ABSTRACT
This discussion piece between Elaine Swan and Sukhmani Khorana contextualises Khorana's new book in her research trajectories in refugee and media studies, and also unpacks new directions in exploring social movements and how they intersect with the study of emotions and practices of anti-racism. Swan and Khorana share many similar interests in food and intercultural studies, and in critiques of organisational equity and diversity – this interview, therefore draws on their mutual areas of expertise to demonstrate what decentring whiteness could look like in material and mediated practices.
Elaine Swan Interviews Sukhmani Khorana
Journal of Intercultural Studies commissioned Dr Elaine Swan to undertake an interview with Associate Professor Sukhmani Khorana on the release of her new book, Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (Bristol University Press, 2023). This interview contextualises the book in Khorana’s research trajectories in refugee and media studies thus far, and also unpacks new directions in exploring social movements and how they intersect with the study of emotions and practices of anti-racism. Swan and Khorana share many similar interests in food and intercultural studies, and in critiques of organisational equity and diversity – this interview, therefore draws on their mutual areas of expertise.
I really enjoyed this. I really enjoyed it because when you're reading you're reading for your own purposes or you're not aware that you're going to be in a kind of a dialogue. And it's rare that you get to talk to the author and say, ‘Well, I was wondering about this’. So it was a really interesting form of thinking. So thank you for inviting me to do it.
One of the things that I wanted to kick off with is the way that your book has been situated. By the publishers I think it might be you can kind of clarify, sort of, and it's an interesting positioning I think, given what you've written before, and get on to what you're interested in intervening in, but it's about being situated in media studies, migration studies, and social movement studies. And I know one of the things you're very clear about in the book, is you want to look at the transformative potential, have certain emotions, and in particular, you're looking at empathy, aspiration and belonging, and you're wanting to think about possible interventions by activists or within policy or the kinds of actions individuals might take. So I wonder what you made of this sort of nexus and in particular the relationship between social movement theories and Media Studies.
It was certainly the publisher’s idea to situate it in social movement studies. In some ways, my work on refugees and refugee media, which is now ongoing for almost a decade is probably most situated in what might be called social movement studies, though I've never thought of it in that way. But, the impetus for that work has been, especially given that it's coming from the Australian context where it's not just refugee policies, whether you talk about mandatory detention, some of which I know, the UK is kind of importing, offshore processing and bipartisan support for these kinds of policies in the political system. So in the Australian context, it is because of this kind of stalemate that we've had. I guess the impetus for me and for many, many others who work in refugee communities, but in my case, particularly because I am more interested in storytelling or mediated discourses about refugees, because most people don't meet refugees face to face, it's the mediated discourses that inform their ideas of refugees. So I find these discourses, these stories really important to try and create individual and then eventually collective change. If I think about that particular trajectory, I can see how my work would fit in with, you know, social movement theory, for instance, which is largely about social mobilization, especially since the 90s when social mobilization is achieved through collective forms of identity. In this book, though, it's interesting that it's situated in that way, because I am certainly talking about refugees in the empathy section and to some extent in the belonging section, but also in the middle bit on aspiration, where you might not consciously think of aspiration as related to social movements, but I'm arguing that it can be.
Yeah, and I kind of found that the way that it was described in that way in relation to social movement studies really helpful. It sort of turned your work around a little bit and like you said, you know, there's always been that trajectory in there. But I was thinking about what I know about social movement theory, and I'm not a social movement theorist, but I was thinking about, there is some attention to affect, but not that much. And there is some attention to media, but again, not that much. So I thought it was sort of an interesting way of rethinking some of the categories in social movement theory, but also thinking about the politics of media and the politics of activism in a different way.
I'm not someone who was trained in social movement theory and activism. To begin with, obviously, it was a cultural studies approach to media and to some extent, sociology of migration. So for me, I came to social movements through affect and its mediated aspects. The social mobilization that takes place via emotion and affect was my entry point into social movements. I’m much more familiar with the social movement literature which is about using affect to build movements and activism and generate change than I am with the bulk of the work that goes on in social movement studies. And I think, a lot of media scholars, not so much migration, maybe a little bit in critical migration studies, but a lot of media scholars, especially people who work with digital media, have become interested in the role of mediated affect in social movements.
