysis is utilised as a methodological approach, while semiotics and iconography are used as methods of visual analysis. Picking up on the previous studies of the discourses of trafficking, the study aims to place the dominant discourses of trafficking into the context of humanitarian appeals and distant suffering, adding to the scarce literature addressing the visual representation of the victims of trafficking. Three dominant discourses are found within the data: deception, imprisonment, and survival. These discourses are placed into a broader theoretical and socio-political context by drawing upon photo-theory, feminist theory on the visual representation of women, solidarity and distant suffering in humanitarian appeals, and recent academic debates on the discourses of sex trafficking. The results of the study show that trafficked women are victimised, objectified and depicted as lacking agency with the aim of eliciting public pity, thus adding credence to the dominant discourses of trafficking discussed both in this, and in previous academic studies on sex trafficking. Victimisation marginalises, both legally and morally, those women who enter the sex industry in ways that do not involve irregular migration and prostitution resulting from deception. Therefore, the data overlooks the less commercially appealing cases of trafficking, focusing rather on worst-case scenarios. Siding with a liberal feminist approach to representing victims, the study argues for a more inclusive representation of sex trafficking. This would address the needs of both the victims of forced and voluntary sex trafficking for the sake of clarifying the definitions of trafficking victims and ultimately, for the sake of creating both more inclusive and better targeted anti-trafficking campaigns. In a broader societal sense, the results of the thesis aim to add to the discussion leading to a more victim-centred international legislation on human trafficking

Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news

In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public life – various practical dispositions of action towards the misfortunes of migrants and refugees at Europe’s border. On the basis of empirical material from European news (June-December 2015), we construct a typology of visibilities of the ‘crisis’, each of which situates refugees within a different regime of visibility and claim to action: i) visibility as biological life, associated with monitorial action; ii) visibility as empathy associated with charitable action; iii) visibility as threat, associated with state security; iv) visibility as hospitality, associated with political activism; and v) visibility as selfreflexivity, associated with a post-humanitarian engagement with people like ‘us’. In conclusion, we argue that, important as these five categories of visibility are in introducing public dispositions to action towards the vulnerable, they nonetheless ultimately fail to humanise migrants and refugees. This failure to portray them as human beings with lives that are worth sharing should compel us, we urge, to radically re-think how we understand the media’s responsibility towards vulnerable others

Trafficked women in the media: discursive constructions of trafficked women in three media genres

In this thesis I explore how women trafficked for sexual exploitation emerge as subjects of public pity in media discourse. I do this by analysing their depictions in three media genres: film, celebrity advocacy, and newspaper journalism. The broad goal of the study is to understand how proposals for emotional and moral obligation towards trafficked women are constructed in the mediated communication of human trafficking. More specifically, I explore the dichotomy between ideal and undeserving victimhood through an intersectional lens by analysing how the embodiment, agency, and vulnerability of trafficked women are constructed in the media. The analytics of mediation is employed as a methodological approach, combining multimodal and critical discourse analysis as tools for analysing data. My thesis reveals that representations of trafficked women are characterised by discursive ambivalence and that dominant trafficking discourses, which coalesce around depictions of naïve, innocent, young women exploited by evil traffickers carry the most visibility, which is reflected in laws, policies, and humanitarian and human rights appeals. But more importantly, rather than an absence of marginalised identities and narratives, this study shows that victim hierarchies legitimate only those voices which are already dominant in social and institutional discourse. In other words, victim hierarchies are problematic not only because they highlight some groups as particularly worthy of public pity, but because they create and perpetuate dominant discourses at the expense of contextualising and politicising marginalised subjectivities and experiences. Victim hierarchies, therefore, result in a discursive ambivalence within semiotic texts that do carry political potential but, as it is, fall short of giving full political agency to those trafficked women whose experiences and identities do not conform to notions of ideal victimhood

Visual Communication : Vol. 18, No. 3, Agustus 2019

Photojournalism as Political Encounter: Western News Photography in The 2015 Migration \u27Crisis\u27 Lilie Chouliaraki, Tijana Stolic Human Rights Collectives as Visual Experts: The Case of Syrian Archive Sandra Ristovcka An Aesthetic of The Human: Peru\u27s Ojo Que Liora Memorial Robin Adele Greeley . . . . .