‘What do we see when we look at people on the move’? A visual intervention into civil sphere and symbolic boundary theory

Abstract

Photographs of migrants can evoke powerful reactions. Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–16, politicians, media, and the public have all expressed strong opinions about people who cross borders. Within the civil spheres of Western democracies, debates about who belongs as a ‘good citizen’, and who should be excluded as an ‘anticivil’ outsider, result in consequences for migrants and locals alike. In this article, we engage in a visual intervention into theories of the civil sphere and symbolic boundaries. Through a cultural sociological analysis of 80 interviews conducted amongst Czech residents, we examine the boundary work surrounding two photographs of people crossing borders. The Czech context represents a compelling case through which to do so; Czechia is neither a primary transit or destination country, yet migration issues figure prominently in its civil sphere. Our findings are based on thematic and reflexive questions that organise the different grounds for boundary work amongst the RPs: ‘What are we looking at’? ‘Who are they?’ and ‘Should “we” help “them”’? The broader implications of our findings concern the role of visuality in conceptions of democratic civil spheres and the presence of boundary work that delineates who belongs and who does not.

INTRODUCTION

Photographs of migrants can evoke powerful reactions. Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–16, politicians, media, and the public have all expressed strong opinions about people who cross borders to enter Europe. Within the ‘civil spheres’ (Alexander 2006) of Western democracies, debates about who belongs as a ‘good citizen’, and who should be excluded as an ‘anticivil’ outsider, result in consequences for locals and migrants alike. Locals worry about potential security and economic threats, and wonder if ‘their culture’ is in danger of disappearing. Migrants often become the victims of stereotyping and prejudice. Our study investigates the ways in which people express their attitudes toward people crossing borders through the construction and maintenance of symbolic boundaries.

More specifically, this article is situated at the intersection between the ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander 2006) and the ‘visual sphere’ (Nathansohn and Zuev 2013). Whilst we believe that civil sphere theory (CST) offers a compelling conceptual framework for visual scholars studying democratic culture, we need to acknowledge its shortcomings regarding the visual dimension of civic life. Thus, we engage in a visual intervention into cultural sociological theories of the civil sphere and symbolic boundaries, not only to highlight the importance of visuality for meaning-making, but also to showcase their usefulness for the study of visual (democratic) culture. Through a cultural sociological analysis of 80 interviews conducted amongst Czech residents, we examine the research participants’ (RPs) boundary work surrounding two photographs of people crossing borders. The Czech context represents a compelling case through which to do so. Czechia is neither a primary transit or destination country, yet migration issues figure prominently in its civil sphere. At the same time, levels of migration have been increasing steadily since the millennium, and as of 2021, about 6 percent of the population was foreign born, mainly hailing from Ukraine, Slovakia, and Vietnam for work or business (CSO 2022a). The prior year, 1164 people sought asylum (mostly from Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine) and only 42 were granted international protection (CSO 2022b). As we conclude this article, the country has granted protection for approximately 300 000 Ukrainian refugees (MI CR 2022). Nevertheless, as Messing and Ságvári (2019) suggest, Czechia remains one of the most anti-migrant countries in Europe, with media and political elites emphasising the securitisation of migration (Tkaczyk 2017; Jaworsky 2021; Gallup International 2022).

The following section elaborates the theoretical basis for our analysis. We then discuss our methodological approach and data collection and analysis procedures. Our findings are presented in three sections, based on thematic and reflexive questions that organise the different grounds for boundary work. ‘What are we looking at’? covers the theme of scepticism about the intent of the migrants depicted in the photographs, largely concerning their ‘illegal’ and/or unknown status. ‘Who are they?’ delves into deeper contemplation; the boundaries RPs draw between ‘us/we’ and ‘them/they’ are based on different characteristics, most prominently gender, age, physical ability, appearance, culture, and religion. Reflections on ‘should “we” help “them”’? reveal images of ‘our’ society as well as notions about the civility of ‘good citizens’ and pollution of ‘anticivil’ others. To conclude, we discuss the broader implications of our findings, with regard to the role of visuality in conceptions of democratic civil spheres and the presence of boundary work that delineates who belongs and who does not.

THE CIVIL SPHERE, SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES, AND VISUALITY

Cultural sociology, with its emphasis on meanings and meaning-making, has been increasingly devoted to the study of democratic life in modern societies. At the centre of this efforts has been Alexander’s theory of the civil sphere (2006), for which democracy is not just a political system, but a way of life informed by shared cultural codes. At first glance, the meaning-centred approach of CST is a promising theoretical starting point for scholars of visual culture, who want to understand how democratic values and ideals are performatively (re-)enacted and culturally represented. Upon closer inspection, however, cultural sociological theories such as CST (Alexander 2006), as well as those on symbolic boundaries (Jaworsky 2016; Rétiová, Rapoš Božič, Klvaňová, and Jaworsky 2021; Lamont and Molnár 2002), share a blind spot with regard to the visuality of social life. We find that despite their emphasis on symbolic forms and meaning-making, visual symbols such as photographs have not been adequately theorised. In the field of visual studies, the implications of visuality for democratic life have been more thoroughly explored, from the figure of the ‘citizen-spectator’ (Green 2009; also Azoulay 2008; Hariman and Lucaites 2011) to visual representations of (the) ‘people’ (Schober 2020), from civil rights activism (Moser 2021) to international migration and anti-migration movements (Authors 2018; Doerr 2017). Our aim is to bring civil sphere theory and visual studies into a dialogue, cultivating visual sensitivity in the context of contemporary cultural sociological theorising.

