Introduction to special issue “visual governance in migration”

Putting the visual dimension of migration governance into context

In today’s public discourse, images have assumed a pivotal role, a significance that has only grown with the increasing prominence of social media platforms. Images possess a unique ability to transcend language barriers, swiftly convey complex ideas and emotions, encapsulate narratives, and elicit strong emotional responses, rendering information more accessible and engaging. In today’s fast-paced world of social media, where concise, visually appealing content reigns supreme, both real and fake images have become the primary currency of online communication. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Images have become not just common but often indispensable elements of communication on virtually every topic. Particularly, subjects of global significance have been widely represented through a diverse array of images, whether it’s overcrowded migrant boats, starving polar bears on melting glaciers, or infographics displaying the latest COVID-19 mortality rates, all of which have gone viral.

As images play an increasingly vital role in communication and political discourse, scholars from diverse perspectives have examined their intersection with international politics - particularly since the emergence of debates around the media’s influence on foreign policy decision-making, the so-called CNN effect (Livingston, 2011; Robinson, 1999; Strobel, 1996).

In the early 2000s, with a seminal intervention, Bleiker called for increased attention to the role that images were playing in international relations, given their crucial role in offering specific representations of socio-political events. Since then, the significance of visual representation in global affairs has received some attention from scholars who have looked at the role played in world politics by iconic images (Hansen, 2015), and the emotions elicited by particular photographs (Adler-Nissen et al., 2020).

In migration and asylum governance, 2015 and the photo of Aylan Kurdi’s little body washed off the coast of Turkey have been a turning point. The photo went viral through social media and republication in official media, raising awareness about the plight of asylum seekers crossing the Greek Turkish sea borders and overall attracting attention to the plight of refugees in the Middle East and around the world. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the visual representation of the ‘migration crisis’ played a role in the onset of the New York 2016 declaration that led to the 2018 Global Compacts (the Global Compact on Refugees, and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration).

Research in this field has developed fast, investigating the role of the media in shaping the “migration crisis” visual and verbal narrative (Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2017). Specific themes included the military-humanitarian visual politics of operations in the Mediterranean Sea (Musarò, 2016), analysing also the convergence of humanitarian and policing visual framing (Franko, 2021). This Special Issue carries forward this line of research by underlining the role of the visual in a world that is becoming increasingly dominated by audio-visual communication through the social media.

The special issue addresses two main sets of questions. The first is analytical in nature and asks: what is the role of visual communication in governance today. Our analysis takes stock of the pervasiveness of social media and other advanced digital technologies (like drone photographing or filming; data sharing over the internet in real time; audio and visual information travelling instantly) which has led to a world where time and space are highly compressed. Local crises – whether affecting 100 or 100,000 people – can be elevated to the global level with a speed and immediacy that we have not experienced before.

A shipwreck south of the Greek or Italian coasts hits global headlines very fast. Related images include not only pictures of the ship or of people in despair waiting for rescue but also geographical maps of high precision or images from the radar antennas of nearby vessels. Investigative journalists use digital tools to create infographics in the effort to both communicate the truth to a broader public and to push the legal inquiry into new directions (Collective, 2025; Crispino, 2024). Similarly, news about catastrophic flooding and community displacement, whether in Bangladesh or the Caribbean, travels equally fast, and visual representations include devastated landscapes, people in distress, as well as graphs about rainfall in recent years. What is special about the visuality of this communication is that it requires limited to no language knowledge.

The question that arises is whether and how such instant connectivity shapes the governance landscape. Does it bring additional actors in the field such as the amateur journalists, the social media influencers alongside, for instance, civil society organisations as well as more traditional governance actors such as states or international organisations? Do we need to rethink our analytical framework on governance and particularly of migration and asylum governance? Should we even theorise in terms of a transnational audience and a transnational public sphere, that does not need a common language to exist (as traditional public sphere theories posited). Alice Massari addresses directly these questions in her paper in this Special Issue (Massari, 2021) entitled Visual Governance: Theorizing the role of images in migration governance. However, these questions are also addressed in all the contributions to this Special Issue, through their specific case studies and analytical reflections.

