Résultat de la recherche
Making sense of refugees on social media: Perspective-taking, political imagination, and Internet memes
There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self–other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies construct images of otherness, defined in cultural, religious and political terms. Since many participants in these debates have never actually interacted with refugees, their reactions to the crisis are often infused by emotion and fueled by a form of imagination that carries political consequences. At the core of this political imagination, we propose, are certain understandings of refugees, of how they think, feel, and intend to act. In other words, more or less explicit processes of perspective taking are at play in audiences’ responses to refugees. In this article, we aim to unpack the social and psychological mechanisms involved in taking the perspective of refugees on digital platforms using the Commitment Model of Perspective Taking (CMPT). Specifically, since online media is a key channel for sharing views about refugees, our focus here is on refugee-related Internet memes shared on Reddit, and the conversations around these visual artifacts. Our findings indicate that participants in these forums most often construct the perspective of refugees from an outside position, based on a commitment to difference, and rarely try to identify with the situation of refugees. We then discuss the ways in which these forms of perspective taking stimulate or hinder reflexivity and contribute to a political imagination that is open to otherness and tolerant of diversity or, on the contrary, fearful and prejudiced towards refugees.
Taking the perspective of others: A conceptual model and its application to the refugee crisis
Cultural Psychology and Politics: Otherness, democracy and the refugee crisis
What does psychology have to offer to the pursuit of actualised democracy? Starting from the assumption – that we share with Moghaddam – that psychology has an important role to play in this regard, we propose to develop a cultural psychological perspective on the topic. To do so, we first revisit four common assumptions about democracy through the lens of cultural psychology. We then present the notion of political imagination as a tool to unpack how (the democratic) self, others and societies are imagined and constructed in discourse. We apply this notion to a series of four examples stemming from the on-going refugee crisis, and we illustrate how the psychological categories proposed by Moghaddam can be used to defend a vision of society that excludes others. Finally, we turn towards the concept of perspective taking, and we conclude that psychology’s contribution should focus on self-other relations – not just on the idealised, democratic self – as these are simultaneously political, psychological and ethical.