Cultural visions and narratives of (im)migrants and (im)migration in the digital social mediasphere.
Résumé
Theme(s) and objectives of this lecture:
1) to understand how audiovisual media (here: digital videos) produce and communicate images, representations of the "migrant", "immigrant", "refugee", ...
2) and how this object (the “migrant", ...) becomes a shared topic for smaller and bigger virtual communities(“shared topic” means a “mental” and cultural reference for defining the "migrant", for speaking about and for interacting with the "migrant"…).
Our empirical research field isthe You Tube platform with thousands, even millions of videos and video channels producing and communicating visions of migrants, immigrants, refugees … sometimes far away from traditional cultural “elite” visions but apparently influential on the mentalities of that nebulous social category called the “middle classes” as shown by the recent socio-political evolutions in Europe and the USA (populism, rejection of multiculturalism, protectionism, nativism, Brexit, election of D. Trump, …).