Yeah. And maybe, as you write about empathy, sort of being one of the more studied and criticized emotions and one of the things I really liked about your work was how you brought in a sort of a new discussion around empathy, but you also brought in aspiration and belonging and looked at those from a different point of view. So relatedly I really liked reading the case studies and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about, I don't know whether you'd see it as a case study approach. But it seems quite an unusual methodology for this kind of thinking. I know people in media and cultural studies do clearly analyze films and texts. etc. And it was sort of the range that you've drawn upon and the fact that they're from different mediums, and different contexts of use, different reception contexts and also different national contexts. So I wondered if you could say a little bit about that approach.
My first book, as you know, was situated in Australia. Most of the examples were drawn from Australia. This was the book about the politics of food and intercultural food in Australia and that was in the title as well. But having said that, I was conscious even in that book to draw upon what's happening in comparable settler colonial contexts, if not all of the Global North. I've previously written about mediated texts which have come out of places like Canada and the US and have had some work published which is about refugee documentaries which have connections with the UK and Europe. So I think I was quite conscious that when you're talking about what's happening in the Global North, in terms of migration and refugee policies as well as migration and refugee media and public attitudes that those boundaries are quite porous. And as I mentioned in the case of the UK before that they're often looking at Australia to implement new kinds of refugee policies. Also, populism in the US in the last decade or so has obviously had impact in Europe and across the globe. So, I think these discourses and the emotions that stick with these discourses kind of move around from one place to the other, especially in the Global North in countries that are culturally similar and have had similar ways of dealing with migration. I don't think you can just isolate one nation or one mediated site or one form of storytelling. It will be useful to do an in depth examination of one country or, or one media platform, but if you're talking about a book which is about how discourses circulate in the public sphere and emotions stick to bodies, I actually think that methodologically it is important to be multi-sited and transnational. This is not to say that there aren't differences in the way each of these culturally similar but still different countries perceive migrants and refugees, but I think there's probably quite a few similarities as well, as I tried to draw out. I think sometimes in Media Studies and to some extent other disciplines that come out of a tradition of looking at texts are guilty of doing the close reading or doing the textual analysis and maybe not paying as much attention to what else is happening with that text. So, for instance, in the third chapter in the part on aspiration, I look at the Netflix series, Patriot Act by Hasan Minhaj. I was quite conscious here of looking at also how he's received by migrant reviewers and what the Twitter commentary is on a couple of his episodes. I think if a book is interested in how certain texts or certain emotions about migration are going to generate change, then you have to look at the text as well as what is beyond the text or the inter textual the extra textual elements. I hand picked a few texts and related reception contexts. It's not possible to cover all of that within the scope of a book, which is quite wide ranging. But I think I tried to attempt audience studies or reception studies because it's important to simultaneously look at the text and how meaning is being made from it and with it in that traditional Stuart Hall sense.
And that opens up possibilities for activism. Exactly.
Carolyn Pedwell is probably one of the first cultural studies scholars I know of who did a critique of empathy. She looked at Obama's speeches and how Obama you in that early era, including in his pre election speeches was using empathy a lot to talk about how individual Americans need to be more empathetic. So he was individualizing empathy, and she does an interesting critique of it. While Obama’s use of empathy went down the neoliberal route, the way the broader American audience used empathy to construct their own kind of emotional communities and activist communities and work with the empathy even though that was probably not the original kind of individualizing neoliberal empathy that Obama had tried to conjure up is indicative of what people can do with emotions and emotional communities. And that's why I think it is important to look at the reception of speeches or of texts of that nature.
And it's not exactly reading against the grain. But it’ sort of reorienting them in a way.
That's right. It's not really going against the grain so it's not an oppositional reading. They're doing with it what they think is useful for their context, or for their particular kind of activist community.
And you use different platforms, different types of media, and also different kinds of protagonists from politicians to comedians. Was that sort of obvious to you, or, I mean, you said you sort of hand picked them. Could you say a little bit about the selection and the fact that it covers so many different domains?
