REIMAGINING NARRATIVES ON MIGRATION The Role of Media, Arts and Culture in Promoting Transcultural Dialogue

In the last decade, the representation strategies and discursive practices enacted by a wide range of state and non-state actors have been presenting irregular migrants crossing borders as an ‘emergency’ to be managed in terms of a wider social, cultural and political ‘crisis’. These media representations of migration and asylum seeking as a ‘crisis’ have outstripped the reality of the situation. In order to go beyond this depoliticised politics, that is based on detached forms of compassionate care and technocratic control, it is essential to enhance an alternative vision of solidarity that is capable of recognizing the other as a human being and unveiling the harsh oppressive conditions of the global and local structures of injustice. Thus, moving away from othering and alarmist, depoliticised representations of the others, the article calls for the need to challenge current narratives and discourses and to create and construct alternative ones