The second set of questions focuses more specifically on migration and asylum governance – where we understand migration and asylum in their broader sense including both individual and community migration and displacement, whether for economic or protection reasons or both. This Special Issue asks whether the use of images by different actors can subvert the dynamics of migration and asylum governance, giving more power to the hitherto weaker actors like civil society but also and most importantly migrants, asylum seekers and displaced persons themselves. The paper of Berfin Nur Osso (2025) analyses the ways in which refugee-produced images play a role in shaping the public representation and the public debate on the ‘refugee emergency’ in Greece. While Krista Lynes looks at the forensic and humanitarian frameworks on the refugee emergency as they are constructed and reproduced by different types of media images. Similarly, Garces-Amaya and Perez-Rodriguze in their paper on the visual economy of migration and the production of a crisis look at how newspapers use multimodal communication strategies to represent the ‘migrant crisis’ while Caballero-Vélez and co authors (2025) compare such representations between the two sides of the Mediterranean pointing to the importance of the visual dimension in communication.

Before presenting in more detail the contents of this Special Issue, we would like though to take a step back and discuss how the widespread availability of affordable digital technologies, which do not necessitate expensive equipment, and the emergence of the social media have brought the visual dimension centre-stage in the public debate and have created a visual dimension in governance.

The emergence of new modes of communication and the role of the visual

Advanced digital technologies have changed our modalities and even habits of communication through the invention of email, the internet and cell phones. While the use of emails intensified during the late 1990s and early 2000, cell phones emerged during the same period and soon they became ‘smart’ phones in the sense that beyond calling or writing text messages they incorporated several other functions. The first smartphone, the Blackberry smartphone was invented in 2002 while the Apple I-phones first appeared in 2007. During the same period, social media emerged (Facebook was launched in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 although it took longer than Facebook to gain traction) changing dramatically the way in which people communicate with one another.

Social media have altered the boundaries of the private and the public, the personal and the political. While these boundaries have been challenged in the past also by feminist theorists who argued that the private is also political in many ways (Dahlgren, 2017: 2910), today we are witnessing a significant collapse of the private into the public and an enmeshing of the personal and the political in ways that are difficult to distinguish, let alone disentangle.

More specifically, today, the visual has become omni present not only through the traditional electronic media like the press or television. Photography has become a new way of communicating for people and organisations, thanks to social media. Most photography is now social media-photography, and it can be part of a bilateral, private conversation through, for instance, Whatsapp or Instagram messaging. But it can also become part of a broader conversation from one to many when someone posts their pictures into a social media group, available for all to see or for all their friends to access.

Considering the impact of the new social media on public life, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they have upended the ways in which people communicate and share information and have transformed the public sphere. While discussing the theory of Habermas (1989) about the public sphere goes beyond the scope of this paper, a few comments are in order here. A democratic public sphere must be accessible to all citizens, must allow for the representation of a pluralism of views and must enable a dimension of interaction; citizens should engage, talk with one another. The notion of the public sphere has been primarily related to the nation-state which provides for a unified communicative space that allows for voices to be heard within a unified political culture avoiding an ineffective cacophony (Dahlgren, 2017).

The heterogeneous character of modern life though raises important issues regarding the existence of a shared political culture and the possibility for all groups to share and debate their positions in a democratic space (Dalhgren ibid.). The public sphere today needs therefore to be conceptualised as a tiered and networked set of communicative spaces that feed into one another. The advent of the internet (and particularly of the ‘internet of things’) has reinforced the existence of multiple, fragmented but also networked communicative spaces that defy national boundaries and engage people from different geographies. These developments have important implications for the public debate in general, but also in particular in relation to the governance of migration and asylum.

