Place, Access, and (Lack of) Belonging in News Photographs of Migration

Place matters a great deal to many people and informs much of their perspectives, worldviews, and values. So does identifying who “belongs” in a place and who respects or transgresses on a real or imagined boundary, whether physical, cultural, or social. Sometimes this evaluation happens by evaluating written language or speech. At other times, it happens through analyzing visual phenomena, such as how someone dresses, who they accompany, or where they position themselves in a space. This essay argues that an attention to the people who encounter and consume news; a willingness to focus on heterogenous news providers; and an ability to select and use visual research methods that are grounded in a field-specific context are necessary to provide depth and nuance to the scholarly study of the visual news representation of people on the margins of social space.