Glossary

The concept of threat perceptions relates to the question of to what extent citizens believe that migration is posing a threat for themselves and their country. Group conflict theory (GCT) (Blumer 1958; Blalock 1967) states that people may feel anxious about migration. The “in-group” wants to protect their social structures from the competition of “outsiders” who are often referred to as the “out-group.” The main assumption behind this theory is that valuable resources within a society (e.g., jobs, housing, access to healthcare, etc.) are scarce, and that migration increases competition over such resources. It is, moreover, assumed that members of the in-group seek to protect their social identity, irrespective of whether they can safeguard their socioeconomic position (Scheepers et al. 2008). However, threat perceptions of migrants and refugees do not result exclusively from economic reasoning, but they may also have cultural and ethnic causes such as the fear of an alleged ‘Islamization’ of the country as well as the demise of ‘Western values’ (Goubin et al. 2022, 9–10).

⇢ see also Attitudes, beliefs, and values, Crisis, Frames of migration, Othering, Racism, Terrorism

References and further reading:

Blalock, Hubert M. 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Blumer, Herbert. 1958. “Race Prejudice as Sense of Group Position.” The Pacific Sociological Review 1.1: 3–7.

Goubin, Silke, Anna Ruelens, and Ides Nicaise. 2022. “Trends in Attitudes towards Migration in Europe: A Comparative Analysis.” KU Leuven, HIVA – Research Institute for Work and Society. [Working paper of the OPPORTUNITIES project 101004945 – H2020.]

Scheepers, Peer, Mérove Gijsberts, and Marcel Coenders. 2002. “Ethnic Exclusionism in European Countries: Public Opposition to Civil Rights for Legal Migrants as a Response to Perceived Ethnic Threat.” European Sociological Review 18.1: 17–34.

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We speak of toxic debates, when there is good reason to doubt that all participants are sincerely interested in establishing common ground and finding a consensus on controversial issues. Narratives can be toxic, too, when they are employed strategically to initiate or sustain toxic debates, fostering “centrifugal” narrative dynamics (Sommer 2023). The toxic nature of harmful “strategic narratives” (Miskimmon et al. 2013) may be a question of (1) content, e.g., falsehoods, disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, or hate speech; (2) a lack of transparency with respect to origins and proliferation paths which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify senders and disseminators; and (3) intended effects such as triggering confirmation bias or fostering ontological insecurity (Kinnvall et al. 2021).

Invoking freedom of speech in pluralist democracies, toxic narratives are typically designed to exploit legal loopholes, violate unwritten rules, and test taboos, with the aim of redefining the spectrum of acceptability and tellability (for instance, in racist, extremist, and nationalist discourses). Toxic narratives are typically part of a larger framing strategy or image campaign which aims at unfolding a centrifugal narrative dynamics with the goal of destabilizing democracy, curbing the influence of independent media, and sidestepping public debate in order to influence public opinion, for example by spreading disinformation online. The abuse of stories and storytelling has lately received considerable attention (Fernandes 2017; Meretoja and Freeman 2023); see also the recently completed “dangers of narrative” project at the University of Tampere (Mäekelä et al. 2021). At worst, toxic narratives are part of state propaganda, justifying wars of aggression, torture, and genocide.

⇢ see also Counter-(master-)narrative dynamics, Frames of migration, Narrative dynamics, Narratives on migration, Racism, Terrorism

References and further reading:

Kinnvall, Catarina, Ian Manners, and Jennifer Mitzen, eds. 2021. Ontological Insecurity in the European Union. London: Routledge.

Mäkelä, Maria, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipolda, and Tytti Rantanen. 2021. “Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy.” Narrative 29.2: 139–159.

Meretoja, Hanna, and Mark Freeman, eds. 2023. The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miskimmon, Alister, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle. 2013. Strategic Narratives: Communiction, Power, and the New World Order. New York, NY and London: Routledge.

Sommer, Roy. 2023. “Migration and Narrative Dynamics.” In The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by Paul Dawson and Maria Mäkelä, 498–511. New York, NY and London: Routledge.

