Migration in the media: Strategies, bias and blind-spots

Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud will hold this first seminar in the communicating migration series. It will be about media strategies that are used by different actors in the migration field. The main foci will be on the department of justice and police (JPD) and the Directorate of migration (UDI) where most of the fieldwork has been carried out. What do people working in these institutions do to avoid or limit negative talk about migration politics and bureaucratic processes on migration issues? How do they “sell” different cases to the media?

There are many confrontations within the field of migration. How do actors working with migrant or asylum seeker advocacy try to get their cases to the media?  What are the dilemmas and the weak points for these different actors?

Is the media a tool for a powerful stat that will try to limit migration? Or are they on the other side a tool for different actors promoting value based campaigns together with activists and persons who fight for their right to stay in Norway. And at last, what is hidden in the media. What do we not talk about?

Monday 10th of February at Rokkansentert, Nygårdagaten 5th floor (6. etg)

Kjersti Throbjørnsrud

Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud is a researcher at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. She has been writing on topics as election campaigns, politics, work, public organizations. More lately the focus has been on migration issues within the framework of the project Mediation of Migration. This project is about medias influence on meaning, politics and administrative practice within the migration field. More information and list of publication here: http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/personer/vit/kthorbjo/

Mediation of migration project: http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/forskning/prosjekter/mediation-of-migration/

Communicating Migration Seminar Series IMER Bergen spring and autumn 2014

The IMER seminar series for 2014 will cover how migration and ethnic relations are communicated in every-day encounters, in mass and social media, in politics and in teaching at the universities.  Has the way people talk about migration and migrants in different social contexts changed over time, and in which ways has it changed? How does migration theory and research fit in with other topics and theories in the social sciences, and how do results from migration research inform public debate and policy development? Communicating migration will be discussed from various angles in our seminar series on international migration and ethnic relations during spring and autumn 2014. We welcome papers that touch upon this broad theme from different angles.  Historical analyses of change over time in regard to politics and public debate, research foci and disciplinary concerns are specifically welcomed.  The seminar series will end with a two-day conference in October/November 2014.