Alexander’s CST (2006) offers a sociological perspective on democracy, in which meaning-making processes and cultural structures occupy centre stage. The civil sphere is a discursive and institutional arena that facilitates the incorporation of actors into a society and the production of broad solidarity – in contrast to non-civil spheres such as the economy, race, or gender, in which members of a society are primarily conceived as isolated actors or members of particular social groups. The discourses and institutions of the civil sphere constitute a ‘societal community’, which also defines the political boundaries of the demos and determines who can be legitimately regarded as its representatives. According to the cultural logic of the civil sphere, inclusion and exclusion are inextricably intertwined: first, belonging to a civil sphere can be understood as some form of citizenship, albeit not necessarily in legal terms, which excludes non-citizens from the societal community; second, its symbolic core is often occupied by images of ‘good citizens’, relegating others to the role of second-class citizens; third, every claim of an actor to represent the civil sphere necessarily renders competing claims as anticivil, thus excluding their proponents.

Employing the democratic code and its counter code, actors in the civil sphere portray themselves as civil, pure, and acting in the public interest, whilst painting their opponents as anticivil, impure, and serving particular interests. Studies on populism (Müller 2016; Roberts 2022) often emphasise the polarising logic of populist discourse, in which populist leaders in the name of the ‘pure’ people attack corrupt elites or ‘impure’ minorities. Alexander (2019) contends instead that the polarising logic is emblematic of the civil sphere, of democracy itself. What distinguishes populism from democratic business as usual is rather a matter of degree, a tendency to recast the agonistic struggle for power as an irreconcilable antagonism, and the concerted efforts of populists to undermine the institutions of the civil sphere itself. Further, contemporary populism is often tied to debates about migration and attempts to recast the boundaries of the societal community in primordial and nativist terms. Whilst civil sphere theory focused originally on the incorporation of domestic minorities (Alexander 2006), international migration has become a crucial concern in many contemporary democracies. Public discourses on migration have become an important part of how societies see themselves and how they view the civil and anticivil characteristics of their current and prospective citizens. The ‘welcome culture’ promoted in Germany in the wake of the ‘migration crisis’ in 2015–16 entailed a collective self-image as well as images of migrant-others that were strikingly different from Eastern Central European countries, who framed the ‘crisis’ as an invasion.

In contrast to Alexander’s grand theory of democratic society, the theory of symbolic boundaries, which investigates the ‘conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorise objects, people, practices, and even time and space’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168f.), is more of a middle-range theory, applicable to a wide range of subjects, including migration. For Alexander (2007, 28), the ‘symbolic boundaries to which subjugated groups orient themselves cannot be changed’, although ‘their position on the sacred or profane side of the civil/anticivil boundary certainly can’. In a slightly different vein, the symbolic boundaries approach treats them as ‘tools by which individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168) emphasising the processual aspect of meaning-making. Lamont’s conception of ‘boundary work’, ‘the process by which individuals define their identity in opposition to the that of others by drawing symbolic boundaries’ (Lamont 1992, 33, n. 5), likewise stresses the agency of social actors and the fluidity of symbolic boundaries. Like civil sphere theory, the symbolic boundaries approach originally focussed on relations amongst domestic social groups, such as class relations, but recent research has fruitfully extended the approach to the perception of migrants at multiple levels (for an overview, see Authors 2021).­ For example, at the micro level, Cangià (2017) examines the emotional states amongst Italian youth that go along with representing immigrants as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people and distinguishing between ‘Italians’/’immigrant friends’ and ‘immigrants’. At the meso level, Ulbricht (2019) analyses the role of political discourse in delineating symbolic boundaries between wanted and unwanted immigrants in Germany. Cutting across levels, McAreavey and Krivokapic-Skoko (2019) show that whilst states may frame boundaries in an inclusive way, in everyday interactions, migrants may suffer exclusion.

We regard both CST and theories of symbolic boundaries as complementary, providing different perspectives on the same phenomena, in our case, democratic life. Whilst Alexander (2007) highlights the cultural macrostructures that inform symbolic boundaries and boundary work, Lamont (1992) provides a more micro-perspective on how actors navigate and negotiate the cultural codes of social life. Nonetheless, both theories fail to take into account visuality as a fundamental and irreducible dimension of modern society and, consequently, of democracy. Collective representations, a primary concern for both approaches, often take the form of visual representations. We need to understand how democratic codes and symbolic boundaries are visually encoded in their production as well as decoded in their reception (Hall 1973), both of which constitute a specific type of boundary work. Whilst both theoretical approaches privilege discursive modes of meaning-making methodologically, we insist that a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of social meanings cannot afford to side-line visual meanings.