The visual nature of much social media communication, its immediacy and technological simplicity (a smart phone is generally all that people need) opens up new possibilities for democratizing and transnationalising the public sphere, as well as new risks of polarization as well as mis or disinformation. The simultaneity that advanced digital technologies and social media offer, collapses the dimension of both time and space giving the impression of ubiquity as well as of simultaneity in communication. Thanks to digital devices, the same conversation may be asynchronous, and distanced in time and space, or it can be a sort of co-presence despite people being physically apart, and perhaps far from one another. In addition, digital devices and social media platforms become an extension of both our individual and collective memory as they cater to information that we cannot recollect, but they also recreate our memory through their storage and retrieval (guided by an algorithm) of relevant ‘memories’ to remember (Miller, 2014). Unsurprisingly, these memories are always images – they are visual not textual.

Four observations are in order here in relation to how we engage in this tiered and networked public sphere. ¹

First, in contrast to the period of mass communication, during the last two decades people become themselves transmitters of content, in interaction with the traditional information and communication gatekeepers – the mass media (Landert and Juncker, 2011). They can not only choose what news to watch or read and when, but they can also share and reshare those news, including pictures or short videos. They can interact with other readers or watchers in real time, attracting ‘likes’ and commentaries. Thus, migrants or refugees – as is also illustrated in several of the contributions in this Special Issue – become themselves reproducers of the public debates and transmitters of alternative representations.

Second, the visual becomes dominant and deeply enmeshed with the written or oral. With the invention of handheld smartphones, people can post their own pictures or videos with remarkable ease and immediacy. Visual communication takes a new turn. As a corollary, citizen journalism emerges for the first time during the Arab spring protests in 2011 when lay people take pictures of the protests and the police crackdown which they send in real time to major news agencies in Europe and around the world. Similarly, memes create new idioms and new jokes that travel internationally and that resonate with tiered publics (e.g. teenagers in countries as far away and as different as South Korea, Italy and Canada; or India and the United States). However, much of the visual content arises still from large media corporations or commercial networks that reproduce national frameworks. The importance of such corporations is seen also in several of the contributions in this Special Issue such as in Lynes (2025) for instance on the forensic and humanitarian representation of migration.

Third, while there is a feeling of control of one’s own communication, information and engagement, the truth is that the individual user is indirectly monitored and manipulated by the algorithm that is generated by their earlier media and social media usage. Thus the democratizing potential of the immediacy, ease, and visuality of new forms of communication is undermined by the social media environment. This complicates also our inquiry and understanding of the role of the visual in migration governance. Reflections on this are offered by Anna Fin (2025) in her paper on photography in this Issue.

Fourth, the life span of information and communication becomes much shorter than it used to be with television, or the print media. The worldwide availability of information and the lack of fixity in the hyper-text, changes the nature of the communicative relationships merging the boundaries between the private and the public (Landert and Juncker, 2011), as well as the borders of the local, the national, and the transnational into an amorphous transnational, synchronised space. The use of photography/video in this space further reinforces both its immediacy (one can ‘watch’ things happening as they evolve) and its transnational potential (there is no need for translation).

There is no doubt that the social media open new possibilities for participation and afford ordinary citizens the possibility to voice their concerns and express their opinions increasingly through visual means (Walsh, 2022). Such participation though does not necessarily translate into more democratic and open debate but may also lead to more polarization.

Naturally, in many instances, the social media can be used for domestic or transnational mobilisations for pro-social reasons such as the transnational protests of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in the early 2010s or the mobilisation in favour of Indian farmers in 2020 (Monteiro, 2021). There are interesting studies of citizens mobilising through social media (Delhaye, 2024) during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and further succeeding to change dominant representations of national history in cultural institutions like museums. The social media are a tool for migrants and refugees to mobilise and demand that they should be represented in the national media, in the national cultural landscape, in TV series and overall, in the dominant national narrative (Frisina and Kyeremeh, 2023 as well as several contributions to this Issue like Osso, or Desille and Nikielska-Sekula, 2025). The power of visuality (Massari, 2021) in representing difference for instance, opens new ways of imagining migration.

