The Ethics of Media Research with Refugees

This chapter is concerned with the ethics and politics of the relationship between media and refugees. The chapter is structured around the argument that the literature on media ethics which is inextricably linked to the ethics of researching media, tends to ignore the political dimensions of ethical positions. This argument takes issue with the tendency of relevant literature to focus on philosophical discussions on what constitutes appropriate ethical practice when it comes to researching and representing the suffering of others. In the relevant literature, ethical dilemmas arise with respect to how can media approach refugees and the ‘refugee issue’; what might constitute an appropriate representation of this topic, and how must audiences be positioned vis-à-vis the distant suffering of refugees. However, in treating these as ethical questions from a philosophical-moral point of view, there is a tendency to overlook the political dimension that is always present in ethical positions. Secondly, in this discussion and notwithstanding important exceptions, the overall tendency is to focus on those who represent refugees and not on the refugee or migrant communities and their attempts to reclaim their media representation. This shows a significant omission in thinking about research ethics: that the very subject of the research is turned into a voiceless object to be studied. This chapter seeks to foreground the politics of ethics by looking at political activist interventions by refugees themselves. In foregrounding the actions and interventions of refugee/migrant communities themselves we see a clear shift towards emancipation from imposed narratives, whether they come from the NGO and governmental sectors, from the media or even from academic researchers. We argue that this shift represents a new phase in media activist ethics because through the political act of reclaiming their own voice, refugee/migrant communities in Europe and elsewhere point to the resolution of the Gordian knot of ethical dilemmas: very simply, for these communities themselves the only ethical position is one that directly addresses the source of exploitation, subjugation and oppression. In this specific interpretation of ethics emerging from refugee and migrant activists themselves, media ethics and politics collapse into one another.