Paper short abstract:

IOM's WAKA Well website is a campaign designed to provide African people with info about local opportunities and migration-related risks. By means of a multimodal discourse analysis, the article analyses its structure and content to study the meaning-making processes embedded in its realisation.

Paper long abstract:

In order to control, deter or dissuade unauthorised migration, stricter border-control measures and securitisation policies have increasingly been adopted, by EUrope, U.S.A. and Australia above all. One of the most recently employed strategies consists in delivering information (or awareness) campaigns to potential migrants in areas with high emigration rates. While on the one hand these campaigns aim at informing potential irregular migrants about the dangers and obstacles they might encounter, on the other they are inscribed into a broader tendency to externalise migration management, with the purpose of tackling the issue at its roots by preventing migrants from leaving. Most of the EU-funded campaigns, with the collaboration of international and transnational organisations, have been targeting central and western Africa, by means of social events, discussions, printed paper, cinema, TV, radio, internet and social networks. In 2019 the International Organization for Migration launched WAKA Well, an innovative campaign in the form of a website designed to provide young African people with information about local opportunities and risks associated to irregular migration. This article investigates the structure and content of the WAKA Well website by means of a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) methodology. MMDA stems from a social semiotic approach to discourse suitable for studying multimedia contents made of language, image, music, sound, texture and gesture. Thus, the study aims at exploring assumptions, objectives and communicative strategies at stake in the campaign realisation, by analysing the construction of meaning across its different webpages and the logico-semantic relations between elements on the website.