In the era of traditional mass media like radio and television, the content was controlled by few powerful media institutions and the audience, the citizens, had limited opportunities to interact or chose what they watch. While the main mass media are still controlled by a few powerful conglomerates that usually bring together financial, industrial and media interests, social media offer alternatives given their interactive nature. Today, the options appear innumerable, but the nature of the communicative space is completely different – the algorithms effectively control the communicative space in ways that are subtle and unobserved.

In addition, the audio-visual becomes dominant, almost hegemonic, at the expense of written communication. Not only is this type of communication qualitatively different, as it transcends language barriers and arouses emotions, but it also leaves little room for imagination. Migration is no longer just imagined, it is seen, watched, performed in front of a highly dynamic and yet unknown virtual community that is constantly constituted and re-constituted by its members.

Contents of this special issue

Contributions to this special issue highlight how visual representations influence the perception, framing, and policymaking surrounding migration. Understanding these dynamics is critical, as they can shape public discourse, governmental decisions, and international cooperation. The proliferation of social media platforms and the ease with which images can be shared have amplified their influence on public opinion and political narratives. Images can mobilize support for migrants’ rights or, conversely, reinforce stereotypes and xenophobia, thereby affecting the policies enacted. Moreover, in an age of misinformation and ‘fake news,’ it is paramount to investigate how visual content can be used for advocacy with both pro- and anti-social objectives. By addressing these pressing questions, we seek to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate interplay between images and migration governance dynamics, providing valuable insights for academics, policymakers, and civil society stakeholders alike.

Earlier versions of the papers included in this Special Issue were presented at the workshop: Visual Governance: Theorizing the Role of Images in Migration Governance, held at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program, at Toronto Metropolitan University, in October 2023. The workshop was co-convened by the two guest editors and benefited from support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada and the Marie Sklodowska Curie Program, Horizon Europe.

This special issue brings together a set of nine papers covering different asylum and migration processes, focusing on the role of a variety of actors – including media, journalists, government agencies, politicians, civil society, and migrants or asylum seekers themselves. These studies engage with very different migration and asylum ‘crises’ in Africa, Europe, and the Americas while they share their common focus on the visual dimension in migration and asylum governance.

Co-editor Alice Massari provides the theoretical approach that informs contributions to the Special Issue. In her paper Visual Governance – Theorizing the role of images in migration governance, Massari coins the term visual governance, to speak about a process whereby governance is enacted through visual representations—such as images, videos, maps, and other visual media. Such images play a role in communicating, regulating, legitimising or challenging existing power structures, and buttressing or undermining related policies and practices. Using the lens of migration governance, the paper introduces a theoretical framework that brings the visual dimension into analytical focus. Firstly, the framework enables us to incorporate the realm of discourses and representations into the dimensions of governance previously explored in migration governance literature (i.e., policies and practices). Secondly, it enables the inclusion of all relevant actors in the analysis, not just traditional ones, but also those whose participation has been facilitated by the new digital communicative sphere. This includes stakeholders at both the macro level (state-based institutions such as national government and transnational entities as the European Union) and meso- level (international organizations and non-governmental organizations). It also concerns however those situated at the micro-level such as individuals (for instance, influencers and individuals with a large followers’ base or whose content is shared wildly). Finally, the proposed theoretical framework is based on the understanding that the role of images in migration governance should be examined through an iterative approach, considering the interplay between the visual communication sphere and the governance realm and how those two dimensions influence each other.

