How Political Actors Mobilize and Translate Images of Immigration in Social Media

Associated Professor Nicole Doerr has published the article 'How Political Actors Mobilize and Translate Images of Immigration in Social Media' in the journal Visual Communication. 

The article examines visual posters and symbols constructed and circulated transnationally by various political actors to mobilize contentious politics on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Following right-wing mobilizations focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis, immigration has become one of the most contentious political issues in Western Europe. Nicole Doerr's analysis compares right-wing populist visual communication strategies assessing digital media and provocative visual posters depicting immigrants or refugees as 'criminal foreigners' or a 'threat to the nation'. The cross-national comparative study shows how right wing mobilization travels online through transnational social media. By comparing the translation of right-wing nationalist with leftwing, cosmopolitan visual campaigns on the issue of immigration in Western Europe Nicole Doerr shows the challenges of progressive activists' attempts to translate cosmopolitan images of citizenship across different national and linguistic contexts in contrast to the right wing's rapid and effective instrumentalizing of denigrating images of minorities in different contexts.

Nicole Doerr, How Political Actors Mobilize and Translate Images of Immigration in Social Media, Visual Communication, vol. 16, 2017.