There was an interesting question there, which links to the case study of the comedians and why I went with aspiration. It was a useful question for me to think about in terms of the structuring of the book because empathy is an emotion that I've been working with for the longest time by virtue of my interest in refugee documentaries in Australia and overseas and other kinds of refugee media, most of which tries to work with the invoking of empathy. Empathy has also been critiqued in terms of how it’s deployed in humanization discourses which can be quite de-politicizing. So some of those critiques are well known. And more recently, I’ve also worked with belonging as a result of some grassroots projects that I did in western and southwest Sydney and becoming interested in this idea of reciprocity and agency. But aspiration was the bit which is conceptually the newest in this book and it came from two places.
One was the 2019 federal election in Australia where both the major parties, the Liberal Party and the Labor Party, were using the word aspirant or aspirational, to talk about the people they wanted to appeal to. In the Australian political context, the aspirational class or the social climbers is something that's associated with a Conservative Prime Minister, John Howard. So aspirational connoted the trajectory of someone who wants to work hard and achieve socio economic mobility rather than a sort of collectivist idea of aspiration. But the Labor Party was also using that notion of aspiration in the 2019 election to talk about how it needs to be collective and the direction of aspiration started changing a bit and maybe following the UK Labor route. And the other pathway to aspiration was that I was on a large Australian Research Council Linkage project which looked at the history of migration and television in Australia, which was not just textual analysis from the 1970s onwards, but also multi-generational audiences and what they make of the representation of migration, who's working behind the scenes and really just all aspects of what is and isn't on TV. Through the interviews for this project, I found it really interesting that the younger migrants and children of migrants were the ones who were not just more most critical of the fact that there was a lack of representation of people like them on mainstream TV, but also that they were finding their own ways to circumvent that. So if you looked at it from the point of view of the audiences, they were no longer watching mainstream TV. And you could argue that most younger audiences are just going on Netflix and finding shows that speak to them. But I think it's happening to a greater extent with people who are racialized and from a younger generation. And a lot of them who are interested in careers in media, politics, and the influence-making realms of society are in many ways, using tangential means, or they're hitting a ceiling in whatever area they're working in. Because of this, they are often starting their own advocacy initiatives alongside trying to work in the mainstream or quitting the mainstream entirely. The Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu calls is the ‘farm to table approach’ where they know that they're going to hit a ceiling, so they find other means where they can control the message and where there will be no white gatekeepers. And I guess what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way about aspiration is that a lot of these migrants are sold the story of, ‘if you work hard, you will achieve your dreams and can get into the right job as well as have financial stability’. But this particular generation of the children of migrants is sort of being more exposed to global and digital media and I think they want to claim that space for themselves which isn't just about, ‘I work hard and have a healthy bank balance’, but also it's about the how my community is perceived and what kind of space they're given in the national imaginary and whether someone who looks like me will be genuinely considered Australian or British or American. So, that kind of collective aspiration is what I argue is starting to form through the work that some of these people are doing, whether it's through comedy or the digital media accounts that certain politicians have. So it might not seem like an obvious choice, but I guess the ethnic comedy did come out of the Linkage project because comedy is the genre that was most used by people of colour who wanted to exercise agency over their representation. While people of colour have been most visible to begin with on reality TV, whether it's the talent shows or the cooking shows, but the ones where they think they have the most agency or what we realized through the project was actually where they were able to create their own content was with comedy. Many of them also happen to be Muslim, whether you look at it in Australia or you look at America, and again, that's no coincidence that that had started happening in a particular way after 9/11. This was the way that they could voice the collective aspirations, or to begin with, the collective anger. That anger was in some ways the embodiment of that aspiration to be viewed differently. So that's my really long-winded answer to why aspiration and also why comedy.
And I really liked it. I really liked listening to your sort of rationale and I liked reading it and it was interesting because as you said, you know, it circulates in particular forms in politics, in traditional politics. And as soon as you sort of pinned it down, I could start to see it in other spaces. In, for example, where I am in London, and I think one of the things about comedy is that it has that ambivalence in a way. It's a political intervention, but sometimes it's an obvious political intervention, but it has an instability, I think to it.
