The picture of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, was lauded as iconic after it went viral. Within hours, Aylan was a symbol, a ...hashtag and a meme. This project analyzes funerary Aylan memes to understand their meanings and functions as they proliferated in cyberspace. Through iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis, the project expands the functions of memes from visual jokes and social and political commentary to tools of grieving and atonement. The study demonstrates how memes are deployed to subvert and renegotiate reality, in this case to create a ‘better ending’ for the child and seek reparations for his death. The project also suggests that the rhetorical powers of iconic images may be eroding in remix culture due to their digital appropriations.
This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring ...access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.
Attaining visual literacy is becoming of growing importance, and iconography is an approach that allows people to become visually literate. Globalisation and technological advancements have ...transformed the way people communicate and understand the social and political realities that inform their everyday lives. The generation of information that guides these realities has become progressively more visual and accessible to a global audience. People's visual worlds have expanded to incorporate those that are not part of their environments. The increasing interconnectedness of the world and the rapid dissemination of information through visual mediums make visual literacy important and iconography relevant. This article explores the use of iconography to understand images and provides a framework for exploring their meaning. To accomplish this goal, iconography is discussed alongside the issue of migration to the European Union and the image of Alan Kurdi.
Compassion-evoking and widely circulated news images seem capable of affecting public opinion and change history. A case in point is the picture of the drowned toddler Alan Kurdi, who died while ...trying to escape to Europe with his family in September 2015. We theorise how these types of photos affect public opinion. By relying on panel data with sequentially embedded survey experiments conducted in the aftermath of the picture's publication and while large numbers of refugees were coming to Europe, we demonstrate that the image of Alan Kurdi had context-varying effects on policy preferences. Initially, the upsetting photo of the toddler increased support for liberal refugee policies across ideological divides. However, when individuals had the time to think about policy implications, they started processing even this highly upsetting picture through their ideology. Consequently, our results indicate that compassion-evoking images shift meaning over time.
New and social media are increasingly used to raise issues of global justice. Images and texts representing distant suffering in an emotionally charged way involve users of social media in debates ...about ethical standards and moral responsibility. This raises the question of how social media users react to such evidence about instances of distant suffering. How and under which conditions are users' involvement in discourses of global justice enhancing new practices of civic engagement and redefining the boundaries of solidarity? Our point of departure is the so-called "refugee crisis" in Europe in fall 2015, which raised questions of distant spectatorship and moral responses with renewed urgency and immediacy. We consider the conditions of collective reception and interpretation of visual icons of human suffering, which became viral through social media in this period. We first situate social media reception in the framework for the analysis of moral spectatorship. We secondly explore the link between iconic images and the emergence of so-called impromptu publics of moral spectatorship. As an empirical case, we refer to the performance of reddit discussion groups in confronting the salient images of Alan Kurdi, the drowned boy from Syria found at the beach in Turkey in September 2015.
Aylan Kurdi, Twitter y la indignación efímera Roncallo-Dow, Sergio; Córdoba-Hernández, Ana María; Camero, Marcela Durán
Revista española de investigaciones sociológicas,
01/2019
165
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
La foto de Aylan Kurdi, tras haber naufragado con su familia, despertó la sensibilidad de la opinión pública internacional frente a una crisis europea que venía consolidándose tiempo atrás. El ...presente trabajo hace un acercamiento al comportamiento e interactividad presentes en Twitter alrededor de la crisis migratoria en Europa. Tomando las cuentas de los principales influenciadores en este tema y analizando sus publicaciones desde el 30 de agosto hasta el 3 de diciembre de 2015, se busca demostrar que la crisis solo generó ruido y fue invisible para la opinión pública. Sin embargo, se hizo visible a través del acontecimiento de la fotografía de Kurdi que luego desencadenó una shitstorm temporal, provocó una rápida anestésica colectiva y devolvió los hechos a su invisibilidad original.
The photo of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian child who drowned after shipwrecking with his family, awakened international public concern in the face of a crisis that had already been established several months previously. This paper considers the behavior and interactivity taking place over Twitter with regards to the European migration crisis. Taking the accounts of the main influencers in this issue and analyzing their publications from August 30 to December 3 of 2015, the study seeks to demonstrate that the crisis was merely noise and was in fact invisible to public opinion. However, with the event of Kurdi’s photograph, setting off a temporary shitstorm that led to a rapid collective anesthetic, the events ultimately returned to their original invisibility.
The impact of iconic imagery on policymaking during humanitarian crises is oft-discussed within the literature. When rapid humanitarianization or sudden policy shifts emerge, researchers seek to ...identify why. One potential explanation is that of ‘focusing events’ – sudden, harmful events which destabilize political consensuses and elevate marginal agendas. While focusing events have been used to explain the impact of large-scale accidents and disasters, this paper extends their usage to activist-generated events such as the iconization of images of the drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 migrant crisis. In exploring the Kurdi images’ impact on US media and political discourses of asylum, this paper finds that asylum-related discourses became increasingly sympathetic and domestically focused, eventually culminating in the announcement of an increase in resettlement targets for Syrian migrants. By expanding conceptualizations of focusing events to cases such as Kurdi’s, this paper supplements understandings of the agenda-setting function of iconic imagery.
Em setembro de 2015, a fotografia do corpo do menino sírio Aylan Kurdi realizada por Nilüfer Demir causou uma comoção mundial. A criança afogou-se no mar Egeu, durante uma tentativa de fugir da ...guerra civil na Síria, e seu corpo foi encontrado em uma praia turística na Turquia. O presente estudo de caso procura responder a uma pergunta: por que esta e não outras imagens de crianças em situações muito semelhantes, a mais próxima sendo a de seu irmão Galeb, morto da mesma forma e na mesma praia, tornou-se símbolo da tragédia que se abateu sobre aqueles que, entre 2015 e 2016, deslocaram-se em direção à Europa em busca de sobrevivência ou de uma vida melhor? Para a resposta, será preciso identificar o potencial icônico da imagem, estabelecer as relações entre materialidade fotográfica e seu valor indicial, o poder de agenciamento e os novos caminhos da circulação que hoje as imagens possuem graças às redes sociais digitais. Assim, pretende-se com o presente artigo contribuir para uma discussão metodológica sobre o estudo da imagem na cultura contemporânea. E, para tanto, procurou-se alinhá-lo à perspectiva de análise do estudo de caso realizado em 2003 pelo historiador Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses sobre a fotografia de Robert Capa, que registra o momento da morte do jovem miliciano Federico Borrell García, em setembro de 1936, atingido por um tiro, ao ser surpreendido pelas forças franquistas nos campos abertos de Cerro Muriano, perto de Córdoba (MENESES, 2002). Não se propõe aqui um estudo comparativo entre as fotografias de Aylan e Borrell Garcia, mas a adoção do roteiro metodológico proposto por Meneses, agora aplicado à imagem fotojornalística feita por Demir, e com isso compreender o que de novo se pode dizer sobre o circuito desse tipo de imagem quando lançada em redes digitais.
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