Table Of ContentS u k h m a n i k h o r a n a
Mediated
eMotions of
Migration
reclaiming affect for agency
Global miGration and social chanGe
Global Migration and Social
Change series
Series Editor: Nando Sigona,
University of Birmingham, UK
The Global Migration and Social Change series showcases original research that
looks at the nexus between migration, citizenship and social change.
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Social Networks and Migration
Relocations, Relationships and Resources
Louise Ryan
Migration, Crisis and Temporality at the Zimbabwe–South Africa Border
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Kudakwashe Vanyoro
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The EU Migrant Generation in Asia
Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities
Helena Hof
Migration, Health, and Inequalities
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Roberta Villalón
Navigating the European Migration Regime
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Global Migration and Social
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Series Editor: Nando Sigona,
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Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, US
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MEDIATED EMOTIONS
OF MIGRATION
Reclaiming Affect for Agency
Sukhmani Khorana
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
Bristol University Press
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© Bristol University Press 2023
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-5292-1823-7 hardcover
ISBN 978-1-5292-1824-4 ePub
ISBN 978-1-5292-1825-1 ePdf
The right of Sukhmani Khorana to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
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not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol
University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any
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Front cover image: Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle, 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Series Preface ix
Introduction: Feelings and Migrants Come and Go, and Some Stay/ Stick 1
PART I Empathy 15
1 Witnessing as an Expression of Critical Empathy: 19
An Examination of Audience Responses to a
Refugee- Themed Documentary
2 Jacinda Ardern and the Politics of Leadership Empathy: 32
Towards Emotional Communities of Transformation
PART II Aspiration 45
3 Asian Americans and Asian Australians on Screen: Aspiring 49
to Centre the Community Through Comedy
4 Aspiration for Collective Progress: Diversity and Digital 63
Intimacy as Practised by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (US),
Sadiq Khan (UK) and Jagmeet Singh (Canada)
PART III Belonging 77
5 Refugee Storytellers Claim Belonging: Agency, 81
Community and Change Through the Arts
6 Belonging as Affect: Towards Paradigms for Reciprocal 94
Care in Community- Based Research
Conclusion: Care and Resilience in the Face of Increasing 108
Precarity – COVID- 19 and Beyond
References 121
Index 141
v
Acknowledgements
I began this book at a hopeful time – a new job, a child on the way, and plenty
of expectation about a future in which proliferating migrant stories would
be told on their own terms across many mediums. Then COVID struck,
marking a shift from hope to existential dread and uncertainty. Hearing stories
about refugees on protection visas, temporary migrants and international
students in Australia who would not have access to welfare payments like the
rest of us, I was reminded of how uncertainty is the dominant emotion for
the vast majority of migrants in limbo, with or without COVID. I narrate
this not to make those with full citizenship rights in the Global North feel
grateful and recognise their privilege. Instead, I want to point out how such
lives are never given due consideration until we are in circumstances where
we might, momentarily, experience their pining for a better future.
For this reason, I am grateful to those who participated in the projects
that contributed to amplifying such stories and have made their way into the
case studies examined in Chapters 1, 5 and 6. The project on multicultural
and Indigenous communities in the Illawarra, conducted with esteemed
colleagues Associate Professor Tanja Dreher and Professor Bronwyn Carlson,
is one that has inspired my longstanding interest in empathy and spawned
many subsequent research activities. I am grateful to both for helping sow
the seed for that work.
The project about making short films on belonging in Liverpool in South
Western Sydney came out of preliminary conversations with CuriousWorks,
an inspiring media and arts organisation with a focus on empowering
disadvantaged young people. Again, this project has become the bedrock of
my interest and investment in Western Sydney, particularly its working- class
migrant and refugee communities. For this, I am grateful to University of
Wollongong for providing me with a secondment through a governance
role that enabled me to work on the Liverpool campus. The research
itself was funded through a competitive Community Engagement Grant
Scheme (CEGS) funded by the university, with in-k ind contributions from
CuriousWorks and Settlement Services International.
Draft material from Chapter 6 was presented at an invited seminar at the
University of Sussex in August 2019, at the inaugural symposium of the
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Justice, Arts and Migration Network (JAM) held at the Hong Kong Baptist
University in November 2019 and at the seminar series of the Institute for
Culture and Society (ICS) in June 2020. I am grateful to Dr Elaine Swan
for the Sussex invitation, to Professor John Erni and Professor Stephanie
Donald for starting JAM, and to the ICS Engagement Committee. The
feedback from these presentations was invaluable in shaping the chapter and
my conceptualisation of belonging.
I first became interested in ‘aspiration’ as a complex emotion associated
with migrants when it was being weaponised during the 2019 federal election
campaign in Australia. Both major parties were referring to their base of
‘working families’ as aspirational. It also emerged that many voters from
migrant backgrounds were pivotal in deciding the future of certain seats
and were described in the post-e lection analysis as embodying aspiration.
