Paper short abstract:

Visualization plays is crucial to the politics of European migration. The concept of visual ecology reconstructs a terrain of circulating visualizations. Migrants are able to intervene in this continuous production of movements and help us see beyond the 'migration crisis'.

Paper long abstract:

Crises signal the limits of the imagination: things must change yet a different future remains unimaginable. The current 'migration crisis' in Europe is no different. While practices of visualization play a crucial role in the ways in which mobility is securitized, controlled, counted and publicized, visualizations tends to hypostasize 'migration crisis' to be unnatural yet inevitable. Specific logics of visualization depict migration so as to render it both external - i.e. 'foreign' - and internal - i.e. 'European' - at once. Thereby, migration remains an exceptional issue, abnormal yet unavoidable. This raises the question which visualizations may destabilize an imaginary of invasion. However, this question presumes an all too clear-cut competition of imagery. By developing the concept of visual ecology, we are able to construct migration's visuality not as an arena of contrasting pictures but as a shifting terrain of circulating visualizations. While a critical analysis would discover hegemony behind representation, a focus on ecological connections demonstrates how visual capacities are entangled. The visual politics of migration turns out not to be one of static imposition, but a continuous co-production of movements in which migrants are able to intervene. Lines of sight beyond migration's crisis are invented in the midst of becoming visible.