While migration has always been a defining feature of human history, shaping societies, cultures and economies across the globe, it seems safe to say that nowadays it is a more contested and emotionally charged issue than ever before. Migration encompasses a wide range of experiences of human mobility, including labour migration, postcolonial migration, refugee conditions, exile, diaspora, and other forms of (forced) displacement driven by economic, political and/or environmental forces. Political responses to the social realities of our ‘age of migration’ are marked by fear, panic, anger, resentment, hatred, bitterness, and hostility.1 Today’s global political landscape is witnessing the rapid rise and expansion of populist, far-right, and alt-right movements that advocate zealous nationalism and virulent anti-immigration sentiments. By constantly evoking fear and disgust of migrants, and by portraying them as threats to cultural identity, economic stability, and national security, these political movements contribute to and capitalise upon, what Sara Ahmed has coined, our current ‘affective economy of migration’, in which emotions are instrumental in constructing immigrants as ‘others’.2 The proliferation of right-wing populism and the far-right, and the popular backlash against migrants that has been unfolding in recent times in the global north demonstrate the normalisation and naturalisation of previously marginalised forms of xenophobia, racism, and nationalism. As a consequence, we are increasingly confronted with the ways in which these political fears and anxieties materialise in exclusionary and violent border regimes in the global north. Today, we are witnessing a rise in anti-immigrant protests and violence across European countries, securitisation of borders, stricter immigration law enforcement, lethal push-back policies by the EU’s border agency Frontex around the Mediterranean sea, the instalment of laws criminalising helping illegals and, in the US, disruptive deportation raids by ICE, where foreign nationals end up in detention camps awaiting court cases without legal aid.
Violence towards migrants also takes place in the domain of media representation. Global political debates on migration are fuelled by an endless array of narratives, images and frames provided and reproduced by (mainstream) media, such as the press, television, film, radio, and social media platforms. Media discourses can be considered co-constitutive of the violence of global border regimes, since they often confine migrants to rigid stereotypes, such as dangerous invaders, passive helpless victims, uncivilised and racialised ‘others’, bogus asylum seekers, and fortune seekers.3 Scholarship has revealed that such portrayals circulate affects of fear and pity, dehumanise migrants by denying them agency and voice, and often reiterate the neoliberal discourse of deservingness, that categorises migrants in terms of those who are deserving and useful for the nation (often labelled as ‘genuine refugees’) and those who are undeserving and useless (often labelled as ‘asylum seekers’, ; ‘fortune seekers’, and ‘migrants’).4 Besides, scholarship has raised concerns about the persistent framing of migration from the global south to the global north as a ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’.5 Such framing connotes events that are sudden and alarming in nature, thereby neglecting the temporal dimensions of human mobility and disregarding the long durée of migration and migration policies. Besides, such framing perpetuates Eurocentric perspectives constructing the global north as the gravitational centre of events, thereby ignoring the incredible risks taken by migrants worldwide.6 Eleonar Paynter argues that ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’ labels cultivate what historian Michele Colucci has called ‘an obsession with the present’, and frame precarious migration as taking place in ‘an endless, ahistorical now’, despite the fact that these migration ‘emergencies’ signal continuity rather than sudden change.7 Similarly, other scholars have pointed out that media coverage of migration tends to be ahistorical by denying the historical roots of conflicts causing migrants to leave, and by making invisible the historical connections between migratory movements and the (colonial) pasts of the ‘host’ countries.8
This special issue on migration in media histories explicitly aims to move beyond this persistent ahistorical rhetoric of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’, and wants to both acknowledge and foreground the temporal and historical dimensions of migration as a phenomenon, an experience, and a process. Many European countries have histories of migration driven by the legacies of colonialism and post-WW II reconstruction efforts. Today’s moral panics over migration are rooted in discontents about our multicultural societies that emerged as a consequence of these migratory movements. The descendants of labour and postcolonial migrants, despite their birth-righted legal citizenship, are often still regarded as outsiders, compelled to continuously prove and demonstrate their national belonging. It is our contention that the current xenophobic sentiments cannot be fully understood without turning to the past and scrutinising the historical roots of today’s anti-immigration climate. The enduring nature of migration patterns over time raises questions about how migrants have been mediated in the past, how media representations have been informed by colonial relations, how migrant voices have been silenced and excluded previously, and how forms of epistemic violence have emerged historically. Besides, we can ask questions about how media enabled migrants to organise, identify and express themselves. To borrow from sociologist Saulo Cwerner’s work on the temporality of migration, we can question how media enables us to think and conceptualise the heteronomous, asynchronous, remembered, liminal, diasporic and nomadic histories (and futures) of migration.9 Historicising the entanglement of media and migration thereby becomes indispensable. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on the nexus of media and migration, a profound historical approach is still rather undeveloped. Therefore, this special issue on migration in media histories has a double impetus: it aims to counter the ahistorical representation of migration by foregrounding its temporal dimensions, and it wants to respond to the gap in media and migration studies by presenting relevant avenues for media historical research.
The field of media and migration studies has become an interdisciplinary research area where different approaches and methodologies meet.10 What binds these approaches is the inherent link between migration and mediation, as media serve both as important tools for imagining and visualising migration, and as essential means of communication for migrants both locally in the land of arrival, and between the ‘new’ land and the homeland. Discursively, media have a double role when it comes to representing migration and diaspora. In its hegemonic function they consolidate existing political relations by reproducing familiar media frames and visual regimes. At the same time, film, radio, television, and digital media are equally instrumental in formulating, imagining, and vocalising counternarratives ‘from below’. They allow not only for what Stuart Hall has labelled the representation of difference, but also potentially for counter-strategies that challenge, contest, and possibly transform the politics of representation.11 This interplay of various media operations has resulted in an interdisciplinary perspective on media and migration, focusing at once on structural, systemic, and institutional perspectives, while also opening up for individual, singular productions and media objects.
In journalism and media studies, a lot of scholarly work has been done on media representation and framing of migration in print media and audio-visual forms of journalism.12 This research has shown that, while refugees and migrants are hypervisible as subjects of news stories, their dehistoricising and dehumanising representation tends to result in invisibility.13 A substantial amount of research has been published since the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015, and has identified media mechanisms of othering, through the framing of refugees as threats or voiceless victims and through reducing them to numbers that need to be managed.14 The question of visibility/invisibility is also taken up on in the study of fiction and documentary film, particularly in relation to the violent borderscapes of ‘Fortress Europe’ and the refugee ‘crisis’. Besides studies that identify familiar stereotypes of migrants and refugees in fictional formats and documentaries, scholarship focuses on alternative representations that disrupt and unsettle dominant frames and visual regimes.15 Here, the cinematic mediation of migration is discussed in terms of ‘accented cinema’, ‘postcolonial cinema’, ‘(im)migrant and/or diasporic cinema’, ‘Fifth Cinema’ and, more general, in terms of migrant (first-person) voices and perspectives.16 What these approaches have in common is their focus on the strategies that filmmakers use to counter the representational regime that racialises and criminalises migration and to contest hegemonic notions of ‘Europeanness’. As such, these studies centre on migrant voices, perspectives, and identities, as well as migrant authorship and ownership. Likewise, studies in (transnational) migrant radio and podcasting address how sound media can provide room for migrant voices and experiences.17
Currently, scholarship on media and migration has shifted towards digital media.18 Alongside research on how mechanisms of dehumanising and de-historicising migrants and refugees gain power in the digital new media environment, scholarly work focuses on the potential role of migrant voice and agency, as well as on migrant media use.19 Digital migration studies and research into digital diasporas, drawing on concepts such as ‘mediascapes’ and ‘shared imaginaries on the move’, ‘migrant polymedia’ and ‘the connected migrant’, have become crucial frameworks for understanding the intersection of media and migration in contemporary globalised society.20 Studies revolve around migrants’ use of digital media for maintaining connections with their home countries, for navigating new environments, and for building communities in their host countries.21 Additionally, scholarly work focuses on the role of digital media as what Kaarina Nikunen, following Hannah Arendt, has termed ‘spaces of appearance’: sites for cultural expression, identity formation and digital activism of migrants and refugees.22 This research moves away from mainstream media representation and reveals how online grassroot and collaborative contexts can form counter-narratives to the persistent stereotyping, undo the hierarchies of representation, and give voice and agency to migrants and refugees themselves.23
