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Civic Imagination

Katur Kati

Katur Kati is 19 years old. He comes from Syria and because of the local conflicts, that have already reached international dimensions, he was forced to flee his home city. Katur has five siblings and he was the first to flee, all by himself, all alone. During his journey he was dependent on information that was shared by human traffickers on social networks. They told him where to be at what time and charged an incredible and outrageous amount of money for trafficking the refugees to a “safe harbor”. Sometimes those traffickers had an agreement with the police though and just took the money and extradited the refugees. It happened many times that other refugees had been betrayed like that.
Just like many other refugees Katur tried to flee through the Mediterranean Sea to go to Greece. He almost drowned two times because the boat was overfilled with people. The traffickers put as many people as possible on the boat, with no lifesaving preservations or anything like that. The first time the boat collapsed and many refugees died and only few survived. He told me that there was a woman, who tried to flee with her three daughters to go to Germany. The woman was in the sea and only had one life jacket. It could not carry the weight of four people. He told me that the woman was struggling, forcing to make a decision which ones of her 6, 9 and 12 year old daughters she should rescue. But she could not make a decision so she just waited and waited to see what will happen. The first daughter drowned immediately and then after a few minutes her second daughter let go. Only the 12 year old girl and her mother could rescue themselves.
It took Katur several months to get to Austria. His asylum claim had been approved and his brother undertook the same journey a few months after.
Many times we do not know what the migration crisis mean, why people are fleeing, what war means and what risk they are taking to get to a safe place. If you look at their individual stories though, listen to them; feel with them you get an insight into what it means for them to flee from their home country and how bad the current situation actually is.

The story is not fictional it is a real stroy. I sat down with the refugee Katur to give him one of the regular German classes. After a whlie, I had also gotten to know him a little better by then, and one time I asked him about his journey. Before I heard the story I had not really had an idea of what kind of risk these people are taking in order to get to a safe place. It was all in the media how dangerous the route through the Mediterranean Sea is but if you have not heard an individual story you don't really have an approach to the impact or meaning. I have shared the story with many people, friends and family. It is one story where everyone is in silence for a while.

The language used in media to represent refugees and asylum seekers plays a vital role in shaping the audience’s opinion. Words used in connection with mass migration such as invasion, flood, swarm, bogus or a batch of immigrants , mass influx or mass exodus, deluge etc. are terms with negative or dehumanizing connotations . They convey a hostile tone and create fear which does not enable people to think rationally and calmly about the situation any more. This type of language is pejorative and degrading.
In addition to these expressions the term “illegal” is frequently used in connection with asylum seekers. The notion of illegality strongly conveys the idea that something or somebody is a danger to the public. Other stigmatizing expressions in connection with the refugee crisis are terms like inmates and detention camps. All of these things are happening and I think if we heard and payed more attention to such individual stories we will be able to think more out of the box and be critical towards what we read and see in the media. I shared the story because all of my friends now have a different approach to the migration process that we are currently facing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1UJ5ecjM3w

It is a movie about the refugee crisis called Mediterranea

Religion, Migration, Media, Media Literacy, Emotions, Empathy, Understanding, Compassion, Anger, Fear, Love

