This book sheds light on how the public engage with, make sense of, and discursively evaluate news media constructions of people from asylum seeking backgrounds. As a case study, the author discusses her recent research combining Critical Discourse Analysis with a cultural studies Audience Reception framework to examine the perspectives of 24 Western Australians who took part in semi-structured interviews. During their interviews, participants were asked open-ended questions about: their general views on people seeking asylum, including Australia’s policy responses, their media engagement habits and preferences, and their views concerning how the Australian media represents people seeking asylum. The author compares and contrasts this research with broader interdisciplinary discussion, and the book will therefore appeal to students and scholars of migration, political communication, sociology, audience reception, critical media studies and sociolinguistics.

The voices Australia should hear This beautifully illustrated book captures the stories of those who have lived the experience of seeking asylum. In their own voices, contributors share how they came to be in Australia, and explore diverse aspects of their lives: growing up in a refugee camp, studying for a PhD, changing attitudes through soccer, being a Muslim in a small country town, campaigning against racism, surviving detention, holding onto culture, dreaming of being reunited with family. There are stories of love, pain, injustice, achievement and everything in between. Accompanied by beautiful portrait photographs, they show the depth and diversity of people’s experience and trace the impact of Australia’s immigration policies. Seeking Asylum also includes a foreword by Liliana Maria and an essay by Abdul Karim Hekmat on the human, social and political impact of Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum over the last fifty years. With an afterword by Kon Karapanagiotidis and supporting material demystifying Australia’s current policies from Julian Burnside, Seeking Asylum redefines assumptions about people who have sought asylum and inspires readers to take action to create a more welcoming Australia. 100% of the proceeds from Seeking Asylum: Our Stories will be reinvested by the ASRC to fund projects that build people’s capacity to tell their story in their own way and provide opportunities to amplify their voices. One area of investment will continue to be the ASRC’s Community Advocacy and Power Program (CAPP). The CAPP training program, offered nationally, provides participants with skills in advocacy, community organising / mobilising, public speaking and effective media engagement.

The first in-depth exploration of the persistence and pervasiveness of a dangerous legal fiction about people who cross borders: the binary distinction between migrant and refugee. Today, the concept of "the refugee" as distinct from other migrants looms large. Immigration laws have developed to reinforce a conceptual dichotomy between those viewed as voluntary, often economically motivated, migrants who can be legitimately excluded by potential host states, and those viewed as forced, often politically motivated, refugees who should be let in. In Crossing, Rebecca Hamlin argues against advocacy positions that cling to this distinction. Everything we know about people who decide to move suggests that border crossing is far more complicated than any binary, or even a continuum, can encompass. The decision to leave home is almost always multi-causal and often involves many stops and hazards along the way--a reality not captured by a system that categorizes a majority of border-crossers as undeserving, and the rare few as vulnerable and needy. Drawing on cases of various "border crises" across Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East, Hamlin outlines major inconsistencies and faulty assumptions upon which the binary relies, and explains its endurance and appeal by tracing its origins to the birth of the modern state and the rise of colonial empire. The migrant/refugee binary is not just an innocuous shorthand, indeed its power stems from the way in which is it painted as objective, neutral, and apolitical. In truth, the binary is a dangerous legal fiction, politically constructed with the ultimate goal of making harsh border control measures more ethically palatable to the public. This book is a challenge to all those invested in the rights and study of migrants, to interrogate their own assumptions and move towards more equitable advocacy for all border crossers.

Winner of Australia’s richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani’s account of his detainment on Australia’s notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world. In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile. Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, No Friend but the Mountains is an extraordinary account — one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world. “Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.” — From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize–winning author Richard Flanagan

Media have played an important role in framing the public debate on the “refugee crisis” that peaked in autumn of 2015. This report examines the narratives developed by print media in eight European countries and how they contributed to the public perception of the “crisis”, shifting from careful tolerance over the summer, to an outpouring of solidarity and humanitarianism in September 2015, and to a securitisation of the debate and a narrative of fear in November 2015. Overall, there has been limited opportunity in mainstream media coverage for refugees and migrants to give their views on events, and little attention paid to the individuals’ plight or the global and historical context of their displacement. Refugees and migrants are often portrayed as an undistinguishable group of anonymous and unskilled outsiders who are either vulnerable or dangerous. The dissemination of biased or ill-founded information contributes to perpetuating stereotypes and creating an unfavourable environment not only for the reception of refugees but also for the longer-term perspectives of societal integration.

Refuge in a Moving World draws together more than thirty contributions from multiple disciplines and fields of research and practice to discuss different ways of engaging with, and responding to, migration and displacement. The volume combines critical reflections on the complexities of conceptualizing processes and experiences of (forced) migration, with detailed analyses of these experiences in contemporary and historical settings from around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies – including participatory research, poetic and spatial interventions, ethnography, theatre, discourse analysis and visual methods – the volume documents the complexities of refugees’ and migrants’ journeys. This includes a particular focus on how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life in cities, towns, camps and informal settlements across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and Europe.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ..." How has Australia risen to Emma Lazarus' great challenge? This overview of the historical, social and political contexts that have shaped Australia's recent treatment of asylum seekers offers a clear-eyed view of the many dimensions of the asylum seeker predicament, including its psychological and humanitarian consequences, and lays out an agenda for change in policy. Sir Gustav Nossal, the Rt Hon. Malcolm Fraser, Senator Lyn Allison, Phillip Adams, Professor Stuart MacIntyre, and Lindsay Tanner MP introduce the six sections. Julian Burnside QC, Dr Carmen Lawrence, Peter Mares, Pamela Curr, Michael Clyne, Linda Briskman, Derrick Silove, Michael Gordon, Arnold Zable and David Manne are among the contributors to the 20 chapters. Yearning to Breathe Free is a passionate but informed work that is multi-faceted, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful. All royalties for this book go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.