Further exploring the role of the visual in migration and asylum governance, Anna Fiń’s on a Semantic Framework for the Creation of Migration Photography and Their Role in Visual Governance in Migration elaborates on the production of migration photography and its implications for visual governance. More specifically, the article examines the role of the photographer (producer of visual representation) and the meanings photographers assign to migration, thus willingly or inadvertently contributing the process of visual migration governance. Referring to the principles of social constructivism and cultural sociology, the study seeks to answer the following questions: How do photographers understand the phenomena they communicate and represent visually? What role does that semantic framework play in producing visual representations of migration? And hence, What role do they play in the visual governance of migration? The article focuses specifically on the role of the visual representation producer within the process of visual governance. Accounting for the meanings ascribed to migration by image creators undoubtedly enhances our understanding of the early stages of image production and, by extension, the production dynamics involved.

Following the same line of critical analysis, Amandine Desille and Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła propose pluriversal dignity as a methodological lens for conducting visual research on migration through a place-based approach. Rather than treating ethics as an external check applied after visual data has been collected and circulated, they position dignity as a dynamic, situated, and plural concept—one that must be negotiated throughout the research process. Recognizing the absence of a fixed or universal definition of dignity, the authors argue that its very indeterminacy enables a richer, more context-sensitive engagement with migration and visuality. Their analysis emerges from RePlace, a Horizon Europe project aimed at rethinking the narratives surrounding so-called “left behind areas” through co-produced visual methodologies. The project explicitly engages with the visual governance of migration by constructing counter-narratives that challenge two dominant media framings: the dehumanization of migrants as threats, and the portrayal of marginalised regions as static, deficient spaces. The authors contend that these intersecting distortions not only obscure the complexities of migration in non-metropolitan areas, but also undermine inclusive and grounded governance strategies. By introducing pluriversal dignity as both an ethical stance and a research method, the paper offers a pathway for reimagining the role of visuals in migration research. This involves more than simply correcting misrepresentations—it entails building what the authors call a dignified living archive, one that reflects the multiplicity of experiences, knowledges, and spatial dynamics within a given place. They outline four key principles for such an approach: contextualising dignity in the field; negotiating shared ethical responsibility; embracing the processual nature of research from design to dissemination; and adopting fragmented visual forms that resist singular narratives. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, (2004) work on the affective dimensions of archives, the authors suggest that such an approach not only reshapes the ethics of visual research, but also actively contributes to the governance of migration by foregrounding relationality, co-presence, and emotional resonance in the representation of mobile lives.

The paper by Berfin Nur Osso entitled Exploring Refugee Experiences of Migration Management: A Socio-Legal Inquiry into Visual Artworks and Social Media complements and further extends the reflections shared by the previous papers on the role of the image makers and the ethical dimension in visual analysis. This study introduces introducing refugee-produced images, adding an essential bottom-up perspective to the discourse on visual governance. Nur Osso notes that little is known on how refugees communicate their experiences of migration governance in their audiovisual artifacts. The author adopts a socio-legal approach incorporating visual and multimodal inquiries into refugee law research to understand the intricate interplay between refugee-produced images and migration governance dynamics. She illustrates this with two case studies on the Greek island of Lesvos, involving qualitative analyses of 70 refugee-produced paintings from the Hope Project Greece (2022) and 50 social media posts from the ‘Now You See Me Moria’ Instagram account (2023). The visual analysis of the images was complemented by semi-structured interviews with the founders of these organizations, analysis of legal and policy documents, and of reports of international and non-governmental organizations.

The paper investigates the interplay between the everyday reality of asylum seeker life in Greek island camps, and their counter-struggles through their art. The reflections underscore that empirical investigations of refugee-produced paintings, photographs, and videos shared online can (i) endorse refugees as vital actors of refugee law; (ii) reveal their everyday practices, narratives, and perspectives in navigating migration management measures, and (iii) demonstrate refugee law’s impact on their everyday lives. These investigations can help understand how laws and policies are experienced on the ground and illustrate how these laws look from refugees’ perspectives. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of incorporating visual and multimodal techniques from a bottom-up perspective into refugee law scholarship, emphasizing their contributions to academic debate, knowledge production, and informed discussions around migration governance. Such scholarly attention to refugee perspectives, narratives, and everyday practices can enhance refugee agency, voices, and visibility, and facilitate the recognition of their struggles vis-à-vis dehumanizing and criminalizing discourses and practices of state authorities.

