Browsing by Author "Burgoyne, R."

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Conclusion (Speculative)
(Taylor and Francis, 2025) Burgoyne, R.; Bayrakdar, D.
Citation - WoS: 2
Introduction: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media
(Taylor and Francis, 2025) Burgoyne, R.; Bayrakdar, D.
The unending drama of forced migration, with millions of people displaced from their homes and compelled to take on a life of nomadic transience or enforced stasis in permanent waiting zones, ranks as the defining story of our times, the most sweeping transformation of collective historical experience since WWII. The United Nations estimates that the overall population of migrating people, including economic migrants and those swept from their homes by war, persecution, and climate catastrophe, now numbers over a billion people—one in seven humans now alive. This vast exodus has been called the “largest diaspora in the history of the species” (Salopek, 2019). Already in 1951, Hannah Arendt saw the swelling numbers of refugees and stateless people as an insoluble threat to the existence of the nation state. The 21st century, with its ecological crises, civil wars, and intractable hardships, has seen a massive, unprecedented increase in the number of people wandering the Earth or locked in conditions of suspended mobility. The phenomenon of mass displacement, however, also brings into view a striking new mode of human existence: as one writer says, the journey is now shaping a different class of human being, “people whose ideas of ‘home’ now incorporates an open road” or, at the other extreme, people whose mobility is blocked, who have become, as the title of a recent exhibition puts it, “permanently temporary” (Salopek, 2019). Viewed through a guardedly positive lens, the refugee and the migrant, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) further suggests, may represent “the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,” pointing towards a future beyond the binary order of the nation state, defined as it is by the concepts of citizenship and exclusion. Thomas Elsaesser makes a similar observation. Describing contemporary Europe as a “thought experiment,” he characterizes modern Europe as a continent of immigrants… both East to West and South to North, with migrants, refugees and mobile labour turning the nineteenth century European nation states into multicultural, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic communities which have not yet found a modus of how to live together. © 2022 The authors/Taylor & Francis Group.
Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media
(Taylor and Francis, 2025) Bayrakdar, D.; Burgoyne, R.
Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lésbos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and works by Balkan and Turkish directors, such as Melisa Önel, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés. © 2022 The authors/Taylor & Francis Group.