Multimedia and Multimodal Narratives on Migration and Refuge

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there are approximately 272 million international migrants worldwide, two-thirds of whom are migrant workers. This reality has already surpassed projections made for the year 2050, which anticipated 230 million international migrants. Human migration is undeniably a complex contemporary issue. Numerous factors and motivations—emotional, social, economic, political, environmental, among others—interact within the world’s chaotic systems. This complexity is reflected in the growing number of research studies dedicated to investigating international migration. The overall objective of this project is to analyze the constitutive phenomena of multimedia and multimodal narratives about migration and refuge. To that end, we aim to: (a) develop a database of audiovisual narratives that address migration and refuge as human experiences; (b) identify pedagogical, semiotic, linguistic-discursive, and ideological phenomena inherent to this body of narratives; (c) analyze the shared experiences that are (re)lived and (re)told by the participants; (d) recognize the languages and digital technologies used by participants in their daily lives; (e) create an open-access online environment to host and disseminate the narrative archive; (f) identify challenges and barriers participants face in using languages and digital technologies; (g) analyze, from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the strategies participants use to address or overcome such challenges; (h) promote spaces for meta-reflection on participants’ experiences throughout the process. The narratives will be created across various digital media (audio recordings, videos, photographs, etc.) and will reflect a multiplicity of semiotic modes (verbal, visual, auditory, etc.). One of the project’s specific objectives is to build a repository of narratives—an open and free online platform to host and disseminate the multimedia and multimodal collections.

 

Project Coordinators:
Ronaldo Corrêa Gomes Junior (Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG)
Sandra Maria Silva Cavalcante (Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais – PUC Minas)