Visuality is not theoretically integrated into Alexander’s account of the civil sphere, but we can find an implicit acknowledgement of visuality in the empirical parts of his book that highlight pop-cultural phenomena, for example, the widespread appreciation of Barbara Streisand’s iconic ‘Jewish nose’, which signalled the growing inclusion of Jews in US society (Alexander 2006, 532; see also Hariman and Lucaites 2011). Whilst Alexander’s work has started tackle questions of materiality and visuality, for example in his works on visual arts (2008) and celebrities (2010), they are not systematically addressed in The Civil Sphere (2006) or in later works in this paradigm. Similarly, the symbolic boundaries approach has so far failed to acknowledge the importance of visual clues for the boundary work of social actors in everyday life.

Democratic codes and symbolic boundaries are embodied and solidified by visual symbolic forms such as photography. For example, there is a growing body of literature on refugee photography. Malkki (1995) highlights the inclusive boundary surrounding refugees, making them the ‘embodiment of pure humanity’. Szörényi's (2006) analysis of coffee-table books containing refugee photographs instead emphasises the distance from the viewer – a divide between a privileged viewing agent and the viewed object ‘on offer’ for consumption. Such distance has political implications, with dominant images of refugees coded as dehumanised (Bleiker et al. 2013), deviant and dangerous (Banks 2012), or security threats (Wilmott 2017) able to ‘dilute compassion and cultivate a culture of fear’ (Bleiker et al. 2013, 411–412).

It is especially the purported realism of photography that turns it into a powerful carrier of symbolism:

Photographs work by twinning denotative and connotative forces, by which the ability to depict the world as “it is” is matched with the capacity to couch what is being depicted in a symbolic frame that helps us recognize the image as consonant with broader understandings of the world (Zelizer 2005, 31).

In photographs, symbolic visual meanings become ‘naturalised’ and ‘essentialised’ – just like the discourses and narratives that translate the abstract cultural codes of the civil sphere into a concrete social reality (Alexander 2006, 62–64). At the same time, photographs do not simply fix social meanings and symbolic boundaries but are also the object of practices of meaning-making, open to interpretation by social actors. Through engagement with photographs, spectators enact and negotiate symbolic boundaries. Analysing the reception of press photographs, we highlight the ‘boundary work’ which takes place through visuality.

RESEARCH DESIGN: COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEWING AND PHOTO-ELICITATION

Migration, is a highly politicised issue in the Czech civil sphere; for example, in the 2018 presidential election, it was a leading issue for the candidates, notwithstanding the lack of actual immigrant arrivals (Jaworsky 2021). The Czech context thus provides fruitful terrain for examining how democratic codes about belonging are produced and reproduced through processes of meaning-making. We employed qualitative and interpretive methods to examine the meaning-making practices of social actors in their implicit and explicit dimensions (Flick 2014, 5). We conducted 80 semi-structured interviews that included photo-elicitation with Czech residents from five localities: (1) Brno – a cosmopolitan city in the Moravian region, (2) Vyšší Brod – a town in South Bohemia with a Vietnamese population of 20 per cent; (3) Teplice – a spa town in North Bohemia with a Muslim community; (4) Kuřim – a Moravian town with predominantly labour migration from Ukraine and Russia; (5) a village¹ in the Highlands with virtually no migrants. We selected the RPs through purposeful sampling, striving for diversity in terms of gender, age, and social class (Patton 2014). Moreover, our criteria for selection included proficiency in the Czech language and residence in the locality for at least five years.

The face-to-face and online² interviews, collected in 2020 and 2021, were 50–120 min long and covered the following topics: associations with terms ‘migration’, ‘foreigner’, ‘migrant’, and ‘refugee’;³ the visibility of migrants in Czechia and within the particular locality; personal experience with migration; political orientation; and media consumption preferences. The interview questions included, for instance: What comes to your mind when you hear ‘migration’? How do you perceive people who came to live to Czechia from abroad? How often do you meet with people from abroad living in Czechia? What do you usually learn about migration from media? We followed the principles of comprehensive interviewing, based on active listening, and demonstration of empathy and acceptance towards RPs (Ferreira 2014). The aim was to come to a better understanding through accessing ‘a narrative that comments, values, interprets, lists and contrasts facts’ (Ferreira 2014, 123).

In order to examine how migration-related attitudes and democratic cultural logic are visually encoded and decoded, we included photo-elicitation at the end of each interview. Photo-elicitation is ‘an interviewing technique in which researchers elicit information from participants by using photographs’ (Richard and Lahman 2015, 5). Photo-elicitation illuminates processes of meaning-making, especially when research participants are invited to not only describe a photograph but also to engage in interpretation and introspection (Ndione and Remy 2018, 64). The method is particularly suitable for cultural-sociological analysis, as it allows us to ‘gain access to implicit cultural and identity-related data and meanings [and] to understand the hidden logics and subjective experiences that verbalisation alone cannot express’ (Ndione and Remy 2018, 68).