And it also is seen as a genre that invites a lot of people in. Some comedians do it differently where you know from the title that the episode or gig is going to have political subject matter. But the fact that they don't always begin in that way, or the political critique might not always be upfront makes it more appealing to people who might not want to be in a pedagogic space unless there is comedy associated with learning something.
Yes, and an interesting sort of affect economy.
That's right. Yeah.
I wonder if you could say a little bit more about sort of thinking more about ambivalence and emotions. So at the beginning of the book, it's clear that you want to extend current feminist and Critical Race discussions of emotion and you want to focus less on sort of ‘negative emotions’, and you want to focus on what you're calling ambivalent emotions. And this means you don't discuss racism sort of head on. So could you say a little bit about your thinking about what you understand by ambivalence?
The reason that I call these ambivalent emotions is because the journey for all three emotions that are discussed in the bulk of the book, but especially with empathy and belonging is that they start out in a way where they're used by the progressive side of politics or by progressive social movements, for particular ends, which had to do with social justice or reform. So again, empathy has largely been used not by the far right, but it was first used by you know, people on the progressive side whether it's in the migration context, dating back to the Vietnam War and resettling refugees. Now, what many humanitarian organizations and media shows propose to do is create simulations where they try to make ordinary citizens experience the journey of a refugee. So, this means empathy has not only been misunderstood, but it has also been appropriated by the humanitarian discourses. It has been appropriated more explicitly by the right to justify really cruel and in many cases, illegal policies (such as by arguing that it is humane or empathetic to have deterrence policies that ‘save’ refugees from paying large sums of money to people smugglers). So that's somehow justified as showing care and compassion and empathy.
It does seem to be that in the case of belonging as well, a seemingly progressive term and phenomenon has been appropriated. It's not a new term, but again, its been used a lot by governments in the Global North that have increasingly become more protectionist and populist and anti-migration. They emphasise how the onus of belonging lies on the shoulders of the migrants and the refugees and have deleted the reciprocity aspect. It is crucial to have that essential arrangement where the whole society needs to be asking how to create that sense of belonging for people who've just arrived. What I'm trying to suggest is that the reason that I call these emotions ambivalent is because of the way they've been taken up for purposes that are the opposite of how they were first used. They've kind of stuck to certain kinds of projects, or ideas or rhetoric and appropriated in ways that wasn't originally intentioned. I'm trying to find case studies where they've been reclaimed to some extent. And I guess I'm making the case that they can be reclaimed because of where they originally come from.
Towards the end of the book, I also talk about three other emotions that are ambivalent that I don't explore in detail. In the conclusion, I suggest that emotions like anger and discomfort and care are ambivalent for different reasons where you know, they're seen as unproductive whereas it can be productive. I mean, in some ways, it'd be more productive to have a discussion about empathy leading to discomfort leading to some form of responsibility rather than empathy being a stopping point in conversation or being enough. So I guess these complex emotions can also be in conversation with each other if social transformation or social change is the objective. There's already a lot of more populist feminist work now about anger (like Eloquent Rage) where anger is a really important emotion that can be channelled in particular ways for different kinds of activist and progressive projects. Similarly, care has been around for a really long time if you look at the work of feminist scholars, and it's had a bit of a resurgence since COVID. But again, there's times that it tends to be essentialised and feminised or has the same connotations as empathy and is, again, appropriated by conservative elements, or it's individualised. So I guess I'm not saying that empathy and belonging and aspiration are the only ambivalent emotions out there to do with migration or the mediated emotions of migration. There are others as well, and in some cases, they're being reclaimed by particular actors. So I'm making the case that there are there are conditions where they can still be reclaimed.