While the historical perspective on media and migration is still quite underdeveloped within this significant body of work on media and migration, promising avenues of research have emerged recently. Moving away from contemporary representations of migration in the media, a growing number of scholars have turned to analysing media representations of migration over time.24 These studies demonstrate that historicising of media narratives of migration and paying attention to wider temporalities can help to understand the emergence and persistence of (stereotypical) stories and images of migration, and to recognise the historical roots of contemporary media discourse of migration. Besides, scholars have shown that computational approaches can offer promising opportunities for historical, cross-media, and systematic longitudinal research on media and migration.25 Another productive line of historical research on media and migration revolves around archives and mediated memories of migration. Various scholars engage with (marginalised) audiovisual collections, and study the archival representation of migrant communities, and the systematic underrepresentation and silencing of these groups in heritage.26 Others seek to examine the remediation of archival footage of migration to demonstrate how media re-narrativise migration, and how media make (counterhegemonic) use of mediated migratory memories in contemporary productions.27 Besides, scholarly work focuses on the history of multicultural programming in European broadcasting.28 And finally, scholars are invested in historically-informed inquiries of media technology and media use across migration contexts.29
This special issue on migration in media histories seeks to further these promising avenues of historical research on the topic of media and migration. The case-studies presented here collectively address predigital mediations of migration and offer complex and nuanced analyses that show how migrant communities were represented in the past and over time, how they were addressed by the media, and how migrant filmmakers’ work has been subject to insufficient archival strategies. Each contribution is exemplary for the promising avenues that research on media and migration can take, varying from spotlighting the understudied representation of postcolonial migrants on television, to taking a longitudinal approach to the television representation of labour migrants, to examining the overlooked work of a diasporic female filmmaker documenting labour migration, and finally to scrutinising exilic radio production that targeted labour migrants. Three of the scholars whose work appears in this issue focus on the Dutch context, and all of the studies included here are situated in Europe. This is not in any way a reflection of the importance of the Dutch context and merely a matter of coincidence. We contend and hope that the research presented in these case-studies can invite other scholars working in the field of media and migration to expand these approaches to other national contexts.
Our special issue opens with Leonie Schmidt’s “A Conditional Welcome: Early Dutch Television and the Affective Terms of Postcolonial Inclusion”, which discusses Dutch television representation of repatriates from Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed on hospitality, affect and conditional inclusion, Smidt investigates how postwar Dutch television shaped narratives of Indo-Dutch and Moluccan repatriation, and explores how television functioned as a key medium for producing the emotional terms of postcolonial inclusion. Thereby Smidt explores how televised hospitality narratives function as a mechanism of conditional belonging, where inclusion is tied to the expectation of gratitude and adaptation. Schmidt convincingly argues that in the 1950s television constructed a self-congratulatory narrative of repatriation as a national success story, depicting the Dutch state as an efficient and benevolent moral actor, while portraying repatriates as voiceless and exoticised ‘others’, whose belonging was granted only on the condition of obedience, gratitude and economic usefulness. In the 1960s, as Schmidt demonstrates, new television genres enabled repatriates to voice their experiences of marginalisation, discrimination and misrecognition. However, despite the emergence of a critical counter-narrative that challenged the idealised image of Dutch hospitality, television persisted in framing repatriates as ‘others’, whose inclusion remained conditional. Schmidt’s compelling article not only sheds light on an understudied part of Dutch television history, it also adds a postcolonial dimension to Ahmed’s critique of the discourse of hospitality. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that the emotional politics of inclusion, that are so prominent in today’s affective economy of migration, were already articulated in Dutch television programming of the 1950s and 1960s. It reveals that even migrants who were legally Dutch were subjected to conditional hospitality.
