CMENAS 2026 Fall Colloquium Series | Making the ‘Migrant Crisis?’: Media, Power and Perception

More than a decade since the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ transformed European politics and media, it remains a deeply contested story. From the Syrian civil war to conflicts across Africa and the movement of people from the Indian subcontinent, this moment in 2015-16 came to be framed as the ‘migrant crisis’. It also became a media crisis, marked by an explosion of alarmist reporting about people on the move. Rather than being treated as a humanitarian emergency requiring search and rescue missions, the movement of vulnerable people across the Mediterranean was increasingly depicted as an attack by “invaders” from “over there”. The media too often relied on visual tropes of small boats, barbed wire, and faceless masses, stripping people of their dignity and humanity.

Drawing on a decade of his reporting across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Ismail Einashe will in this lecture examine how the media constructed the figure of the “migrant” in the global public imagination, reducing complex human movements to extreme binaries: the “vulnerable body” or the “dangerous outsider.” He will consider how, a decade on, this narrative has fueled increasing securitisation across the Mediterranean, even as fewer migrants arrive.

Einashe will explore why this story has become one of the biggest — and most divisive — stories in recent history. He will also analyse whether the media simply reported Europe's migration story or helped shape it into a permanent ‘crisis’ that now threatens European democracy.

Ismail Einashe is an award-winning British-Somali journalist and author whose work on migration and refugee issues has appeared in numerous publications – including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, BBC News, The Nation, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, NPR and ArtReview. He is the author of Strangers (2023), a book by Tate Publishing that explores migration through the lens of art, and he co-edited Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere (2019), a collection of critical essays examining how migrants are represented in European media. He was a 2025–26 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he examined migration reporting through the lens of trauma and art. Einashe is also part of a team of journalists working on Lost in Europe, a cross-border journalism collaborative that investigates the disappearance of child migrants. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Register at: https://myumi.ch/qwg1Z

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange. Contact: warsansa@umich.edu