Workshop 16 & 17 May SHUT-MED: Securitizing Human Transit across the Central Mediterranean migratory corridor, Univ of Messina
On 16th and 17th May 2024, at the Department of Political and Juridical Studies, University of Messina, the SHUT-MED research team met with researchers coming from Italian and European universities in the field of borders, migration, and securitization studies to debate the preliminary research outputs, challenges, and further steps for the months ahead. During the two-day workshop, Eugenio Cusumano and Diego Caballero Velez shared the results of the early findings of quantitative and qualitative discourse analyses applied to articles on migration by two ideologically different newspapers per country (Italy, Malta, Libya, and Niger). Chiara Loschi and Luca Raineri of Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies shared their considerations on fieldwork opportunities and challenges and the forthcoming theoretical reflection to advance the field of borders, migration and security studies.
Methods at the base of the research involved quantitative frame analysis by individuating keywords linking migration with specific threats, after which the research team will carry out a qualitative analysis of each keyword in the specific contexts. Further, the visual analysis will be applied to identify tropes and icons and investigate security forces as securitizing discourses.
The overall contribution of the PRIN Project SHUT-MED includes the combination of desk research and ethnographic work, which has been largely debated during the workshop, and the combination of textual and visual analysis on a long timeframe, as well as across European and non-European countries.
The use of visual evidence is relevant to the study of the co-constitution of discourses and practice, and, eventually, the analysis of both the governance of mobility and the mobility of (mobility) governance.