During our interviews, the photo-elicitation represented an ethnographic moment in which we could observe the reactions, emotions, and reflexive thinking of the RPs. We presented our RPs with four photographs depicting different groups of migrants and invited them to speak about what came to their mind when looking at each photograph:

1. Vietnamese women sewing face masks during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic⁴

2. A boat with African migrants being rescued by humanitarian aid workers in the Mediterranean Sea⁵

3. Refugees waiting behind the fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border⁶

4. Ukrainian workers at a bus station⁷

We intentionally selected photos circulating in Czech media depicting specific migrant groups and different situations. Whilst Vietnamese and Ukrainians are amongst the most numerous immigrant groups in Czechia (Photographs 1 and 4), the potential acceptance of refugees from the Middle East and Africa (Photographs 2 and 3) has become a topic of heated political debates since 2015 and remains a powerful trigger for moral panic. Furthermore, the first pair of photographs depicts migrants in situations connected to work and looking for work, whereas the second pair thematises the act of border-crossing. In this article, we focus on Photographs 2 and 3, consistently interpreted by our RPs as ‘political photographs’:

Political photographs become political precisely when interpreters convince us that a photograph does not only refer to an external reality, but also says something important and potentially troubling about the viewer and the collective(s) he/she belongs to. (Olesen 2020, 969)

In talking about Photographs 2 and 3, RPs often transcended the particular situation captured by the photograph connecting it to culturally anchored repertoires of evaluation. The narrations about Photographs 1 and 4 often lacked this transcendental reference and were mostly perceived as depicting mundane situations.⁸

Photographs 2 and 3 depict two different but emblematic migration situations, an act of helping and a person behind a fence, which correspond to different collective stances towards migration. Thus, they provide the context for meaning-making not only about migration per se, but also about ‘us’ in the sense of ‘societal community’, and its values, norms, and collective representations. Whilst the photo of the refugee at the fence zooms in on individual face expression, the photo of the rescue mission captures an anonymous mass of people. The rationale behind this compositional variety is to draw attention of the RPs to different dimensions of migration.

In many cases, the photographs elicited rich narrative data. The RPs contemplated the motives for migration, its potential risks, and the moral responsibility of migrants and destination countries. Moreover, the RPs were asked not only about what they see and think about the depicted situation, but also about how they feel about it. Thus, the photo-elicitation enabled us to access the affective dimension of meaning-making, bringing to the fore emotions of fear, discomfort, pity, or despair.

The rich narrative data obtained from the interviews were transcribed and analysed through a process of initial open coding and subsequent focused coding (Thornberg and Charmaz 2014). The codes were developed both inductively from the data and deductively from the literature. For instance, we developed the code group ‘grounds for boundary work’, identifying a range of different characteristics (gender, age, religion, language, etc.) that served as a basis for drawing boundaries between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ types of migrants. This interpretive analysis allowed us to access the cultural logic of the civil sphere, built upon the symbolic boundaries between ‘us’, namely, ‘good citizens’, and ‘them’, symbolically polluted, anticivil others.

ANALYSIS: STIRRING UP CIVIL CODES THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS

We differentiate the analysis based on three distinct themes within the findings, represented through RPs’ reflexive questioning. First, we show how the two photographs, despite depicting different migration situations, evoke similar feelings of suspicion and uncertainty. The RPs formulate their scepticism about migration in relation to both photographs, expressing concerns about the unknown and seemingly ‘illegal’ status of the photographed people. Moreover, in the case of Photograph 2, several RPs problematise the intent behind the photograph. Second, we discuss how the initial scepticism enables deeper contemplation about the people depicted in the photograph. The boundaries RPs draw between ‘us/we’ and ‘them/they’ are based on different visual characteristics. The RPs pose reflexive questions, asking why ‘they’ are only young and healthy men, why ‘they’ are coming here, and if ‘they’ are really in need. Third, boundary work serves as a ground for making assumptions about ‘them’ – the migrants – and ‘us’ – the ‘societal community’ of reception. Based on these assumptions, RPs contemplate whether we should or should not help people on the move. Such reflections, stimulated by the immersion of spectators in the photographs, bring to light not only meaning-making about the phenomenon of migration and images of ‘our’ society, but also cultural repertoires rooted in the cultural logic of the civil sphere – the notions of civility of ‘good citizens’ together with symbolic pollution of ‘anticivil’ others.

What are we Looking at?