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Contents of this tag:
6. Chef "Chef is a film released in 2014 that was written and directed by Jon Favreau who was inspired by his own career in film and love of the culinary arts to create a movie about a popular chef who needs to find his creative spark and fall in love with cooking once more. The film begins in California where Chef Carl Casper lives and works. After receiving a brutally negative review from a well regarded food critic, Carl reevaluates his job at a fancy restaurant in California. He realized that sticking to a strict menu has taken away a lot of joy from the profession he used to love. After he quits his job, Carl heads to Miami, Florida with his family because his ex-wife, Inez, needs him to watch their son, Percy, while she works.
7. Sanjay's Super Team This is an animated short film from Pixar directed and written by Sanjay Patel who based it off his experiences as a child. The story revolves around a young boy, Sanjay, and his father, an Indian-American migrant. Sanjay is watching his favourite superheroes on TV while his father is praying by the shrine in the same room. His father urges him to join in the ritual but Sanjay refuses so he switches off the TV and takes his toy in order to force him into it.
8. Freedom Writers: Bridging Racial Divides Through Writing Freedom Writers (the movie) is based on a true story of a school in Long Beach, California. The main character, Erin Gruwell, is a new teacher at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School and placed with the students who are considered at-risk and unteachable. These students were almost entirely comprised of minorities, with the exception of one student. With such a diverse class and a group of students who had no apparent desire to learn, the film explores the real-world challenges that Gruwell faced trying to get her students to come to class wanting to learn, if they would even want to come to their classes at all. The class divides itself based on race, and fights and arguments breakout regularly. The class later finds common ground on their feelings and discussions around The Holocaust. Her students become inspired to break free from the things that originally divided them, most notably with one character speaking out against someone who she was being forced to lie for during a trial. She tasked her students with writing in a diary and then compiled those journals and writings into a collection of them all in “The Freedom Writers Diary.”
11. Sailor Moon Sailor Moon is a young teenage girl that learns that she has magical powers that allows her to fight against the evils of the extraterrestrial world. She finds the Sailor Scouts, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter. Each of them have powers that relate to the symbolism of their planet and a specific superhero outfit that they wear. Based in Neo-futuristic Tokyo the story was released in the 1990’s as a manga and then a television anime came out. It became very popular among teens especially young Asian-American girls because of where it was based although the characters were many depicted as white skin tone.
17. The Lion King
18. Dana G.
23. The Diary of Anne Frank
25. Sandokan: A Post-Colonial Coldwar Hero The plot of the novel revolves around the adventures of Sandokan - a Bornean man who lost his status, home and family to British colonialists. Embittered by his experience, Sandokan sets up camp at the island of Mompracem. From there he leads a gang of pirates under the flag of the Tiger. Together they destabilize the colonialists’ authority through robbery and violence. Steeped in the colonial period in which it was written, Salgari’s novel pitted indigenous populations against the colonial powers in ways that highlighted the evils of imperialism and celebrated resistance. As Maria Bianca Gerlich (1998, 34) observes, “Sandokan, Mompracem, and the flag of the tiger are allegories in the fight for freedom.”
27. The colonial city
28. My Dad
29. Maus: A Survivor's Tale
30. How the tortoise got cracks in his shell
34. Train of Hope
37. Emmeline the Suffragist
45. Stephanie Q
50. The doctors' team of the Aegean sea
52. A Leader
62. How I "Eat, Pray, and Love"
69. Tiajna A
71. Julia B. I am a third year student at the University of Maryland in the U.S. studying Journalism with a minor in French. Writing is a passion of mine, and journalism is one of the many real world applications of writing. I hope to be able to use writing to make an impact on the world through the news and help others get the information that they need in order to be informed citizens. In my free time I like to do triathlons and write poetry.
75. Nick C
79. Roaring Lion
84. Zootopia: Disney's Introduction to Reality for Children
89. SkyNet: the danger of Artificial Intelligence
93. Nour H
94. Be kind to yourself
97. Nina N.
104. The Infinite Forking Possibilities of the Future
112. We are all Martín Fierro
114. Rafael DCB
116. Michelle S
119. The Myth of the Mansfield Hanging Tree
120. Ghada G.
123. Nora S
126. Equilibrium Equilibrium is set in 2072 in Libria, a city state established by the survivors of World War III. “Equilibrium” is an action/thriller movie following John Preston (Bale), an enforcement officer in a futuristic world where a regime has decided to eliminate war by suppressing emotions using a certain type of drug. Books, art and music are strictly forbidden and "feeling" is a crime punishable by death.
130. The Light at the end of a Dark Tunnel
133. The Help
Contents of this tag:
2. Maus: A Survivor's Tale
5. How the tortoise got cracks in his shell
12. My Dad
13. Sanjay's Super Team This is an animated short film from Pixar directed and written by Sanjay Patel who based it off his experiences as a child. The story revolves around a young boy, Sanjay, and his father, an Indian-American migrant. Sanjay is watching his favourite superheroes on TV while his father is praying by the shrine in the same room. His father urges him to join in the ritual but Sanjay refuses so he switches off the TV and takes his toy in order to force him into it.
14. Freedom Writers: Bridging Racial Divides Through Writing Freedom Writers (the movie) is based on a true story of a school in Long Beach, California. The main character, Erin Gruwell, is a new teacher at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School and placed with the students who are considered at-risk and unteachable. These students were almost entirely comprised of minorities, with the exception of one student. With such a diverse class and a group of students who had no apparent desire to learn, the film explores the real-world challenges that Gruwell faced trying to get her students to come to class wanting to learn, if they would even want to come to their classes at all. The class divides itself based on race, and fights and arguments breakout regularly. The class later finds common ground on their feelings and discussions around The Holocaust. Her students become inspired to break free from the things that originally divided them, most notably with one character speaking out against someone who she was being forced to lie for during a trial. She tasked her students with writing in a diary and then compiled those journals and writings into a collection of them all in “The Freedom Writers Diary.”
18. The Light at the end of a Dark Tunnel
20. Train of Hope
22. Emmeline the Suffragist
24. The Diary of Anne Frank
25. A Leader
32. The Help
35. How I "Eat, Pray, and Love"
36. The doctors' team of the Aegean sea
39. We are all Martín Fierro
Contents of this tag:
1. Fox's Creek On a hot summer night a community of animals were chased out of their home by a growing wildfire which started to burn down their forest. Mother Deer grabbed her young ones while the other animals rushed to cross the great river. Everyone showed their human instincts, pushing, kicking, and growling desperately on their way to safety. Mother Deer made it to the other side with Fawn but Mother Rabbit forgot one of her many young ones so she asked her for he