Paper short abstract:

The Hungarian government has set up billboards in the Summer of 2015 against the flow of migrants and refugees. People of the Internet answered again with digitally altered jokes. In the paper I investigate these memes and the dialogue between the Hungarian government and the „folk” as folklore phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

The european migrant crisis began in 2015 when increasing number of Syrian and Afghan refugees and migrants arrived to the European Union. The Hungarian government has set up billboards in the Summer of 2015 against the flow of migrants and refugees. These roadside posters gone up all over the country and said: "If you come to Hungary, you cannot take away Hungarians' jobs" and "If you come to Hungary, you must respect our laws." Dozens of digitally altered humorous memes have spread on social media sites responding the anti-immigrant billboard campaign of the government. Later the government has buildt a four-meter high fence along border with Serbia to stop migrants on Balkan route. People of the Internet answered again with digitally altered jokes. In the paper I investigate these memes and the dialogue between the Hungarian government and the "folk" as folklore phenomena.

The immediately digital reaction against the anti-migrant campaign seems emotionally motivated and ineffective because the Hungarian society is mainly xenophobic according to recent social reserches.

Paper short abstract:

What kind of imaginaries and images run through the "technologization" of the European border regime? What pictures are actually circulated by technological research projects or security and defense companies that produce border technology?

Paper long abstract:

The technologization of the European border regime has been diagnosed again and again for the past years. It has been argued that through surveillance systems like Eurosur, databanks like Eurodac and smart border technologies the border actually liquifies and becomes bodily: following border crossers wherever they are. On the other hand, the image of Fortress Europe has never been as strong as now - and this also due to new fences and walls being built and military ships patrolling the Mediterranean to "fight smuggling". This raises the question, what kind of imaginaries and images run through the "technologization" of the European border regime.

While the visual regimes of migration (Bischoff 2015) as well as the visual culture of humanitarianism have been analyzed in recent years (Nyers), and while the gazes of different technologies (body scanners for example) or systems (Eurosur) has been explored, nobody has ever looked at what pictures are actually circulated by technological research projects or security and defense companies that produce border technology. These actors are producing the border before the border. They are doing border work and this becomes even clearer when looking at the pictures and images they produce. Here the border is often dehumanized, it only consists of landscapes and technology. No person, not even border guards are appearing in these images that are often furthermore digital pictures and thus seem distanced, unreal. In my talk I want to explore the iconography of these pictures.

Paper short abstract:

Narratives of control and sovereignty are closely linked to the performativity of the nation state as a "home". The paper seeks to elaborate on the relation of images and imaginaries and emotional practices of "doing home" in media and political discourse on refugees in Germany and Austria.

Paper long abstract:

"The night that Germany lost control". This headline of the German weekly "Die Zeit" was published in fall 2016 on the occasion of the anniversary of the 2015 border opening, when German chancellor Angela Merkel had decided to allow Syrian and other refugees into the country. Also in fall 2016, in light of the so-called refugee crisis the Austrian government drafted an emergency decree that would allow for extreme measures and entail the suspension of asylum-seekers' legal rights and basic freedoms in order to restore safety and security. Both examples, the media narrative and populist politics, instrumentalize images, metaphors, and visual imaginaries related to imaginations of control and sovereignty. Both suggest that the border opening led to an uncontrolled influx of not classified/classifiable and potentially bad people. In effect, they argue, the state cannot fulfil its security promise and thus cannot be considered sovereign anymore.

The paper seeks to elaborate on the relation of images and imaginaries and emotional practices of "doing home" in media and political discourse on refugees in Germany and Austria. Narratives of control and sovereignty are closely linked to the performativity of the nation state as a "home" and a trusted "safe haven". Right-wing populist images and imaginaries on refugees particularly draw upon the notion of fear. Also, their emphasis on an alleged "state of exception" informs individual actors' fears as emotional practices, leaving a lasting impression that potentially undermines democratic conceptions of the state and the society.

Paper short abstract:

Security is socially constructed, but how and by whom? My paper seeks to understand the role of the nation state in a globalised world and the conditions of possibility of contemporary imagineries of security.

