Marginalized disappearances: Shaping the power relations of the search for the missing

Abstract

Every year, tens of thousands of people go missing in Europe and across the globe, leaving the families of these individuals in the anguish of the unknown. Yet only some missing gain media attention, with others remaining the ‘missing missing’, and this contributes to a definition of who is, and who is not, worthy of being searched for. This article focuses on the Polish television programme Ktokolwiek widział, ktokolwiek wie (Has anybody seen, does anybody know), which for the last three decades has been helping to establish a more egalitarian politics of the visibility of, and the search for, the missing in Poland, going against the grain of the mass media’s tendency to ‘symbolically annihilate’ those with less power in society. I explore how the programme supports the search for the marginalized missing, that is, those who have led precarious lives on the socio-spatial margins of Polish society, people who, to utilize Gatti’s term, were ‘socially disappeared’ before they went physically missing. I show how the programme utilizes its power of mediation to articulate disappearances of the marginalized missing and mobilizes institutions and the public to help in finding them.