Paper/Proposal Title

Savage, Victim, Savior: Human Rights and Visual Culture in the Rohingya Crisis of Burma/Myanmar

Location

River Campus - Room M2006

Start Date

10-4-2013 3:15 PM

Abstract

Drawing from the Savage, Victim, Savior framework of human rights and legal scholar Makau Mutua, this paper analyzes the media constructions of the emergence of violence in Arakan State of Burma/Myanmar between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims that began in June 2012, causing hundreds of deaths. More than 100,000 were forced to flee the destruction of their homes, villages and religious sites. Unlike traditional conflict reporting, graphic and emotional images appeared immediately on social media sites, inviting worldwide attention towards the plight of stateless Rohingyas. This paper employs textual analysis to examine the human rights discourse on the largest and most active Rohingya community page on Facebook and compares its representation of the violence in Arakan State with the portrayal of the issue in the traditional media outlets of the New York Times and Inter Press Service.

Through the “politics of immediation,” activists utilize the Rohingya Community page to mobilize violent images and engage a larger global community in their political activism. The outbreak of violence changed the Rohingya Community page, which first expanded from a local site featuring community events to include a global diasporic Rohingya community and then a larger, global non-governmental and activist community, including a global Muslim community. The analysis demonstrates that the social media activists through their politics of immediation fuel and fan the rights discourse to critique advocacy organizations, yet in this process also reinforce the hegemonic nature of popular human rights representations.

Comments

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Oct 4th, 3:15 PM

Savage, Victim, Savior: Human Rights and Visual Culture in the Rohingya Crisis of Burma/Myanmar

River Campus - Room M2006

Drawing from the Savage, Victim, Savior framework of human rights and legal scholar Makau Mutua, this paper analyzes the media constructions of the emergence of violence in Arakan State of Burma/Myanmar between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims that began in June 2012, causing hundreds of deaths. More than 100,000 were forced to flee the destruction of their homes, villages and religious sites. Unlike traditional conflict reporting, graphic and emotional images appeared immediately on social media sites, inviting worldwide attention towards the plight of stateless Rohingyas. This paper employs textual analysis to examine the human rights discourse on the largest and most active Rohingya community page on Facebook and compares its representation of the violence in Arakan State with the portrayal of the issue in the traditional media outlets of the New York Times and Inter Press Service.

Through the “politics of immediation,” activists utilize the Rohingya Community page to mobilize violent images and engage a larger global community in their political activism. The outbreak of violence changed the Rohingya Community page, which first expanded from a local site featuring community events to include a global diasporic Rohingya community and then a larger, global non-governmental and activist community, including a global Muslim community. The analysis demonstrates that the social media activists through their politics of immediation fuel and fan the rights discourse to critique advocacy organizations, yet in this process also reinforce the hegemonic nature of popular human rights representations.