Nothing new to see here?! A critical (visual) discourse analysis of climate (im)mobility in IOM documents

Abstract

This paper revisits critical climate mobility literature that explores the role of images and visual materials within policy briefs and papers, published about a decade ago, to contrast those findings with present-day policy documents. Based on a discourse analysis of 10 recent IOM reports and policy briefs, we show that the written discourse has changed within the documents from a language of migration/displacement/refuge to one that is akin to climate (im)mobilities discourses. Following from these observations, we explore whether this change in terminology is also reflected in how the IOM communicates visually. We specifically focus on negotiations of governance and (in)security, the agency of the individuals photographed for the IOM reports, and the relationship between urban and rural spaces. On the one hand, we find that, whilst the language is more inclusive of small-scale and temporal forms of (im)mobilities, some of the images used still nurture stereotypes of ‘refugees from the Global South’, reproducing economic anxieties. On the other hand, a more fine-grained analysis of some of the images details opportunities to re-imagine the relationship between human movement and climate change differently, which we deem a missed opportunity.