Andrea Meuzelaar’s contribution “Reporting on the Rituals of Islam: Changing Televisual Narratives on Integration and National Belonging of Muslim Immigrants” also critically addresses conditional Dutch hospitality, in her case through a longitudinal study of Dutch television representation of Muslim labour migrants. Starting from the arrival of Turkish and Moroccan ‘guest workers’ in the 1960s, Meuzelaar’s study traces Dutch television coverage of Islamic rituals over five decades, and investigates the evolving televisual narratives on national belonging of Muslims. Grounded in extensive archival research and drawing on scholarly work on the discourse of deservingness, conditional hospitality, and the stereotyping of Muslims, the study demonstrates the gradual emergence of a ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ approach on Dutch television. Meuzelaar’s article reveals that during the first two decades of Islamic immigration, Dutch television portrayed Muslim labour migrants as exotic and deserving of hospitality, while from the 1980s onwards, as it became clear that the Muslim ‘guest workers’ were here to stay and were increasingly evaluated in terms of integration, television began to gradually present two competing narratives: of the well-adapted, integrated, deserving Muslim whose religious practices aligned with Dutch values, and of the maladjusted, undeserving Muslim whose religious practices conflicted with Dutch values. Ultimately, Meuzelaar’s longitudinal approach enhances the understanding of the historical roots of contemporary discourses of national belonging of Muslims, and demonstrates that, despite their legal citizenship, only Muslims who are similar to ‘us’ and who have reciprocated ‘our’ hospitality with adaptation and integration, can inhabit the Dutch nation. Through historicising the discourse of deservingness and the stereotyping of Muslims that characterise today’s affective economy of migration, the article opens a relevant avenue for further research within media and migration studies.
Turning to a double story of migration, Aslı Özgen’s thought-provoking “The Relational Mode: Farideh Fardjam’s Documentary Strategies of Migration and Intersectional Archival Activism” examines the work of Iranian filmmaker Farideh Fardjam, a diasporic female filmmaker who documented Turkish labour migrants in the 1970s in the Netherlands, and whose work has ever since been overlooked and faded into oblivion. Özgen takes a twofold approach and both places Fardjam’s work in the context of broader archival silences surrounding the legacies of migrant, diasporic, and displaced women filmmakers, and analyses the documentary strategies that Fardjam developed to represent labour migration in its full complexity. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Özgen proposes ‘the relational mode’ to characterise Fardjam’s foregrounding of migration as both a thematic and methodological concern in her filmmaking practice. The article offers an profound analysis of two documentaries, that convincingly shows how Fardjam’s films served as a critique of the exploitation of ‘guest workers’, of the discourse of hospitality, and of transnational capitalism and patriarchy. Özgen thereby demonstrates how Fardjam channelled her own experiences of migration into a documentary ethics and aesthetics of collaboration with her migrant subjects, while also connecting Fardjam’s positionality to broader contexts of feminist and activist documentary filmmaking of the time. With her insightful analysis of these predigital ‘spaces of appearance’ of migrants, Özgen advocates the capacity that Fardjam’s documentary strategies have for unsettling the way migrants are represented today, and calls out for new intersectional archival strategies to ensure that such pioneering work of diasporic women filmmakers is not forgotten.
We close our special issue with yet another double story of migration: Maria Adamopoulou’s “Exiled Airwaves: the Greek Communist Radio in Bucharest Addressing the Gastarbeiter in West Germany (1960-1968)”. In this article, the author turns the spotlight on an understudied historical media object: the exiled Greek communist radio station ‘The Voice of Truth’, that was based in Bucharest, and that targeted Greek ‘guest workers’ in West Germany. By examining a radio station operated by political exiles that targeted labour migrants across the Iron Curtain, Adamopoulou adopts a transnational perspective on radio broadcasting in Cold War Europe. Thereby, Adamopolou departs from the still dominant focus in Cold War media history on the binary East-West, as well as from studying diasporic and migrant media in terms of ‘home’ and ‘host’ country. The article is based on a profound study of the archival records of the station, and provides a fascinating insight into the various media strategies that the Greek political refugees in Bucharest used to address their fellow Greek migrant workers in West Germany, situating the broadcaster’s aim of offering informed resistance to capitalism and (internal Greek) right-wingism in the broader context of Cold War propaganda struggles. The study shows how the radio shows provided news that addressed the conditions of the migrant workers, such as miserable housing and exploitation, and that framed these conditions in terms of a broader transnational struggle against capitalist exploitation and right-wing ideologies. As such, the article gives important insights into a forgotten historical chapter in both media and migration studies and Cold War media history.
All in all, these contributions highlight the relevance of moving beyond the current rhetoric of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ and showcase the importance of adopting a historical perspective on the entanglement of media and migration. As such, the articles invite reflection on historical mediation of migration and on the ongoing legacies of past migratory movements and media discourses of migration. The articles are insightful and compelling, and collectively showcase exciting avenues for research on migration in media histories. We hope you enjoy reading them.
Notes
[1] Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education, 2014); Hein de Haas, How Migration Really Works: a Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics (Penguin, 2023).
