#31: look deeper into the migrant experience
“Now, more than ever, in the aftermath of a presidential campaign that fed off anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, it is absolutely critical to look deeper into the migrant experience and raise questions as to what the future may hold for the thousands of people fleeing dire poverty, drug cartel violence, and political instability to the south.”
Photographs and other forms of evidence that flow effortlessly and in abundance across the internet as the truths that build fake news and its very real violent manifestations, demand material depth for greater substantiation, authentication, and complexity. Material depth that contributes to seeing through, past or with greater depth at fake news can take many forms:
- access to material objects that ground the fleeting
- encounters with rudderless objects that occur within what I have called “good image holding environments” that produce context by building history, analysis, and frames and are also themselves contexts as places with unique and situated histories, communities, and values (I want to be clear, this can include spaces on the internet, albeit those made and inhabited with great care and commitment)
- access to humans who have lived, witnessed, or embody the experience being evidenced
- and finally and perhaps counter-intuitively, a poetic approach that offers truths only available through the imagination, the aesthetic, the intellectual or the affective.
See More:
- Undocumented Migration Project
- The State of Hate: Escalating Hate Violence Against Immigrants
- Transborder Immigrant Tool, Electronic Disturbance Theater
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
