Styles of Communication (Mar 2017)
Visualizing Europe’s Refugee Crisis on the ‘Debating Europe’ Platform
Abstract
The images picturing the refugee crisis are heavily emotion-laden and the picture of the dead boy Aylan on the beach is such an example. Besides newspapers where pictures of refugees have been used to stir the readers’ attention, debating platforms have used visual images to initiate debates with the EU citizens about Europe’s refugee crisis. Designed on a ‘bottom-up approach’, the ‘Debating Europe’ platform empowers citizens by encouraging a dialogue between Europe’s policymakers and experts, on the one hand, and citizens, on the other hand. Each debate embeds an issue to be addressed and visual images which may serve as incentives for a vivid debate. The selection of these visuals plays a significant role in the representation of a particular issue. The sample used for this qualitative analysis consists of the visual images (photographs and infographics) of nine debates on Europe’s refugee crisis (2013-2015). Since Europe’s refugee crisis is both about attributing responsibility and human interest, we will provide an integrated visual framework for our analysis. Using a qualitative content analysis of the visual images depicting the refugee crisis we want to identify (1) the types and the salience of the participants depicted, (2) the communication strategies and the (re)bordering issues used to (de)legitimate these represented participants, (3) the types of emotions used by the ‘Debating Europe’ platform to visually frame the refugee crisis.