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The trafficker is a person whose activity is to recruit, escort and even lodge another person seeking to migrate in return for a financial or other material benefit. In some West African countries, the trafficker is usually called a “passeur” or “coxer.”

⇢ see also Human trafficking

References and further reading:

Tandian, Aly. 2006. “Barça ou Barsaax (Aller à Barcelone ou mourir) : Le désenchantement des familles et des candidats sénégalais à la migration.” Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés 9: 124–137. URL: www.persee.fr/doc/diasp_1637-5823_2006_num_9_1_1073. Date of access: August 24, 2021.

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In literary theory, narrators – or storytellers – are considered reliable when their accounts adhere to the reader’s evaluation and comprehension of a story. Vice versa, they are considered unreliable when their account of the narrative gives the reader cause for mistrust. This can happen, for instance, when the narrator contradicts him/herself, shows excessive emotional involvement, or reveals questionable norms and values. Moreover, sources of unreliability can vary from storytellers’ deliberate lying to limited knowledge of the facts they are telling, from their psychological status to their personal interest in shaping their account in a specific way (see also Shen 2013 for further reference).

As far as narratives of and on migration are concerned, (un)reliability is a powerful and useful tool to employ. For instance, a migrant may shape his/her narrative to protect a relative, or obtain refugee status. However, it must also be considered that, more often than not, migrants’, journalists’, and activists’ narratives are deemed as unreliable by public opinion or by a court on the basis of cultural or racial bias (see Campbell and D’Agostino 2021 for further examples). The OPPORTUNITIES project recognizes the importance of taking the concept of (un)reliability into account when approaching narratives of and on migration.

⇢ see also Multiperspectivity, Stories of migration, Narratives on migration, Narrandum, Tellability, Attitudes, beliefs, and values

References and further reading:

Campbell, Zach, and Lorenzo D'Agostino. 2021. “Friends of the Traffickers” The Intercept. 30 April 2021. URL: https://theintercept.com/2021/04/30/italy-anti-mafia-migrant-rescue-smuggling/. Date of access: August 24, 2021.

Nünning Vera, ed. 2015. Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter.

Shen, Dan. 2013. “Unreliability.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. URL: https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/66/revisions/264/view.html. Date of access: August 24, 2021.

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The OPPORTUNITIES project distinguishes between stories of migration (emic perspective), narratives on migration (etic perspective), and various hybrid forms which employ references to the migrant experience for rhetorical and political purposes. In order to account for this variety, Carolin Gebauer and Roy Sommer (2023) have introduced the concept of vicarious storytelling, which builds on previous research on the notion of “vicarious narrative” (Hatavara and Mildorf 2017a, 2017b; Norrick 2013), and allows narrative analysts to differentiate hybrid narratives with the help of functional criteria. The functional approach acknowledges that journalists, human rights groups, and representatives of NGOs supporting refugees and migrants at various stages of their journey (from transit and immigration to projects geared toward integration and inclusion) employ life stories for different reasons.

The term vicarious storytelling relates to the act of speaking on behalf of someone else which is typical of migrant advocacy and humanitarian narratives. Based on the different functions of vicarious storytelling, one can distinguish four dominant ways in which narratives on migration incorporate stories of migration: (1) case stories, (2) documentary storytelling, (3) ambassadorial storytelling, and (4) allied storytelling. The first two types – case stories and documentary storytelling – both draw on migrant testimony, often in anonymized form; yet each of these types of vicarious storytelling does so for a different purpose: Case stories, which are usually found in humanitarian campaigns by NGOs such as Pro-Asyl or Sea Watch, mainly serve to provide factual information, whereas documentary storytelling are frequently deployed in investigative journalism as a means to illustrate strategies, practices, networks, and relationships of trust between different groups of migrants and stakeholders. The third type of vicarious narrative – ambassadorial storytelling – refers to practices of retelling individual migrant life stories, for example in UNHCR narratives in social media and journalism. Calling for humanitarian, social, or political action, ambassadorial narratives usually draw on affective narrative strategies which focus on the individual with the aim of evoking empathy and fostering perspective taking. The fourth category, allied storytelling, is the only type of vicarious narrative which actively involves migrants themselves in the act of storytelling. Examples of allied storytelling include collaborative literary and artistic work between authors, artists, and migrants which seeks to provide access to the lived experience of migration in the hope of creating a welcome culture as well as promoting new ways of conviviality.

