Abstract
While millions of Syrian, Yemeni and Palestinian refugees have escaped war in their home states, they remain intimately tied to those conflicts as part of an increasingly global society. Based amongst Arab refugees in Canada, this ethnographic research explores how social and mass media variably shapes and directs these global interests and engagements. This research relies on data from semi-structured interviews conducted with Arab refugees in the Southern Ontario cities of Toronto, London and Kitchener-Waterloo between 2022 and 2025. In the first section of this paper, I outline the websites, news channels and social media platforms my interlocutors use to follow global political developments. I show how these consumption patterns are closely, but not exclusively, connected to national, ethnic and religious identities. The second section analyzes the relationship between my interlocutors’ identities and social media consumption practices, on the one hand, and their level of concern about, and engagement with, a number of global issues (namely wars in Israel-Palestine, Syria and Yemen), on the other. In particular, I illuminate the significance of social media algorithms which foreground images of Middle Eastern wars in cultivating and amplifying my interlocutors’ understandings of (in)justice, (in)equality and ethics. In turn, I trace how these images of war, suffering and injustice also shape my interlocutors’ sense of ethics and place in their Canadian host state. Taken together, these perspectives illuminate how people, images and ethics circulate on a global scale.
Presenters
Isaac FriesenAssistant Professor, Conflict Studies, Saint Paul University, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
War; Migration; Media; Middle East; Politics; Ethics