[3] Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: a Visual Typology of European News,” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1162-1177; Kaarina Nikunen, “Breaking the Silence: From Representations of Victims and Threat towards Spaces of Voice,” in The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, ed. Kevin Smets, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn, Radhika Gajjala (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2025): 411-423; Javier Amores, Carlos Arcila Calderón, and Mikolaj Stanek, “Visual Frames of Migrants and Refugees in the Main Western European Media,” Economics & Sociology 12, no. 3 (2019): 147-161
[4] Kaarina Nikunen, “Once a Refugee: Selfie Activism, Visualized Citizenship and the Space of Appearance,” Popular Communication 17, no. 2 (2019): 154-170; Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 2014; Myria Georgiou, “Does the Subaltern Speak? Migrant Voices in Digital Europe,” Popular Communication 16, no. 1 (2018): 45-57; Seth Holmes and Heide Castañeda, “Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death,” American ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 12-24; Simon Goodman, Ala Sirriyeh, and Simon McMahon, “The Evolving (Re) Categorisations of Refugees Throughout the “Refugee/Migrant Crisis”,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 2 (2017): 105-114; Maria Kyriakidou, “Hierarchies of Deservingness and the Limits of Hospitality in the ‘Refugee Crisis’,” Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 1 (2021): 133-149; Billy Holzberg, Kristina Kolbe and Rafal Zaborowski, “Figures of Crisis: The Delineation of (Un) Deserving Refugees in the German Media,” Sociology 52, no. 3 (2018): 534-550; Rosemary Sales, “The Deserving and the Undeserving? Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Welfare in Britain,” Critical Social Policy 22, no. 3 (2002): 456-478.
[5] Eleanor Paynter, Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Precarious Migration and Imagining Beyond Crisis (University of California Press, 20240; Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern and Ian Alan Paul, eds. Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis (Transcript Verlag, 2020); Kaarina Nikunen, “Breaking the Silence: From Representations of Victims and Threat towards Spaces of Voice,” in The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, ed. Kevin Smets, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala (Sage Publications, 2025); Nicholas De Genova, Martina Tazzioli and Soledad Álvarez-Velasco, “Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”,” Near Futures Online 1, no. 1-16 (2016).
[8] Francesca Falk, “Invasion, Infection, Invisibility: An Iconology of Illegalized Immigration,” in Images of illegalized immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics, ed. Chirstine Bischoff, Francesca Falk and Sylvia Kafehsy (Transcript Verlag, 2010): 83-100; Nikunen, “Breaking the Silence”; Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism,” Refuge 34, no. 1 (2018): 16-28.
[9] Saulo B. Cwerner, “The Times of Migration,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 7-36.
[10] Kevin Smets, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala, ed., The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, (Sage Publications, 2025).
[11] Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Open University Press, 1997): 223-290.
[12] Baldwin van Gorp, Framing Asiel: Indringers en Slachtoffers in de Pers (Acco, 2006); Lilie Chouliaraki and Rafal Zaborowski, “Voice and Community in the 2015 Refugee Crisis: A Content Analysis of News Coverage in Eight European Countries,” International Communication Gazette 79, no. 6-7 (2017): 613-635; Rafal Zaborowski and Jan Fredrik Hovden, “The Space of Immigrant Discourse in the European Press: Lessons from the “Refugee Crisis”,” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 40, no. 77 (2024): 031-053; Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: a Visual Typology of European News,” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1162-1177; Myria Georgiou and Rafal Zaborowski, Media Coverage of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Cross-European Perspective. Council of Europe Report. Report no. DG1(2017) 03, 19 May; Amores, Javier J. Amores, Carlos Arcila Calderón, and Mikolaj Stanek, “Visual Frames of Migrants and Refugees in the Main Western European Media,” Economics & Sociology 12, no. 3 (2019): 147-161; Keith Greenwood and T. J. Thomson, “Framing the Migration: A Study of News Photographs Showing People Fleeing War and Persecution,” International Communication Gazette 82, no. 2 (2020): 140-163; Myria Georgiou, “Does the Subaltern Speak?, 45-57.
