Civil Society, Media and Accountability in the Arab Region

human development, democracy

Representing Childhood and Forced Migration: Narratives of Borders and Belonging in European Screen Content for Children

This article explores representations of childhood and forced migration within a selection of European screen content for and about children. Based on the findings of a research project that examined the intersections of children’s media, diversity, and forced migration in Europe (www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the article highlights different ways in which ideas of borders and belonging are constructed and deconstructed in a selection of films and television programmes that feature children with an immigration background. Drawing on ideas around the “politics of pity” (Arendt), the analysis explores conditions under which narratives of otherness arise when it comes to representing forcibly displaced children within European-produced children’s screen media. It also examines screen media that destabilize borders of “us” and “the other” by emphasizing the agency of children from migration backgrounds, and revealing both the similarities and the differences between European children with immigration backgrounds and White European-born children. It is argued here that, operating according to the notions of living “together-in-difference” (Ang), “narratability” (Chouliaraki and Stolic), and “the struggle for belonging” (Kebede), these representations destabilize narratives of borders and otherness, suggesting that children with a family history of immigration “belong” to European societies in the same ways as White European-born children

Cognitive and Energy Harvesting-Based D2D Communication in Cellular Networks: Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis

While cognitive radio enables spectrum-efficient wireless communication, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting from ambient interference is an enabler for energy-efficient wireless communication. In this paper, we model and analyze cognitive and energy harvesting-based D2D communication in cellular networks. The cognitive D2D transmitters harvest energy from ambient interference and use one of the channels allocated to cellular users (in uplink or downlink), which is referred to as the D2D channel, to communicate with the corresponding receivers. We investigate two spectrum access policies for cellular communication in the uplink or downlink, namely, random spectrum access (RSA) policy and prioritized spectrum access (PSA) policy. In RSA, any of the available channels including the channel used by the D2D transmitters can be selected randomly for cellular communication, while in PSA the D2D channel is used only when all of the other channels are occupied. A D2D transmitter can communicate successfully with its receiver only when it harvests enough energy to perform channel inversion toward the receiver, the D2D channel is free, and the $\mathsf{SINR}$ at the receiver is above the required threshold; otherwise, an outage occurs for the D2D communication. We use tools from stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the proposed communication system model with general path-loss exponent in terms of outage probability for D2D and cellular users. We show that energy harvesting can be a reliable alternative to power cognitive D2D transmitters while achieving acceptable performance. Under the same $\mathsf{SINR}$ outage requirements as for the non-cognitive case, cognitive channel access improves the outage probability for D2D users for both the spectrum access policies.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Communications, to appea