Following from the first two contributions that focused on professional photographers and on refugee artists and photographers, the next paper in this Special Issues addresses the securitization of migration though local media in countries of origin and transit. Diego Caballero-Vélez, Eugenio Cusumano, Chiara Loschi and Luca Raineri look at the visual securitisation of migration in cross-country media portrayals of migration. The paper:

From firearms to facemasks: The visual securitization of migration in Italy, Malta, Libya and Niger, addresses the interpretive challenges posed by the polysemic nature of images by narrowing the focus to a specific subset of photographs: those depicting border security personnel interacting with migrants. Within this category, the authors conduct a comparative analysis of visual cues—particularly the presence of weapons and biohazard protection gear—as indicators of how different media construct migration threats. The findings show a striking divergence between European and African media narratives. In Italian and Maltese newspapers, images of security forces wearing biohazard suits became widespread well before the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining traction following the 2014 Ebola outbreak. These visual tropes have since become normalized, effectively framing undocumented migration as a public health threat, independent of accompanying textual narratives. By contrast, Libyan and Nigerien outlets rarely depict such imagery; instead, their visual portrayals more frequently feature armed security forces, suggesting a framing of mobility as a security or physical threat rather than a sanitary one. In tracing these visual patterns, the authors highlight how localized media practices contribute to broader transnational processes of visual securitization. The concluding discussion reflects on how such visual routines circulate across national media ecosystems, shaping and reinforcing distinct narratives of migration as either health risk or physical danger.The paper by Diana P. Garcés-Amaya and Adriana M. Pérez Rodríguez shifts the focus to the cases of Norte de Santander and the Darien ‘Gap’ looking at: The visual economy of migration and the production of a crisis. This paper examines how visual representations shape public perceptions and policy responses to migration in Colombia, focusing on two key border areas: Norte de Santander (Colombia–Venezuela) and the Darién Gap (Colombia–Panama). Analyzing images and narratives published by El Espectador between 2019 and 2024, the authors explore how migrant bodies and spaces are visually constructed to produce a sense of crisis. Two dominant visual regimes emerge. First, the production of migrant bodies: migrants are often depicted as massified and dehumanized, with Venezuelan women portrayed through a dual lens—as victims of sexual violence and as reproductive subjects—reinforcing narratives of vulnerability. In the Darién, migrants are visually fused with the harsh landscape, emphasizing suffering and precarity. Second, the production of spaces: border regions are framed as zones of disorder and threat. The trochas are associated with crime and lawlessness, while the Darién is rendered as a hostile natural barrier, justifying both humanitarian and security interventions. Using multimodal discourse analysis, the authors introduce the concept of the visual economy of migration to capture how visual media contribute to the symbolic order of migration governance. Visuality here operates as a technology of meaning-making that generates affect—fear, pity, urgency—while legitimizing state control and intervention. The study highlights how visual narratives not only represent but actively shape the politics of migration in Colombia.

In the same vein, Krista Lynes and her paper: Forensic and Humanitarian Frames: Mediating Migration as Crisis delves into the ways in which crisis narratives are produced through images circulated in the media and social media. The paper examines the visual culture of mediating migration as a “crisis”, arguing that responses to the movement of peoples (especially into the Global North) are animated by two frames: the forensic and the humanitarian. While these appear to be contradictory image regimes—one relying on data, maps and metrics, the other on iconic portraits of human suffering—the paper argues that it is the vacillation between these two poles that creates the dynamic force of the surge of images of “migrant crises.” Using the image of the thaumatrope – a visual tool for tricking the eye into seeing two images at once – the paper explores how processes of mediation train viewers to see images as data and data as images, and thus to be caught within an ideological framework of crisis. It seeks also to provide examples for intervening in the vacillation between humanitarianism and forensics through activist appropriations of migration data.