And as far as racism is concerned, that's a really good question. Maybe I'll go back to my first book where I talked about the conviviality toolkit. Conviviality is obviously a term that Paul Gilroy came up with and it's been used in various kinds of studies of migration in the UK and outside of it. And everyone who's worked with conviviality, which is a kind of living together with difference, not tolerance, because tolerance again tends to indicate that you're not actually living and sharing with someone, you're just kind of existing side by side. So there have been many studies of conviviality or living together with difference and that kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism doesn't take away from the work and critiques that scholars of racism undertake or the very real anti-racism campaigning work that takes place. In a similar way, in this in this book, I would say that working through emotions of ambivalence doesn't take away from critical work or work that tackles racism head on. But I'm also arguing that what I am doing here is also anti-racist work because it's decentring whiteness. I'm not going to be apologetic about the work and about the fact that most of the book (the section on empathy aside) is about how people of color are claiming space and taking agency and it's often in relation to themselves. When I talk about Minhaj’s Netflix series, it's in relation to how migrant reviewers and audiences are responding to that work. When I talk about the agency of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in creating the content that she does for Instagram or Jagmeet Singh in Canada, it's largely a younger person of color public sphere that they're talking to. So I guess in decentring whiteness, I am doing work which is anti-racist. American scholar Myra Washington wrote recently in a journal article (in relation to Media and Communication Studies) how scholars working on race in this discipline often only have two options: either you resist, or you resign to the dominant white paradigm. And maybe doing neither is anti-racist work as well as decentring whiteness and not always talking about yourself or your identity or politics in relation to whiteness should also count as the important work of anti-racism.
Yeah, I find that really productive, really helpful and it's something that I noticed in your first book on food, and your work on refugees’ and migrants’ responses to MasterChef. And it was a real breath of fresh air for Media Studies and Food Studies and TV studies. And you've also brought it out in relation to food and refugees – what they should be able to do and what their needs are and it really comes through in this book as well.
We could also talk about agency which you’ve touched on, and representation because you, you sort of offer a different way of thinking about representation. And you also had a really helpful question around belonging. So I don't know whether you want to do all three of those or whether you just want to pick one.
I can talk to agency first, perhaps because I just realised I'd haven't at any point really defined agency in the book. I've sort of allowed readers to make what they want to make of it depending on where they're situated. What I really understand by agency is actually quite basic, and again, being in a settler colonial context where there's still no treaty and a referendum on the way, it's about self-determination. So we have a language for it now when it comes to people who are First Nations, but for some reason, we're not at the point where it's part of the discourse in the same way or in the foreground when you're talking about migrants and refugees. There are some organisations (probably still a minority) where they have decided that there will be nothing about us without us. So certain organizations are sort of prioritising, not just consulting with migrants and refugees, especially if they're working in an area which is going to affect refugees. And whether it's people who have been granted asylum or people who are still waiting for their claims to be processed, I think some organisations are beginning to take note and realise that the only ethical way of going about it is to allow people the agency to tell their own stories. In some ways, the term allow shouldn't even be part of the picture. But if the children of migrants and refugees have to claim space for themselves – its’s clamouring or it's claiming – then it tells you that some kind of resistance or fight that has to be put up to the powers that be. So hence, you still have to use terms like allow because there is still a power that has to grant that ability or there's still a power that has to amplify the voices that might already exist.
In most bureaucratic or legal contexts, refugees have to narrate tales of precarity for their claims to be processed and for them to be given refugee status. And when they're in the early period of settlement, then they're expected to express gratitude. So I just find it really curious that this is what we take for granted for all other citizens – which is that you have the ability to tell your own story, whether you want to narrate the trauma or not narrate the trauma, or talk about just having a quotidian life, or something in between. What I'm arguing is that a humanisation discourse should be a discourse of equity where the person – whether it's their individual story, the collective story of the persecution of their community or the survival of their community – has the ability to tell it. It should be up to them whether they want to politicise it or not politicise it, it should ultimately be their decision to make. It should be determined by them, rather than having the media spotlight on the humanisation discourse which tries to prioritize one or the other theme of either the precarity so you feel there's a politics of pity that comes in or trying to highlight how they're so similar to us to and disavowing any structural issues. The decision should not be in the hands of the mediators, however well-meaning they may be. It might come across as an idealistic discourse, and that's why I highlight storytellers and contexts and grassroots projects where that can be made possible or that has been made possible, however imperfectly. We need to pay attention to the conditions that enable agency because without that, we just keep replicating the structures that already exist.
Yeah, I think that that's really helpful. I’m reminded of a theorist, Andrew Smith who problematises the notion of the everyday as being evenly distributed and he's particularly looking at Black theorists who argue that the everyday is unavailable to many Black people. And there’s also bell hooks who talks about how difficult it is to walk down a street if you're Black. So I think that idea of being able to story the everyday in ways that you want to in political terms or banal terms is separately important. And I think what you're also saying is about intervening in what sticks and not, and changing the economy of what moves around.