⇢ see also Conviviality, Empathy, Narratives on migration, Perspective taking, Stories of migration, Positioning

References and further reading:

Gebauer, Carolin, and Roy Sommer. 2023. “Beyond Vicarious Storytelling: How Level Telling Fields Help Create a Fair Narrative on Migration.” Open Research Europe 3.10: 3–14. URL: https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/3-10#FN3. Accessed July 30, 2023.

Hatavara, Mari, and Jarmila Mildorf. 2017a. “Fictionality, Narrative Modes, and Vicarious Storytelling.” Style 51.3: 391–408.

Hatavara, Mari, and Jarmila Mildorf. 2017b. “Hybrid Fictionality and Vicarious Narrative Experience.” Narrative 25.1: 65–82.

Norrick, Neal R. 2013. “Narratives of Vicarious Experience in Conversation.” In Language in Society 42.2: 385–406.

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Given the well-documented negativity bias in the news, it is not surprising that negative frames of migration as a problem, crisis, or even threat dominate media representations of refugees and migrants (see also the entry on “frames of migration”). Mass media offer an optimal platform to spread fake news on various topics, including migration (Ireton and Posetti 2018); however, they can also serve to convey the sense of a moral obligation to help migrants and refugees. This often manifests itself in attempts to foreground the actions and activities of a committed civil society or emphasizes the broad willingness among national populations to support groups on the move (Greussing and Boomgaarden 2017, 1756; Heidenreich et al. 2017, 177–178). These examples testify to the existence of an imparted will to help in mass media which is mainly brought about through framing practices foregrounding humanitarian aspects of migration (see also the entry on “frame analysis”).

However, such humanitarian narratives on migration can also achieve the opposite of the intended effect and contribute to the victimization of refugees. The reason for this is that they tend to focus on migrants’ need of assistance, thus characterizing them as desperate, suffering, and in constant lack of individual agency (Greussing and Boomgaarden 2017, 1750). In this respect, victimization is closely linked to the refugee archetype (see the respective entry), which stigmatizes certain types of refugees as victims due to aspects of their identity such as their gender or their origin. Sophie Lecheler et al. (2019, 694–695) consequently caution us that, even if they often emanate from a humanitarian perspective which is built on ethical concerns and moral convictions, practices of victimization can easily turn into practices of objectifying and dehumanizing refugees.

⇢ see also Agency, Frame analysis (aka framing analysis), Frames of migration, Gender, Refugee archetype, Othering

References and further reading:

Greussing, Esther, and Hajo G. Boomgaarden. 2017. “Shifting the Refugee Narrative? An Automated Frame Analysis of Europe’s 2015 Refugee Crisis.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43.11: 1749–1774.

Heidenreich, Tobias, Fabienne Lind, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, and Hajo G. Boomgaarden. 2019. “Media Framing Dynamics of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Topic Modelling Approach.” Journal of Refugee Studies 32: 172–182.

Lecheler, Sophie, Jörg Matthes and Hajo G. Boomgaarden. 2019. “Setting the Agenda for Research on Media and Migration: State-of-the-Art and Directions for Future Research.” Mass Communication and Society 22: 691–707.

Ireton, Cherilyn, and Julie Posetti. 2018. Journalism, Fake News & Disinformation: Handbook for Journalism Education and Training. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Accessed July 20, 2023. URL: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000265552.

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Voluntary return occurs when the migrant decides to return to his or her country of origin. It may be spontaneous or assisted with the support of either a state policy or an institution such as the International Organization for Migration, following a freely expressed wish of the migrant.