For many of the RPs, Photographs 2 and 3 evoke similar feelings of suspicion and uncertainty, whether about the people depicted in the photographs, or the photographic medium itself. Illegality is a common concern, reflecting legal grounds for boundary work that differentiates deserving from underserving migrants (cf. Jaworsky 2016); it is an anticivil disqualifier par excellence. Both photos are mostly read as depicting border-crossing situations with presumably illegal intent. Although Photograph 2 is often aptly recognised as a rescue mission, and Photograph 3 as an act of segregation of migrants behind what could be a border fence or the enclosure of a refugee camp, most RPs articulate their doubts about the intentions of the represented migrants. Worries about illegal entry seem to relate to the mode of transportation – by boat, in Photograph 2, and seemingly on foot, in Photograph 3. As a 43-year-old head of construction retail remarks, ‘This way of transport and import of migrants is kind of strange’. The absence of modern vehicles of transportation in the photographs, such as airplane, car, or ferry, can represent another factor that renders the depicted people, their motivations, and intentions, suspicious.

A 26-year-old high school teacher frames the migrants’ potential illegality as a ‘problem’ whilst contrasting their apparent modes of transportation as well as places of origin:

These [people in Photograph 3] are at least on land, so it doesn’t look like they came from anywhere. Those [people in Photograph 2], I think, looked like they were coming from Africa or somewhere … But it’s actually still the same problem, right? That it looks like they probably illegally entered somewhere since they are behind the fence. So, it’s kind of a similar situation.

The people in Photograph 3, she notes, are ‘at least on land’, so they haven’t come from just ‘anywhere’. The word ‘anywhere’ in this case might very well be followed by the word ‘dangerous’ or ‘threatening’. She contrasts this with the boat refugees in Photograph 2, talking about Africa as a rather dubious, if not dangerous place, an unlikely source for people who would at some point belong to Czechia’s civil sphere. But the bottom line is nevertheless that the migrants in both photographs have entered ‘illegally’ or intend to do so.

For a young textbook designer and part-time server, the issue with both photos is that ‘I don’t know any of them’. He would like to ‘see some kind of identification’, that would transform the anonymous mass of migrants into suitable prospective citizens. The threat from ‘the unknown’, articulated in many comments about both photos, seems to stem from the uncertainty about migrants’ intentions. The code of the civil sphere distinguishes between civil and anticivil motives as the basis of civil and anticivil social relations (Alexander 2006, 58). The crowds of people travelling by boat on the open sea as well as those waiting behind the fence are not associated with official modes of transportation, seemingly bypassing border controls and registration, which cloaks them in a shroud of anticivil ‘secrecy’, antithetical to the democratic ‘transparency’ promoted by the civil sphere. Uncertainty about the migrants’ motives might also be an effect of the photographs themselves, which remain silent or at least ambiguous about the motives of the represented people (in contrast to the Photographs 1 and 4, depicting migrants working or looking for work).

Whilst most of the RPs’ concerns are about the illegality and anonymity of the migrants, Photograph 2 additionally engendered feelings of suspicion about the intent behind the photograph, a distrust towards journalists and the communicative institutions of mass media. This sentiment echoes prior findings on the lack of trust in and suspicion of media manipulation amongst the Czech public (Volek and Urbániková 2017). A 36-year-old police officer shares his ambivalent reaction to the photo:

RP: It is photographed to evoke emotions, that is for sure. And that’s exactly what I think – the media don’t present it well, because … it’s photographed to immediately evoke compassion.

I: And does it evoke compassion in you?

RP: Well, it raises a lot of questions in me, I don’t know if it is compassion, but … it’s frightening. Just the idea of me sitting in such a crowded boat somewhere at sea; it’s frightening, but I don’t know if that is compassion.

His ambivalence is reflected in his acknowledgement that the scenario in the photograph is ‘frightening’, but he doesn’t want to commit to the compassion he believes the photo is meant to elicit. Or, put in a different way, the imputed intent behind the photograph allows him to revoke the compassion that he otherwise would have been compelled to feel. A 31-year-old woman, an administrative worker on parental leave, wonders too, if the photo is ‘really genuine. […] If it is fake or if it is not fake’. She is also ambivalent: ‘On one hand, I pity these people, but on the other hand, I just can’t recognise if it is genuine or not’. Uncertainty and suspicion extend beyond the intent of the migrants and of the communicative institutions that depict them, into a deeper reflection about the very nature of the migrants and their potential incorporation into the Czech civil sphere.

Who are ‘They’?

The question of who ‘they’ are permeates all the reflexive questioning and boundary work amongst the RPs. Through questioning the very nature and characteristics of the migrants, the RPs engage in boundary work that opens the door towards even greater reflexivity. We find this reflexivity important because it demonstrates that attitudes towards migrants are not necessarily fixed or settled. Instead, they evolve and transform through the processes of boundary work. RPs draw boundaries based on characteristics inferred from visual appearance, such as gender, age, and physical ability, which also relate to various non-civil spheres, whose relationships to the civil sphere are negotiated. Many RPs want to know why only ‘healthy young men’ are the ones migrating. A 39-year-old villager and a product manager in a bank queries Photograph 2:

The question is also who is fleeing, right? Here I only see young men, well, almost … And that’s the question – what do they imagine? Like that they will settle down somewhere, and the rest of their families will come? Or that they will earn some money and return back home? Like … I sometimes miss the … that I do not know their intentions.