Yeah, I find it interesting that the project that is documented in the last part on belonging is one where we paired undergraduate arts students with ex refugee participants, and it so happened that everyone was from a migrant background, in one way or another, but none of them made a story about trauma. They were sort of only given the brief that they had to make short films about belonging, and there was nothing more than that. We wanted to keep it deliberately open. We didn't want the students to interview the refugees and end up turning them into the objects rather than the subjects of politics. We just gave them the basic conceptual frameworks around migration and belonging in the city because they were situated in a fairly superdiverse part of Sydney, and a partner organisation ran workshops on some filmmaking techniques. And none of them made a film about anyone's refugee story, although there were poetic elements of their cultures and what migration and belonging meant in an intergenerational sense. I found it really fascinating that there was no story of precarity amidst all of the material that they wanted to talk about in a creative way. Even if you look at a really high profile story like Behrouz Boochani’s books, No Friend but the Mountains – he undertakes a really scathing, interesting, insightful, theoretically-informed critique of the detention system. Even though he comes from the Kurdish community, which we all know is persecuted, at no point did he think it was important to rehash his own story, his own particular story of being on a boat or being stranded in a refugee camp. He made his decision to not make it a critical part of the book that he wrote. So I think those kinds of interventions are starting to be made and I just hope that it means that we have more and more narratives of migration and refuge of this kind that change the template for what the what we expect of these stories. I think people have started expecting them to be stories of precarity or gratitude and that's where I think the intervention is required if we have really move towards a social movement of some kind.
I'm trying to think through something that Krishnendu Rey has written about in relation to food and it's a kind of critique of Bordieuan sociology. He talks about how minoritised groups, particularly those who were sort of on low pay, how it's assumed by many sociologiststhat they don't have any sense of aesthetics or beauty or hope and that somehow their lives are just kind of completely encompassed by impoverishment. And I find that intervention very helpful for sort of moving out of, as you say those templates. So, I kind of feel like apart from belonging, you've touched on belonging sort of throughout, I don't know whether there's anything additional, you want to say.
I think the only other thing about belonging that I add in the final section on is this idea of transversal politics or transversal solidarities which, to some extent, goes back to Nira Yuval-Davis’s work. I've kind of reintroduced it in the context of refugees and belonging because I think that a lot of the scholarship and thinking about these communities tends to be quite siloed. But one of the people that I interviewed for the chapter on refugee storytellers is this wonderful Somali-American woman, Ifrah Manshour. She's a teacher and a theatre maker, and a poet and she had this really interesting story of how during the COVID lockdowns which coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement, she and her community did a lot of work with African-American communities who were rendered homeless during the pandemic in her suburb in Minnesota. She'd also been working with this collective for about five years, predating the pandemic, which was about a number of groups coming together to provide shelter for homeless people. And she was talking about it in relation to her journey in a refugee camp, a lot of which she doesn't remember because she was a child, but she thinks that forming alliances with people who were similarly disadvantaged even though they might have different histories is her way of moving forward in addition to making art. Eve with her art, it’s re-visiting trauma to have conversations in her own community, and not for the white gaze. So I think I wanted to end the part about belonging on that note, because ultimately, social movements need broad alliances, but not just with white people, but also amongst people of color. We saw a little bit of that with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and also when it became a global movement across the world 2020 onwards. Yet it is also happening, like in this example, through grassroots solidarity and place-based projects. We need to find ways of documenting these and for scholars to find the language to analyse and understand that beyond people just representing their own kind of primordial identity (or identity based on markers at birth). If you're talking about anti-racism work in social movements, then we do need to start working beyond those silos as well. And that's when belonging can, or localised forms of belonging can make a difference.
And belonging sort of sidestepping whiteness in a way. That's right. The conditions that whiteness enforces on the people. One of the interesting things I've noticed since leaving Australia is some new work – activist work but also academic work and creative work – between Chinese people and First Nations people and the histories of intermarriage and interconnections. Again, sort of sidestepping whiteness as much as possible.
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