Exploring Images of an Intercultural Europe: A Semantic Approach to Political  Cartoons of the Refugee Crisis in the  Mediascapes

In an era where image is a fundamental feature of expressing thought, the visual content feeding the media becomes a matter of social semiotics as a reflection of beliefs about social relationships. In this sense, political cartoons are very rich regarding the (de)construction of meanings in the public sphere, especially because they explore ambiguous connotations through humour, parody, and caricature. Assuming that the media are active agents in shaping the social imaginary, the depiction of certain events in Europe (Brexit, refugee and migrant crisis, and terrorist attacks, among others) serves many cartoonists as a mechanism for social criticism, political questioning, and freedom of expression. While cartoons express the artist’s perception of events and enunciate political statements, they also allow us to identify social representations and recognise mediatised frames of collective memory and identity. The focal point of our analysis stems from the migratory crises and their implications for the political and identity constructs of the continent. The influx of thousands of people within a short timeframe has garnered extensive media coverage. It has triggered, intensified or exacerbated the debate on European cultural identity, juxtaposing contrasting visions: on the one hand, the value of cultural diversity and human dignity and the making of intercultural societies and, on the other, discourses emphasising ontological insecurity portraying cultural difference as a threat and migrants as unfit for cultural integration. Since 2014, the influx of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts in the Middle East and Africa has propelled the European Union into the so-called “refugee crisis”. This multi-layered phenomenon has polarised opinions and paved the way for the portrayal of the refugee as a “stranger” and “other”. Therefore, we seek to analyse this crisis in media, specifically through the lenses of cartoonists, to understand, from a semantic perspective, the implications and influence of these symbolic representations in the narrative of European memory and identity. Furthermore, we seek to explore how these representations contribute to the processes of estrangement, rejection or hospitality, both within European and national political spheres and within the public domain. Our analytical corpus encompasses images collected in mass and social media, namely those posted on Facebook between 2015 and 2019. We assumed cartoons as anchors or “metaphorical scenarios” within public discourse and conducted a multimodal analysis, focusing on their textual and visual features. By examining their meaningful references, we sought to analyse the representations of the European Union’s institutional response to the migratory crisis and the multiple conceptions or uses of the migrant/refugee categories to grasp hermeneutically the semantics of this eventful historical and media phenomenon. The findings suggest that the EU’s commitment to solidarity has been called into question and show that the cartoonists challenge the political and social consensus about the humanist values that European societies claim to embody as a core of their identity.

Reference:

Noversa, D., & Ribeiro, R. (2024). Exploring images of an intercultural Europe: a semantic approach to political cartoons of the refugee crisis in the mediascapes. In Eduardo Camilo and Karima Bouzine (Eds.), Transcultural Media Narratives: Cross-Cultural Communication Insights, (pp. 47-71). Labcom. https://labcom.ubi.pt/transcultural-media-narratives-cross-cultural-communication-insights/