⇢ see also Migrant

References and further reading:

Tandian, Aly. 2020. “Returning Migrants: From Disillusion to Integration Initiatives in the South-East, North and Central Regions of Senegal.” In Migration in West and North Africa and across the Mediterranean: Trends, Risks, Development and Governance, edited by Philippe Fargues and Marzia Rango, 241–348. Geneva: International Organization for Migration.

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In common language usage, vulnerability is about susceptibility or being open to attack and injury (see the definition in the OED). As a concept vulnerability is applicable to geographic/environmental as well as social settings. A geographic region could be vulnerable to floods or other disasters in which case groups of people could be at risk and vulnerable to death and injuries as well as loss of resources and livelihood (Birckmann 2013). In a social setting, by contrast, people could be susceptible to and at risk of loss of rights, resources, etc. as well as social exclusion due to, for example, their social background, race, gender, citizenship rights, or migration status. In this context, susceptibility implies being at risk, which is measurable at an individual level and which could be mitigated by appropriate social policy of administrative rules and regulations. An individualistic approach to social vulnerability may not negate susceptibility of groups based on their common characteristics of race, gender, or migration status, but it may well underestimate the structural sources of group vulnerability due to, for instance, unequal distribution of assets and economic resources as well as the lack of political and social power, of a public voice, and of social rights of migrants.

⇢ see also Equality, Risk

References and further reading:

Birkmann, Jörn, ed. 2013. Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. 2^nd edition. Tokyo et al.: United Nations University.

OECD. 2007. “Glossary of Statistical Terms.” OECD. URL: https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=2886.

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The term welcome culture refers to the recognition and appreciation of social and cultural diversity. It implies a positive, welcoming, inclusive, and appreciative attitude toward migrants, which manifests itself in cooperate, neighborly, and administrative everyday practices. Welcome culture is not only directed toward migrants and refugees who count as new arrivals in a country, but it also addresses migrants who have already been living in this country and perhaps even adopted new citizenship. The main objective of practices of welcome culture are to ensure attractive living conditions for every member of society, irrespective of their origin, as well as to establish integration and inclusion as central social duties (Huke 2022, 299).

Media coverage of the long summer of migration in 2015 mainly used the term welcome culture to refer to German solidarity with refugees (Gebauer 2023). When then chancellor Angela Merkel refused to close the country’s borders, allowing an unlimited number of refugees to seek asylum in Germany, an impressively large part of German civil society decided to volunteer in refugee help (Becker 2022, ch. 3; Fleischmann 2020). The humanitarian narrative of German welcome culture which emerged from these events marked an important discursive shift in German debates on migration: Before the European refugee ‘crisis,’ welcome culture had been mainly used as the official term to denote governmental measures of tackling the shortage of skilled workers in Germany, including the improvement of educational and employment opportunities for the population already resident in the country as well as the immigration management of skilled workers from abroad who should cover the need for employable people (Schäfer 2023, 329–331).

⇢ see also Attitudes, beliefs, and values, Conviviality, Diversity, Inclusion, Integration, Solidarity (with migrants)

References and further reading:

Becker, Uwe. 2022. Deutschland und seine Flüchtlinge: Das Wechselbad der Diskurse im langen Sommer der Flucht 2015. Bielefeld: transcript.

Fleischmann, Larissa. 2020. Contested Solidarity: Practices of Refugee Support between Humanitarian Help and Political Activism. Bielefeld: transcript.

Gebauer, Carolin. 2023. “German Welcome Culture Then and Now: How Crisis Narration Can Foster (Contested) Solidarity with Refugees.” University of Wuppertal. [Working paper of the OPPORTUNITIES project 101004945 – H2020.]

Huke, Nikolai. 2022. “Willkommenskultur.” In Begriffe der Gegenwart: Ein Kulturwissenschaftliches Glossar, edited by Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber and Manuel Liebig, 299–304. Wien and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag.

Schäfer, Philipp. 2023. 2023. “Willkommenskultur.” In Umkämpfte Begriffe der Migration: Ein Inventar, edited by Inken Bartels, Isabella Löhr, Christiane Reinecke, Philipp Schäfer, and Laura Stielike, 329–342. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Work Package: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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