Clearly, the RP is uncertain or even suspicious about the ‘young men’ in the photograph and their intentions. Whilst she discusses different migration scenarios (settling and family reunification, or working and leaving), she is definitely ‘missing’ something. This uncertainty feeds into the threat from ‘the unknown’ discussed above, which creates and reinforces feelings of distrust towards the photographed people and their situation. Maybe there is also something missing from her account as well, an acknowledgement of a – possibly racialised – fear of sexual violence evoked by the young men on the photograph. This fear of sexual violence is made explicit by a 37-year-old lawyer, who noted the ‘gender disbalance’ in Photograph 3 saying ‘there’s danger of rape and […] it feels threatening to me’. A racialised anxiety about male sexuality was also expressed by a 56-year-old teacher: ‘How many of these men will – and I will be vulgar now – jerk off because a beautiful blond girl was transporting them?’

Both men and women⁹ raised questions and concerns about the fact that young men predominate in the photos, but there were also different considerations and justifications. In several cases, able-bodied men are seen as less deserving of ‘our’ help and compassion than mothers and children, as a 31-year-old administrative worker on parental leave put it:

Most of all, the man in front can be seen [in Photograph 3]. So, I think to myself: It is a strong young man – he will handle it. It would be probably worse if there was a mother with a child or something. But in this case, I think to myself that it is probably going to be difficult, but he will somehow manage it.

What exactly the young men will ‘handle’ or ‘manage’ is not specified. It could be previous experiences, the journey itself but also life after migration. In either case, those who manage are less deserving than those who don’t, although the latter might never reach the destination country in the first place. Furthermore, migrating groups of young men not only raise doubt but also fear amongst some RPs. A middle-aged primary school teacher from the village describes how Photograph 2 makes her feel:

This one is negative, definitely negative. The threat … and the fact that they are men, right? They are men, they are warriors. There were women [in the first photo], they are caregivers. Whereas these are warriors, young people … If they are men, only men, without families, why are they coming here? What are they going to do here, right? A group of people like this, already raises doubts and fears.

The imagery of ‘warriors’ may partially be connected to the depicted mode of transportation, reminiscent of an invasion by boat over the sea, but is also probably racialised (it is unlikely that a crowded boat of young white men would have aroused similar associations). Again, the threat of sexual violence is not explicitly mentioned, but seems implicated in the questions of the RP. As their intentions are not visible, ‘why are they coming here?’ is a repeated query amongst the RPs. The fact that these migrants are men, in her opinion, represents a threat, raising ‘doubts and fears’. Previous research on attitudes toward migrants finds that groups of immigrants with a large share of young men are perceived as security and cultural threats (see, for example, Ward 2019). Clearly, these ‘warriors’ do not qualify for membership in the Czech societal community. The question of what they are going to do ‘here’, amongst ‘us’, looms large.

Finally, the question of whether the photographed people are really ‘migrants who are in need’ arises, particularly in the case of Photograph 3. Reflecting on the migrant in the close range of the spectator, a middle-aged storekeeper debates what a ‘migrant’ should be like:

I have a young man here; he has a nice jacket, a haircut, he is groomed, I don’t think he is a man in absolute need […] But again, I don’t know, something could have happened to him at home, he could have lost his family, I don’t know. I have terribly mixed feelings about this one […] For me, really, when someone is a migrant, they are really in need, and he really doesn’t look like he’s in need … 

Here, the central figure of Photograph 3, in contrast to the ‘warriors’ in Photograph 2, is described as a ‘civilised’ young man, which might qualify him as a fellow citizen but at the same time casts doubt on his neediness.

The ‘terribly mixed feelings’ of the RP represent a ground for reflexive questioning and boundary work. Someone only qualifies as a proper ‘migrant’, if they are ‘really in need’. RPs mostly imaged ‘migrants’ as asylum-seekers in need of help, which is connected to the fact that the word ‘migrant’ has entered the Czech public discourse during the 2015 ‘migration crisis’ and is associated with provision of help to people in need. On the surface, the man in the centre of Photograph 2 doesn’t really appear to be a migrant in this sense, but the RP still considers the possibility that ‘something’ happened that would in fact qualify him as a migrant. As is symptomatic of political photographs (Olesen 2020), the RP transcends the visual meanings of the photo developing imaginative narratives. The boundary work around the concept of ‘need’ delineates migrants as victims (cf. Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner 2016; Van Gorp 2005) and the civil core as humanitarian helpers. The final question in our analysis concerns whether or not migrants qualify as civil enough to warrant such help.

Should ‘We’ Help ‘Them’?

