The iconic image on social media: Alan Kurdi, the strength of weak commitment & the power of visual art

Posted on February 3rd, 2016 by Lin Prøitz

The Crick Centre’s Dr Lin Prøitz, Marie Curie Fellow, and Dr Holly Eva Ryan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, discuss their contribution to a rapid response report on social media, image circulation and the death of Alan Kurdi.

In recent years social media has in various ways expanded and altered the public sphere. The widespread use of digital platforms and apps around the world has created new arenas for people to share ideas, debate and engage. Recent protest events including the Arab Spring uprisings, the Movimiento YoSoy132 in Mexico and the Indignado mobilization in Spain, to name just a few, have demonstrated the power of digital and social media in channelling collective outrage through many small, orchestrated actions; and, in mobilizing citizens around certain causes and claims.

Social media has become a hot topic for academics keen to understand the power and limitations of new technologies. In particular, the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms has enabled the increasingly rapid and widespread circulation of images – from selfies and memes to photographs of war, violence and environmental degradation. But how does the acceleration of such images affect politics?

During September 2015, the power of rapid global image circulation was brought into sharp relief in the context of the refugee crisis. On the 2nd September 2015, the body of a three-year-old boy was found washed up on the beach at Bodrum, Turkey and photographed. Alan* Kurdi and his family – Syrian refugees of Kurdish extraction – had been on an inflatable boat bound from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. Like some 3,000 others, Alan lost his life when the boat he was travelling in capsized. However, unlike these others, Alan’s death became sensationalized as the photographs taken by Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir were shared across the globe with lightning speed. We formed part of an interdisciplinary research team investigating the circulation of these images and their effect on publics and politics. The rapid response report, which can be found here, features contributions from Sheffield’s I-School, as well as researchers from Google and Witness. It shows how the image catalysed a shift in the dominant vocabulary from ‘migrants’ to ‘refugees’ and it questions the implications of this shift.

In this blog, we outline our contributions to the report and highlight some of the questions that they raise for future research.

 Boat

Boat image courtesy of Anders Illum  via Flickr

The Strength of Weak Commitment (Lin Prøitz)

Lin’s chapter concerned the momentum of the image of Alan Kurdi and the public response to the image on social media. She examined how the response – synthesised in many ‘Refugees Welcome’ groups, activities in NGOs and volunteer groups – influenced the Norwegian Local Government Election held on 14th September 2015, thirteen days after the image of Alan Kurdi went viral. Through examining the activities and mobilisations around the #RefugeesWelcomeToNorway (#RWTN), a Facebook group that increased its number of members from a few thousand to nearly 90,000 members in the first few days after the image went viral, Lin found that the impact of the image, indeed influenced the Norwegian Governmental local election. Although some researchers and commentators have claimed that the civic engagement in Norway was more about emergencies and humanitarian aid than politics and integration, a value mobilisation and change in political rhetoric was clearly noted. The Social Left Party, the Left Party, and the Christian People’s Party all argued that the refugee crisis and the Norwegian peoples’ obligation to help overshadowed – and should overshadow – local matters. Most notably, the change in rhetoric was seen when the Conservative Party and the Progressive Party debated in the many television election debates. Overall, the Labour Party, the Center Party and the Environmental Party were the winners of this year’s election.[1] The election ended devastating for the right-wing parties, with the Progressive Party falling to its worst local government election result in 24 years.

The image of Alan Kurdi and the #RWTN campaign did indeed raise awareness of the migrant crisis among the civic public in general and young people in particular. During these weeks, #RWTN represented a space where people engaged politically, through their everyday political discussions, expressions of emotions, concerns, debates and storytelling. #RWTN represented one public space where young people – through their many debates – attempted to conceptualise, but also redefine what political engagement is. In short, the chapter indicates that the sheer forces of numbers – or, the strength of weak commitment – must be taken into consideration for researchers and for policy practitioners who want to not only understand young people’s engagement but also understand how young people can be involved in politics in the future.

 

#KiyiyaVuranInsanlik‪: Unpacking Artistic Responses to the Alan Kurdi image (Holly Eva Ryan)

Holly’s contribution meanwhile addressed the artistic outpouring in response to the photograph, focusing on Buzzfeed and Bored Panda tribute pages which were deemed to be nodal points for engagement. She explores what the ‘function’ of art is in this context, why people feel compelled to ‘respond’ to the photograph in this way – for example by turning it into a cartoon or manipulating it to project an alternative ending to the story. It also questions why and how such artistic responses matter for politics In particular, Holly explores the therapeutic and cathartic effects of art production, suggesting that artistic tributes offer people a way of working through troubling emotions. However, she questions whether the iconic image of Alan and the accompanying artistic responses demonstrated the power or capacity to effect policy change towards refugees.

 

Biographies

Lin Proitz

Dr Lin Proitz works on ‘Encouraging Network Generation’s Accountability and Global Engagement (ENGAGE)’, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship funded by the EU’s Horizon2020 programme. Lin’s time is split between The Visual Social Media Lab (Information School) and The  Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics.

 

holly

Dr Holly Eva Ryan is Post Doctoral Researcher in Politics, Art and Expression at the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. She can be found tweeting at @HollyERyan.

Notes: *His name has been spelt ‘Aylan’ across much mainstream and social media coverage, which is why the rapid response report also used this spelling. The Kurdish spelling is in fact ‘Alan’ as reported to the BBC by family members (See: BBC, Alan Kurdi death: A Syrian Kurdish family forced to flee. BBC News, 2015).

View or download The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi.

This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Crick Centre, or the Understanding Politics blog series.

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