Sounds of the Jungle: Rehumanizing the Migrant

Abstract

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais, France. ‘The Jungle’, which was strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses of illegality and the violation of white suburbia. The British mainstream media have rendered the migrants either voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders, while silencing the human trauma of migration through the distancing of the human subject in media discourses. Through the Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS) case study we highlight how new media spaces can rehumanize migrants, enabling them to tell their stories through their own narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance- framing techniques of the mainstream media, which dehumanize the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies