Post by João Raphael da Silva

🚨 Publication Alert 📚 After convening the "Media Representations of Crime" module at the University of Roehampton at the beginning of 2022, I moved temporarily to Barcelona. As a Visiting Ph.D. Researcher at the Centre of Discourse Studies, I was struck by the way Spanish newspapers were covering refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War. In "Contingent Safe Waters", Dr. Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester) and I demonstrate that El Mundo and El Pais textually used Water Metaphors conventionally linked to danger - such as "Avalanche" - to describe the movement of refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Visually and textually, however, both news outlets disrupted these meanings through non-Orientalist, Off-White re-racializing lenses. As a result, refugees from the Russo-Ukrainian War were portrayed as "Oriental European Others": Their movement was represented as compelled yet "civilized", while their whitened visibility rendered them absorbable by the "Western European Us". In doing so, the Spanish press co-constructed distinctive "Contingent Safe Waters". In great company, "Contingent Safe Waters: Aesthetic Dissensus Between Metaphor and the Whitening of the Russo-Ukrainian War’s Refugees in the Spanish Press" appears as part of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics' Special Issue title “Who’s the EU for?”, edited by Dr Amal Abu-Bakare, Professor Anna M. Agathangelou and Professor Christian Kaunert. Licensing costs paid to El Mundo, El País and Getty Images were covered by the University of the West of England’s School of Social Sciences and its Social and Public Policy Research Group (SPPRG). https://lnkd.in/eCF36imJ