In developing their attitudes towards helping people on the move, RPs draw on the logic of the civil sphere: are ‘they’ civil or anticivil? They form these assessments through boundary work that distinguishes migrant civility based on characteristics inferred from visual indicators. Related to this question are the obligations and identity of the receiving collective: would helping be the ‘civil’ thing to do? Engaging in boundary work, a 43-year-old head of a construction retailer produces an extensive list of civil and anticivil attributes to discuss the deservingness and undeservingness of the young men in Photograph 3, including references to religion:

The question is: how many of them are those Muslims who are dangerous to society? How many people out of these are really poor? How many could not do anything else? It is a question, right? Maybe you saw how they lived in tents, suffering there. Then I’m not surprised that epidemics broke out there, right? […] But what to do about that? How to approach it? How to help them? How to do it, so that they won’t rape their girlfriends in Austria, right? What do we know? We don’t know anything! Inspect them all? We cannot inspect everyone, right? We should help each other – it is written somewhere, maybe in the Bible or somewhere. I don’t know, right? We should help each other, but are these people worth it?

The RP raises many questions – and gives some implicit answers along the way. He identifies the depicted men as Muslims and considers, if not Islam as a whole, then radical Islamism, a threat to society; he refers to poverty as a precondition for help, whilst at the same time portraying the living conditions in refugee camps as unhygienic – leaving it unclear to what extent the refugees are themselves to blame (and disqualified as ‘uncivilised’). He explicitly associates the migration of young men, in this case Mediterranean-looking, with sexual violence, alluding to the case of an Austrian woman who was raped by a person with migrant origin, on which the RP had previously commented: ‘That kind of person should be shot’. References to media reports of sexualised violence in Western European countries are frequent amongst RPs with anti-migrant sentiments. Distrust towards media images depicting provision of help to migrants in need (Photograph 2) interweaves with an emphasis on and trust towards scary headlines reporting on the troubles with migrants in their more multicultural neighbouring countries, Austria and Germany.

Interestingly, the RP not only invokes Islam as a potential threat but also refers to Christianity in a positive manner, as the basis of a civil ethics of helping. Christianity is associated with civility, whilst Islam’s civil character remains at best ambiguous: On the one hand, ‘we’ are compelled to help by the Bible, yet on the other, ‘they’ (Muslims) are suspect and because of how they live, it is no small wonder that they need ‘our’ assistance. Religion serves as a ‘bright’ (Alba 2005) symbolic boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, the civil potential of religion – or at least Christianity – is recognised, its capacity to promote solidarity even across religious divides (Bellah 2015).

This Janus-faced character of religion as a particularising feature, establishing bright boundaries between groups, and as a universalising force, promoting solidarity across groups, can also be found in an interview with a retired real estate manager. First, she laments the fact that the migrants in Photograph 2 are ‘only men, young men, healthy men, who could have just worked at home’. She too questions their motives for migrating: ‘I think, they are running away … . They just want to live better and with social benefits. They certainly do not come here to work’. Nevertheless, she posits (and, perhaps grudgingly, approves) that the migrants will receive assistance from ‘us’ because of ‘our culture’:

And of course, they are also in danger at sea, if there is a storm or something, but everyone would save them. That’s … that’s an expression of our culture – to help one’s neighbour, and I would say that it is the Christianity that we have here … . It’s in us! It’s rooted here and — and I just don’t think they would do the same for us, that they would help us if we went there for some reason. I think they would let us drown.¹⁰

It is remarkable that the RP calls upon ‘the Christianity we have here’ when Czechia is one of the most atheistic countries in the world.¹¹ Whilst the national-level cultural repertoire may be one of a secular country, so-called European values and civilisation bear a Christian tint. This finding is in line with Brubaker’s (2017) argument about current European populism which is based on the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in civilisational terms, particularly with regard to the threat of Islam. Christianity and Islam are, in this sense, not referred to as religious beliefs but as broader cultural repertoires, which can and indeed are used to construct symbolic boundaries. A very clear boundary is drawn through the statement that such migrants would not reciprocate, that ‘they would let us drown’. Again, Christianity is presented as a civil force, promoting assistance and solidarity, whilst Islam is portrayed as non-civil, just serving a particular community, or even as anticivil, as a potential threat to our society and culture.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In this article, we have examined migration-related attitudes amongst Czech residents through their understandings of the visual meanings in photographs. By shedding light on the symbolic universe of meanings conveyed by political photography, we engaged in a visual intervention into theories of the civil sphere (Alexander 2006) and symbolic boundaries and boundary work (Lamont and Molnár 2002; Jaworsky 2016). The combination of these two bodies of theory not only proved useful to examine distinctions drawn by the Czech public between ‘us’, the societal community of reception, and ‘them’, the incoming others, but it also offered insights into how such cultural logic is visually encoded and decoded. Whilst the concept of symbolic boundaries served to identify different grounds for drawing boundaries between ‘good citizens’ and possibly ‘dangerous others’, the concept of the civil sphere helped us to connect it with more macro-level democratic cultural code of civil and anticivil attributes and characteristics.

