The Third Narrative Space: The Human Interest Story and the Crisis of the Human Form

Yasmin Ibrahim, Anita Howarth

Image; William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 99, "All Human Forms identified....

Between the different models of broadcasting and publishing is an interstitial space of countering dominant paradigms. Their existence is both a symbolic and material affirmation of human struggles and narratives. Through a strand of medical humanitarianism, we examine the so-called 'migrant crisis in Europe'. While media reported the 'migrant' through their transgressions of state boundaries and as unnecessary entities in 'civilised Europe', there has been a quest to reconstitute the human from the third sector. While the conjoining of capital (i.e. the commercialisation of news) and the commodification of the human is a sustained endeavour in private and public models of publishing, the 'third narrative space' seeks to thwart and resist these imperatives by re-humanising refugee struggles as 'human struggles'. This reconstitution of the human works to gain both public attention and funding, and in the process invites both moral and altruistic challenges for these organisations

Citation, Y.Ibrahim, & Howarth, A. (2016), ‘The third narrative space: The human interest story and the crisis of the human form’, Ethical Space, 13(4): http://communicationethics.net/sub-journals/abstract.php?id=00109

Contamination, Deception and ‘Othering’: the Media Framing of the Horsemeat Scandal

Social Identities: 

Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture

Copies available at:  

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2016.1207512.

<a title="By ThereseA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons"

ABSTRACT

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.

Imaging the Jungles of Calais

 

Imaging the Jungles of Calais: 

Media Visuality and the Refugee Camp

Yasmin Ibrahim, Anita Howarth
Networking Knowledge Journal,  Vol 9, No 4 (2016)
 http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/446

 

Abstract

Calais became a space of renewed media interest in the summer of 2015, with an increased visuality into the state of refugees’ living conditions and their lives. We examine the images of the camps dubbed ‘the Jungle’ over time, when media started reporting on the camp which was demolished in 2009 and the more recent resurrections termed as ‘Jungle II’ or the ‘new Jungle’, thereafter. Earlier media coverage of the Jungle accompanied less visual depictions of their living conditions or daily existence beyond the threat they posed to their immediate environment. However, compared to 2009 there has been a surge in the number of images of the refugees, particularly a steep rise in 2014 and 2015. The refugee as an object of suffering and trauma is the subject of an abject gaze where the corporeal body is both a non-entity and invisible. Both death and the accident are ascribed to it, as inhabitants in this ‘state of exception’. We examine these aesthetics of trauma and violence in the liminal space of Calais. The increased visuality and curiosity in the camps since 2015 reinscribed the refugee as a political by-product of border politics, accentuating the refugee camp as a violent and dissonant space in civilised Europe. Despite the intimacy of the imagery, the increased visuality showcased the madness and futility produced through a border politics of legitimacy and ‘bare life’.

By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Coverage of articles and Images on the jungle in the British press from 2004 till 2015