Paper short abstract:

With images being omnipresent in our contemporary world, the way migrants are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived. This paper looks into visuals produced by Afghan migrants in Athens and Berlin in order to reflect on their imaginaries of "Europe".

Paper long abstract:

With images being omnipresent in our contemporary world (WJT Mitchell 2005, Mirzoeff 2011), the way migrants are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived, as images play a key role in regulating political discourse, creating categories such as legal/illegal and sustaining stereotypes. But despite pictures relevance, refugees' visual self-representations remain almost completely absent from public as well as scholarly interest. As part of my PhD research, this paper looks at Afghan migrants based in Athens and Berlin and their existing practices of self-representation on social media platforms, as a focus on migrants' images seems key to understand tensions between their everyday live in a new European context and social expectations they have to fulfill, in order to not be considered as having 'failed' by friends and family members in the home country. Therefore, looking into these visuals informs on how they see and engage with their own circumstances and reflects their imaginaries of "Europe". By countering and deconstructing a common image of migrants, this research aims to broaden the spectrum of migrant representations by re-working a dominant visual field, and to bring the migrant himself in the center of knowledge production.