[15] Ipek Celik Rappas and Philip E. Phillis, “‘Do The Right Thing’: Encounters with Undocumented Migrants in Contemporary European Cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 17, no. 1 (2020): 36-50; Francesca Colella, “The Representation of Migrants in Italian Cinema, from the Stereotypes to the Socio-Political Mission of Present-Day Film Directors, “ Italian Sociological Review 7, no. 2 (2017): 165-165; Thomas Austin, “Benefaction, Processing, Exclusion: Documentary Representations of Refugees and Migrants in Fortress Europe,” Studies in European Cinema 16, no. 3 (2019): 250-265; Thomas Austin, “Miserable Journeys, Symbolic Rescues: Refugees and Migrants in the Cinema of Fortress Europe,” in Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe, ed. Thomas Austin, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Ana Cristina Mendes and John Sundholm, “Walls and Fortresses: Borderscapes and the Cinematic Imaginary,” Transnational Cinemas 6, no. 2 (2015): 117-122.
[16] See for accented cinema: Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001); See for postcolonial cinema: Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller, ed., Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012); Sandra Ponzanesi and Verena Berger, “Introduction: Genres and Tropes in Postcolonial Cinema (s) in Europe.” Transnational Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2016): 111-117; Sandra Ponzanesi, “On the Waterfront: Truth and Fiction in Postcolonial Cinema from the South of Europe,” Interventions 18. No. 2 (2016): 217-233; See for (im)migrant and/or diasporic cinema: Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, ed., European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Springer, 2010); Yosefa Loshitzky, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2010); Lars Andersson, John Sundholm and David E. James, The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking: Minor Immigrant Cinemas in Sweden 1950–1990 (Intellect, 2019); Sandra Ponzanesi, “Europe in Motion: Migrant Cinema and the Politics of Encounter,” Social Identities 17, no. 1 (2011): 73-92; Guido Rings, The Other in Contemporary Migrant Cinema: Imagining a New Europe? (Routledge, 2016); Mariagiulia Grassilli, “Migrant Cinema: Transnational and Guerrilla Practices of Film Production and Representation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 8 (2008): 1237-1255; Isolina Ballesteros, Immigration Cinema in the New Europe (Intellect, 2015); Arne Saeys, “European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, no. 8, (2012): 1329-1330; See for Fifth Cinema: Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Grassilli, “Towards a Fifth Cinema,” Third Text 33, no. 1 (2019): 1–25; See for migrant (first-person) voices and perspectives: Rebecca M. Schreiber, The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility (University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Nadica Denić “Cinematic Ethics of Migration: First-Person Voices in Contemporary Documentary,” PhD Diss., (University of Amsterdam, 2024); Nadica Denić, “Against and Beyond Mimeticism: A Cinematic Ethics of Migration Journeys in Documentary Auto-Ethnography,” in Doing Digital Migration Studies, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs (Amsterdam University Press, 2024): 49-65; Nadica Denić, “Cinematic Hometactics: Negotiating Belonging in First-Person Documentary,” Studies in Documentary Film 18, no. 3 (2024): 189-204; Nilgun Bayraktar, Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema beyond Europe (Routledge, 2015); Ana Cristina Mendes and John Sundholm, ed., Transnational Cinema at the Borders: Borderscapes and the Cinematic Imaginary (Routledge, 2018); Verena Berger and Miya Komori, ed., Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain (LIT, 2010); James S. Williams, Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European cinema (Routledge, 2020); Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, ed., Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency (Rodopi, 2011); Christian Rossipal, “Poetics of Refraction: Mediterranean Migration and New Documentary Forms,” Film Quarterly 74, no. 3 (2021): 35-45; Bruce Bennett, “Becoming Refugees: Exodus and Contemporary Mediations of the Refugee Crisis,” Transnational Cinemas 9, no. 1 (2018): 13-30; Thomas J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013); Temenuga Trifonova, The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne, ed., Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).
[17] Alice Watson, “Radio Geopolitics: Imaginative Geographies of Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’ on BBC Radio 4, “Political Geography 107 (2023); Photini Vrikki and Sarita Malik, “Voicing Lived-Experience and Anti-Racism: Podcasting as a Space at the Margins for Subaltern Counterpublics,” Popular Communication 17, no. 4 (2019): 273-287; Siobhàn McHugh, The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories through Sound (Columbia University Press, 2022); Anne MacLennan and Masudul Biswas, “Symposium Introduction: Multilingual, Multicultural, Migrant and Diasporic Radio, Audio, and Podcasting,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media 30, no. 1 (2023): 6-11.
