Complicating the Single Story: A Visual Analysis of Images of Forced Migrants

The overall focus of this project is to analyze images and writing produced by people with forced migrant experience and examine how they respond to the dominant narratives produced in the mainstream. My study asks the following questions: how do refugees and forced migrants use narrative and images to create representations of their migration experiences? How do such creative works respond to and resist the dominant ways in which forced migrants are constructed by others? What is the role of visual methodologies in projects aimed at challenging the single story of forced migrant experience? This project is framed by theories of cultural studies and critical pedagogy with respect to representation and how encounters with creative works can lead to imagining alternative possibilities. Situated within visual culture studies, I used the visual analysis techniques of compositional interpretation and semiological analysis to analyze my objects. In chapter three, I examined images from two NGOs and four news media websites. While there was some complexity and nuance from all the sites, I found that the NGOs largely reproduced the dichotomy of forced migrants as either threatening or vulnerable, while the news media sites focused on portraying them as either grateful and deserving or as needing to be contained by fences and borders. In chapter four, I examined two graphic narratives produced by women with forced migrant experience and discuss how the creators used the tools of graphic narratives to reflect on how their experiences complicate the dominant narratives of forced migrant experience. Chapter five examines two creative projects completed by young people and children with forced migrant experience and discusses how the participants of these projects represent and reflect on their experiences. In my conclusion, I discuss the limitations of the study, focusing on the challenges of applying the same level of critically to my reading of all the images across the project. Finally, I discuss the contributions, focusing on the richness of the visual analysis and the importance of arts-based work as a lens through which to consciously and compassionately take the perspective of others.