In order to better understand this demographic, I organised a forum on the
Asian Australian vote in July 2019. For this and the work it has inspired,
I am grateful to all the participants and to my co- organiser – Associate
Professor Bhuva Narayan from the University of Technology Sydney – and
sponsor – the Asian Australian Studies Research Network.
The writing of the book was enabled by start- up funding provided by
Western Sydney University after I commenced there as a Vice Chancellor’s
Senior Research Fellow in February 2020. I am indebted to Claudia Sirdah
who conducted literature reviews for Chapters 2 and 4 and copyedited
the book with a great eye for detail and attention to emerging literature
on migration.
At my home institution, I had incredible moral support from the Director
of the Institute for Culture and Society, Professor Heather Horst, and the Co-
Directors of the Young and Resilient Research Centre, Professor Amanda
Third and Associate Professor Philippa Collin. The research support at this
institution has been better than I could ever have imagined in a higher
education context in Australia, and for that I am grateful to Terry Fairclough,
Flora Zhong, Michelle Kelly, Nukte Ogun and Sally Byrnes.
The idea of putting empathy, aspiration and belonging in one book may
come across as novel, perhaps even eccentric. Courtesy of Associate Professor
Lisa Slater (University of Wollongong) and Associate Professor Michael
Richardson (University of New South Wales), the ‘Public Feelings’ network
came together in 2018 to workshop inter-d isciplinary work that investigated
feelings in relation to public, political and systemic issues. I had the privilege
to attend many sessions and received feedback from colleagues that has
greatly benefited the rationale and writing of this book. At a 2019 workshop
organised by the network, I first presented the three emotions outlined in
this book as complex and ambivalent emotions of migration that needed
to be brought together. Again, the commentary from that presentation was
invaluable and helped shape the proposal on which the book is based.
vii
MEDIATED EMOTIONS OF MIGRATION
Did I mention the bulk of this book was written during the Delta-r elated
lockdown in Sydney in 2021? I acknowledge what a difficult time this
was for essential workers, migrants, working families among others. I was
privileged to be able to work from home, to be able to send my toddler to
day care most days of the week and to have the support of my partner when
I had to work on the book over the weekend. I am grateful to my dear
and talented friend Lathalia Song who is like family and helped us through
many life transitions during this time. My generous friend and colleague
Nisha Thapliyal was kind enough to read the proposal in its early stages
and suggest productive directions. As always, I am indebted to my friend
through thick and thin and intellectual comrade Maria Elena Indelicato for
reading chapter drafts and offering incisive feedback.
Reena Saini Kallat was very kind to let me use an image of her acclaimed
work Woven Chronicle as the front cover of this book. There is no better
evocation of what this work stands for.
Shannon Kneis, the sociology and gender commissioning editor at Bristol
University Press, and Anna Richardson, their fantastic editorial assistant, have
worked tirelessly to make sure the best version of this manuscript goes out
into this world. I am honoured to be working with a publisher that cares
about impact beyond the halls of academia.
Large excerpts from Chapter 1 were first published in a volume edited
by Tanja Dreher and Anshuman Modal titled Ethical Responsiveness and the
Politics of Difference (2018, Palgrave Macmillan). They appear in an updated
and revised form here. My contextual review of the film Here Out West (seen
here in the Conclusion) was first published under a Creative Commons
licence by The Conversation on 7 February 2022.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my ‘Daddy and Dadima’ (paternal
grandparents) who trotted the world in their youth and passed away in
2020, not from COVID but possibly from the isolation it brought forth.
I miss your stories!
viii
newgenprepdf
Series Preface
The centrality of emotions in the politics of immigration is a theme we have
returned to a number of times in our series. Our first book, Ala Sirriyeh’s
excellent The Politics of Compassion, explored how emotion is central to
understanding how and why we have the immigration policies we do. The
main concern of Sukhmani Khorana’s Mediated Emotions of Migration, instead,
is to explore, through a series of case studies ranging from Jacinda Ardern’s
response to the terror attacks on mosques in Christchurch in 2019, to the
analysis of the social media persona of US politician Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, and refugee storytelling and creative agency, the conditions and
possibilities for empathy to inform and promote action on migration-related
injustice and prejudice. It offers insights into the kind of interventions that
have transformative potential and makes suggestions on how to harness it.
This book invites us to see the ambivalence of emotions as constructive
potential and argues that mediated stories about migrants and migration,
even when they have nothing or little to do with reality, impact the affective
environment and policy landscape migrants find themselves in as well as
the extent to which their own agency is recognised. Three emotions,
in particular, are the focus of Khorana’s examination, namely empathy,
aspiration and belonging. Central to stories on migration, they are powerful,
contested and often appropriated by different actors in the public sphere
and used to promote and trigger a range of political and policy responses.
Through the lens of emotions Khorana brings different bodies of literature
in conversation and uses her case studies to identify connections and insights
at the intersection of migration studies, social movement and media studies.
Nando Sigona
Birmingham
12 September 2022
ix
