Visiting Lecturer Talk – Myria Georgiou (LSE)

Next week Dr Myria Georgiou will be joining the ARNIC seminar. She will be giving a talk titled: Representing Others, representing Us: The “refugee crisis” in the European Press.

Her presentation will map out the key parameters of media language that defined Europe’s “refugee crisis” during its 2015 peak. The discussion draws from a cross-national content analysis that asked who speaks in the news, how and whether their speech endows refugees and migrants with the capacity to be recognized as humans and as citizens. The aim of the analysis is to explore the ways in which the press shapes imaginaries of the migrant as a human and political subject and of European national cultures as communities of exclusion or openness. The analysis, which examines 1200 news articles from across eight European countries, identifies the distribution of voice and agency in a strictly hierarchical manner that reproduces geo-political hierarchies of the European political spheres and keeps refugees and migrants firmly outside the remit of western communities of belonging.

 Myria Georgiou is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE. Her research focuses on media and the city; urban technologies and politics of connection; and the ways in which migration and diaspora are politically, culturally and morally constituted in the context of mediation. She is the author of Diaspora, Identity and the Media (2006) and Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference (2013). She is the co-leader of the LSE-based project Migration and the media. She is a visiting scholar at Annenberg, USC and currently working on two projects: a book on life in the digital city and a new project on the digital making of the city of refuge(funded by the Rockefeller Foundation).

ARNIC will take place next Tuesday (20/02) at 12:30pm in ASC 236 – Lunch will be served. Please contact rachelm@usc.edu for more details.