[18] Smets, The SAGE Handbook; Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs, ed., Doing Digital Migration Studies (Amsterdam University Press, 2024); Radha Sarma Hedge, Mediating Migration: Global Media and Communication (Polity Press, 2016); Koen Leurs, Digital Migration (SAGE Publications Limited, 2023)
[20] See for shared images on the move: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); See for migrant polymedia: Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia (Routledge, 2013); See for the connected migrant: Dana Diminescu, “Introduction: Digital methods for the Exploration, Analysis and Mapping of E-Diasporas,” Social Science Information 51, no. 4 (2012): 451-458; Koen Leurs, and Sandra Ponzanesi. “Connected Migrants: Encapsulation and Cosmopolitanization,” Popular Communication 16, no. 1 (2018): 4-20; Koen Leurs and Kevin Smets, “Five Questions for Digital Migration Studies: Learning from Digital Connectivity and Forced Migration in (to) Europe,” Social Media and Society 4, no. 1 (2018); Ponzanesi, Doing Digital.
[21] Koen Leurs, Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0. Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections (Amsterdam University Press, 2015); Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs, “On Digital Crossings in Europe,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 5, no. 1 (2014): 3-22; Jessica Retis and Roza Tsagarousianou, ed., The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture (John Wiley & Sons, 2019);
[24] Andrea Meuzelaar, “Seeing Through the Archival Prism. A History of the Representation of Muslims on Dutch television,” PhD Diss., (University of Amsterdam, 2014); Andrea Meuzelaar, “The Emergence and Persistence of Racialised Stereotypes: Tracing the History of Representation of Muslim Immigrants along the Archival Grain,” VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 10, no. 20 (2021): 121-142; Kathleen Beckers and Peter van Aelst, “Did the European Migrant Crisis Change News Coverage of Immigration? A Longitudinal Analysis of Immigration Television News and the Actors Speaking in it,” Mass Communication and Society 22, no. 6 (2019): 733-755.
[25] Emillie de Keulenaar, et al., “Computational Cross-Media Research: Tracing Divergences between Normative Dutch Television and Social Media Discourses on the ‘Refugee Crisis’(2013-2018),” Convergence 31, no. 5 (2025): 1606-1628; Lorella Viola and Jaap Verheul, “One Hundred Years of Migration Discourse in The Times: A Discourse-Historical Word Vector Space Approach to the Construction of Meaning,” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 3 (2020): 64; Charlotte Taylor, “Metaphors of Migration over Time,” Discourse & Society 32, no. 4 (2021): 463-481.
[26] Fatima El-Tayeb, “The Archive, the Activist, and the Audience, or Black European Studies: a Comparative Interdisciplinary Study of Identities, Positionalities, and Differences, “ Transit 1, no. 1 (2004); Dagmar Brunow, “Curating Access to Audiovisual Heritage: Cultural Memory and Diversity in European Film Archives,” Image & Narrative 18, no. 1 (2017): 97-110; Fiona Siegenthaler and Cathrine Bublatzky, “(Un) Sighted Archives of Migration, Spaces of Encounter and Resistance: An Introduction.” Visual Anthropology 34, no. 4 (2021): 283-295; Asli Özgen, “Unsettling Borders of Archives: Activating the Audiovisual Heritage of the Turkish Community in the Netherlands,” VIEW. Journal of European Television History and Culture 12, no.24 (2023): 54-69; Asli Özgen, “Screen Memories: The Audiovisual Heritage of Turkish Migrant Women in the Netherlands Across Political Film, Video, and Television,” TMG Journal for Media History 27, no. 1 (2024).
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Biographies
Dr. Gert Jan is lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from Stockholm University. His research interests include early cinema and film history, Dutch documentary filmmaking and depictions of precarity. His current research project is called ‘Chronotopes of the Social’ and focuses on changing ideas on multiculturalism in neighbourhood documentaries.
Dr. Andrea Meuzelaar is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her PhD research, entitled Seeing through the Archival Prism. A History of the Representation of Muslims on Dutch Television, explores the history of Dutch television coverage of Islamic immigration in the Netherlands. Her research interests lie in media representation of (forced) migration, television history, audiovisual archives, and documentary film. Currently, she is working on a project on the history of representation of forced migration on Dutch television.