In his paper on Accountability in Transnational Border Policing: Frontex’s Use of X (Twitter) to Visualise the Boundaries of its ‘Account-Ability’, Sunny Dhillon focuses on the use of images by transnational actors like Frontex (the European Union’s Border and Coast Guard Agency) to define accountability and thus directly shape migration and asylum governance. The paper notes that visual mediums are beginning to shape what accountability means in the policing of migration. It analyses how Frontex (the European Union’s Border and Coast Guard agency) uses images on X (Twitter), to define what it is accountable for. Frontex uses images a tool to delimit its ‘account-ability,’ in other words, to signal its competency and what it ought to be responsible for. The paper demonstrates how Frontex’s images on X spur new and old ideas about democratic policing, revealing how accountability is visualised by a transnational agency that polices migration.

Previous studies have examined the use of X by policing agencies, including border policing agencies. However, these studies have largely focused on the texts of the posts, rather than the images accompanying the post. This paper adopts a visual intertextual approach to examine both the images and the corresponding text of Frontex’s posts on X on its work at sea. The paper examines clusters of images and posts from a dataset of 393images, which were scrapped from Frontex’s X account. The clusters are formed using PixPlot, an image-analysis tool to group similar images into clusters for analysis. They are then analysed in terms of their content by asking not only ‘what do pictures mean?’ but also ‘what do the pictures want from us?’ In doing so, the paper shows how these images not only share meaning but seek to draw the boundaries in accountability for border policing.

The special issue concludes with Maria Gintova’s paper on Understanding Government Social Media Users’ Role in Disseminating Misinformation: A Comparative Study of Canada and the United Kingdom. This paper addresses the critical role of social media in shaping public perceptions and governance, highlighting the implications of misinformation.

While the role social media play in creating and disseminating misleading information, including fake images and visuals is well recognized by scholars and governments around the world. Many governments, including in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK), are working on, or have already introduced regulatory frameworks to combat disinformation and prevent harms for vulnerable populations. Among these vulnerable populations, migrant social media users form a distinct group of government social media users with specific information and interaction needs. As literature demonstrates, migrants are actively present on social media, including government social media and can benefit from information-sharing and connections it enables. However, social media can also deter migrants from pursuing migration opportunities. This paper examines the use of X (formerly known as Twitter) accounts by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and the UK Home Office (Home Office) by government social media users, including migrant social media users. It specifically investigates if government social media users are spreading misinformation and the prevalence of misinformation on the IRCC and Home Office X accounts. As findings demonstrate, these two government accounts are used differently: IRCC X is used to advocate for causes and ask questions, while Home Office social media users are mostly voicing their opinions by critiquing politicians and government policies, and these critiques often contain misinformation. Finally, misleading tweets remain accessible for public consumption.

Contributions to this Special Issue offer a 360° overview of the role of the visual in migration and asylum governance through both top down and from the ground up studies.

By integrating top-down perspectives on institutional and media-driven visual discourses with bottom-up insights into migrant- and refugee-produced imagery, the articles collectively deepen our understanding of how images produced by different actors situated at different levels of migration governance operate within governance frameworks. This Special Issue situates visual governance at the intersection of representation, power, and practice, illustrating how visual media construct, disrupt, and mediate narratives of mobility, crisis, and control. Theoretical contributions emphasize the iterative interplay between visual representation and governance mechanisms, challenging traditional boundaries between the symbolic and material dimensions of governance. Empirical studies further illuminate the ways in which visual media serve as tools for legitimization, resistance, and the articulation of subjectivities within migration contexts. By foregrounding the dynamic and polysemic nature of images, this Special Issue advances scholarly debates on the visual turn in migration studies and offers a critical lens for interrogating the increasingly mediatized landscape of contemporary governance.