A view from Europe’s borderland: As Europe vows stricter border controls, what’s at stake at the border?

Six months is a long time in politics and this includes humanitarian politics in Europe. ‘Refugees welcome here’ (#Refugeeswelcomehere) was a catchphrase reflecting widespread sentiments and political will in Europe last summer and early autumn – a warm welcome to the first waves of arrivals from war-torn zones

Where is diversity in PSB? Can the BBC carry BAME viewers and producers with it?

LSE’s Myria Georgiou looks at the implications of recently released Ofcom research for the BBC and its diversity goals. Dr Georgiou developed the Council of Europe/EU sponsored self-monitoring tool for diversity inclusiveness in the media MEDIANE BOX with Mediane Manager, Reynald Blion

Making an urban human? The digital order and its curious human-centrism

This article’s point of departure is the observed retreat of techno-centric conceptions of optimal cities and their replacement by a curious human-centrism in media, corporate, and policy discursive constructions of cities. This human-centrism hides an emerging urban order: the digital order. The digital order is realised through discourses and practices that promote controlled cities, not through coercion and visible policing, but instead through a technologized promise of seemingly progressive values. The multiple and contradictory claims to urban humans revealed in the digital order, the article concludes, demand renewed attention to the human – a critical humanist perspective to cities and technology

Solidarity at the time of COVID-19: an(other) digital revolution?

As the world faces a pandemic on a scale not seen for generations, with much of Western Europe, the US and Asia in various degrees of ‘lockdown’ to slow the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, LSE Professor Myria Georgiou discusses the new digital networks emerging focused on solidarity, and their implications and limitations

Gamers versus zombies? Visual mediation of the citizen/non-citizen encounter in Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’

This article identifies the visual representation of Europe’s “refugee crisis” in the media as a key dimension of the communicative architecture of the crisis and its aftermath. Effectively, it argues, the powerful, even iconic, imagery that the media produced and shared during the 2015 “crisis” affirmed ideological frames of incompatible difference, perpetually dividing European citizens and refugees. The article focuses on some of the fundamental elements of the 2015 crisis’s visual grammar to demonstrate how they have (re-)produced popular fears of strangeness and the need for containment and control of foreign bodies. This visual grammar, we argue, imitated and procreated recognizable representations of popular culture to exaggerate newcomers’ strangeness and incompatible difference from the national subject. On the one hand, many news media simulated zombies’ threatening strangeness in images of refugee massification; on the other, many news media images reaffirmed the decisive power of the national subject over refugees’ fate, not unlike the video game player who unilaterally controls a game and takes action when confronted by zombies. This grammar, we argue, symbolically predetermines encounters between citizens and refugees, by emphasizing their incompatible difference and newcomers’ strangeness

Digital makings of the cosmopolitan city? Young people’s urban imaginaries of London

This article focuses on young Londoners’ everyday digital connectedness in the global city and examines the urban imaginaries these connections generate and regulate. Young people engage with a range of mobilities, networks, and technologies in trying to find their place in a city, which is only selectively hospitable to them. Offline and online connections also shape urban imaginaries that direct moral and practical positioning toward others living close by and at a distance. We draw from a two-year study with 84 young people of different class and racial backgrounds living in three London neighborhoods. The study reveals the divergence of youth’s urban imaginaries that result from uneven access to material and symbolic resources in the city. However, it also reveals the convergence of urban imaginaries, resulting especially from widespread practices of diversified connectedness. More often than not, young participants reveal a cosmopolitan orientation and a positive disposition toward difference. Cosmopolitanism becomes a common discursive tool urban youth mobilize, but differentially appropriate, to narrate and regulate belonging in an interconnected world and an unequal city

Refugee 'crisis'? Try 'crisis in the European press'

A new study finds some disturbing trends in the European press coverage of refugees and the purported consequences of their arrival. While it is now more common for “the refugee crisis” to be referred to in the media as last year’s affair, 2016 has been the deadliest year for refugees trying to reach Europe by sea. Only the recorded deaths in the Mediterranean present a chilling reality – and yet, this reality rarely makes headlines. Has journalism forgotten its mission? Has the public grown numb? When does crisis become a crisis? Our cross-European study of the press in 2015 sets the stage to engage with these questions and reveals a political and ethical predicament that touches upon the core values of Europe

The digital border: mobility beyond territorial and symbolic divides

In this article, we develop a definition of the digital border as an assemblage of mediations that articulates digital and other technologies with symbolic resources to draw boundaries of inside/outside both on the ground (territorial border) and in narrative (symbolic border). We subsequently sketch the contours of this assemblage through an emphasis on its dynamics of mediation, its dialectics of resistance and its trajectories of historicity and argue for the significance of this conceptualisation of the digital border in migration research

The Future of the BBC: the Burning Issue of Diversity Behind & on Screen

Some heated discussions in the UK Parliament’s ongoing Inquiry into the Future of the BBC have highlighted the continued problem the broadcaster has with representing the country’s minority groups. LSE’s Shakuntala Banaji and Myria Georgiou argue that the problem is not just an issue of training individuals, but needs to be considered in the context of prejudice in society and structural barriers

Twenty years of Media and Communications at LSE: an interview with Professor Myria Georgiou

LSE’s Department of Media and Communications celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2023, and recently marked the occasion with the Media Futures Conference held in June. To celebrate the Department’s contribution to media and communications research and teaching over the last 20 years, we are publishing a series of reflections from faculty. Here, current MSc student Anandita Malhotra interviews Professor Myria Georgiou, a researcher specialising in media, migration and urbanisation, about how the field has evolved over the last two decades