Paper long abstract:

Security is socially constructed. Admittedly the phrase "socially constructed" is a worn out phrase in the social sciences. Still, I consider it to be useful as long as one is explicit about who actually constructs reality and how this is done.

In the case of security it is the nation state that has the monopoly to construct a reality for a population on a well-defined territory. This is Boltanki's argument echoing Foucault's work on governmentality and parrallels Andersons classic concept of "imagined communities". According to Anderson the nationstate has the capacity to create and manage a collective imaginary that binds a community together.

At first glance this appealing to the nation-state doesn't seem to apply to our globalised world.

However, globalisation cannot be described just as the decay of nation states as some

anthropologists in the 1990ies such as Appadurai suggest. Rather, globalisation ought to be

understood as the reorganisation of the nation-state in the first place, as Sassen shows. It is because

of "the retreat of the state" (Strange) as an economic player that states see security as their first and most important task. Security serves as a legitimation for state action and for state-building. This is why the EU has been trying to establish a common security policy (European Security Strategy) for the last 15 years and has been struggling due to resistance of its member states. My aim is to outline these developments and to offer a perspective which has been useful for my ethnographic fieldwork.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon a digital ethnography of images circulated on social media by a group of vigilantes in Rome, I show how they ‘distribute the sensible’ to form—in Mirzoeff’s words—a complex of visuality which legitimises dominance, while simultaneously enacting a form of securitarian domopolitics.

Paper long abstract:

The paper draws upon a digital ethnography of images of Roma shared on Italian social media networks set up by a group of vigilantes; their emergent practice of patrolling the neighbourhood is justified, in their discourse, by the proximity of one of the largest Roma camps in the city, which instrumentalises the Roma, placing them at the core of their securitarian mobilisation.

My interpretation of the ethnographic material combines insights from Nicholas Mirzoeff's work on visuality as authority's work to exert and legitimate its dominance with Jacques Rancière's 'distribution of the sensible': the definition and apportionment, alongside power lines, of what is visible and what is not in a given, shared space. Rancière's original French wording, 'partage (du sensible)' has a supplementary connotation of sharing, thus of community-making, as well as a more recent, mundane meaning of 'sharing' content on social media. By coagulating these meanings in one lens, I will thus examine how the practice of sharing, on social media, specific types of visual content portraying Roma bodies amounts to a distribution of the sensible sustaining visuality as a system of power, while enacting a form of securitarian domopolitics by building a sense of community around the security discourse

I argue that these mechanisms of visual representations form what I call 'the complex of securitarian visuality', classifying and separating the undesirables while aestheticising the respect for the status-quo. My analysis interrogates the implications of these vernacular forms of securitarian visuality for Mirzoeff's theorisation of a 'post-panoptic' visuality.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how images and imaginaries of climate change affect children and young people and how these images create special conditions for emotions. How do the idea of securitization of home in risk societies go along with visual narratives of global climate catastrophes and an uncertain future?

Paper long abstract:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century we live in a time of fear. Whether it’s the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of terrorist attacks, many people currently live in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that daily is presented in the media. This constant anxiety is also a reality for many children and teenagers who fear the present as well as the future. Above all, they are afraid of climate changes. While anxiety and fears more clearly determine our choices in life, people in the western world live in a time where safety and security characterizes everyday life, which in particular has repercussions on children's everyday lives and freedom of movement. This also adds to an ongoing debate on the current focus on threats to personal and societal security and what this preoccupation does to children´s self-image, living conditions and their understandings of the future.

By focusing on children´s narratives and adult memories of fears in childhood, this paper aims to examine the relation between how images and visual culture that signal “catastrophe”, “extinction” and “collapse” creates special conditions for emotions. In what ways are emotions (fears) socially and culturally conditioned? Furthermore I attempt to understand the cultural meanings and impact of images of lonely polar bears on melting ice floes and parched land and how these images clashes with the idea of living in a secure and predictable world. What narratives of fear are available at different times and how does visual culture affect children’s self-perceived fears? By combining a broad contemporary analysis of visual narratives with archival studies of the relation between human and nature it becomes possible to say something about the intertextuality and the epistemological contexts from which fears derives its power and authority.