In-depth interviewing with the photo-elicitation method conducted with a sample of 80 Czech residents showed that in talking about two photographs – one depicting a rescue mission in the Mediterranean Sea and another one showing migrants at the Hungarian border, our RPs utilised the cultural code of the civil sphere. Photo elicitation proved a powerful method, triggering reflexive meaning-making processes about migration whilst at the same time showing how these processes are intertwined with images of ‘us’, as members of a societal community, and the ‘images’ of migrant ‘Others’. Moreover, RPs drew boundaries between deserving and undeserving migrants, linking visible features to desirable and undesirable characteristics of potential fellow citizens. In doing so, they engaged in reflexive thinking and questing of what they saw in the photographs and who the represented people actually are, producing a narrative of why ‘we’ should or should not help ‘them’. The RPs used attributes such as age, gender, and physical condition, but also religion, thus making connections between the civil sphere of universal rights and the non-civil spheres of particular demographic characteristics and interests. Utilising photographs as visual tools enabled this reflexivity, because it provided a concrete point of reference and space for contemplation. Lastly, it also allowed us to explore the emotional dimension of meaning-making and to better comprehend how RPs feel about different groups of migrants and migration situations.

The insights of the RPs into the photographs, conveyed in narrative accounts, brought to light several culturally resonating themes. The first was the presumed illegality of the border crossing in the case of both photographs, linked to the mode of transportation either visible in or suggested by the photographs. Second, in contrast to men, women were implicated not only as more civil (‘caregivers’) but also as more vulnerable and deserving – along with the old, the sick, and the very young. The overwhelmingly positive reception of Ukrainian refugees in 2022, consisting almost exclusively of women and children, seems to confirm this interpretation, although there is undoubtedly also the issue of the cultural (and racial) closeness between Czechs and Ukrainians.¹² Third, although deservingness played a crucial role for our RPs, they also considered the contributions of migrants to their society, primarily reflected by their desire to work. Whilst the young men on the photographs undoubtedly possess the capability to work, their intention to work was frequently doubted or even denied. Instead, the young (black and, respectively, Mediterranean-looking) men in Photographs 2 and 3 were seen as a potential anticivil threat, associated with fears about sexual violence. Furthermore, some RPs linked the Mediterranean-looking men in Photograph 3 to Islam as a potentially disqualifying and anticivil trait. Lastly, whilst race was not explicitly mentioned, obeying certain discursive conventions, it would be naïve to assume that it didn’t play a role in the perception of the young men depicted, especially the ‘warriors’ in Photograph 2, as a security threat and potential source of sexual violence. Far from being model citizens, young men of colour seem to be the poster boys for anticivil and ultimately unwanted migrants. Our RPs went to great lengths to cast doubts on their neediness or their intentions.

The boundary work was aided by the fact that the meaning of some visual markers remained ambivalent, for example, physical appearance. The ‘well-groomed’ Mediterranean young man in Photograph 3 might fulfil certain civilisational standards, which could facilitate his incorporation into Czech society, but at the same time his appearance can be read as a sign of undeservingness. Contrary to the reasonable expectation that able-bodied young men should be viewed as desirable migrants in terms of their contribution to the work-force, actually the opposite was the case. It was simply assumed that young men ‘certainly do not come here to work’. What we can see here at play is reminiscent of what Robert K. Merton called ‘the “damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t” process in ethnic and racial relations’ (Merton 1948, 199). The reflexive questioning concerning the intentions of the photographed people, encapsulated in the question ‘why are they coming here?’ seemed to play a crucial role for forming attitudes towards migrants and, subsequently, for the willingness to provide help or support helping policies of the nation state.

Somehow contrary to our initial claim that photographs ‘naturalise’ and ‘essentialise’ social meaning, we noted that some spectators exhibit strong reflexivity about the photographs shown to them, expressing a feeling or fear of being manipulated by the photographs (or the media actors and institutions behind them). This resistance towards press photographs implicitly acknowledges their agency, whilst at the same time asserting the agency of the spectator. It also points to the fact that the meaning of a photograph is not something given but emerges in the interaction of the spectator and the image. Evidence of strong reflexive capacity amongst members of the broad public shows that, even in a country with vibrant anti-migrant attitudes and popular populist politics based on reluctance towards people on the move, migration-related attitudes are not settled and ‘simply out there’ to be described. Instead, they are actively produced, reproduced, and possibly changed by social actors who draw upon cultural repertoires embedded in civil cultural logic of democracy and engage in boundary work, which in turn produces and reproduces culturally available images of ‘good citizens’ and those perceived as their anticivil counterparts.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic as a part of the standard project ‘The thirteenth immigrant? An in-depth exploration of the public perception of migration in the Czech Republic’, number GA20-08605S.

Notes on contributors

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is an associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Recent books include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with Carlo Tognato and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., Palgrave, 2020) and Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), Her current research focuses on the cultural sociological analysis of perceptions of migration, and conspiracy theories. E-mail: [email protected].

Alica Rétiová

Alica Rétiová is an assistant professor at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). Her research interests include cultural sociology, qualitative methodology, and social theories. She is involved in the research project ‘The thirteenth immigrant? An in-depth exploration of the public perception of migration in the Czech Republic’ funded by Czech Science Foundation. Recent publications include: ‘The role of helping discourse in the “conflict over family” in Slovakia’ (2021) in European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology and ´Shifting categories, changing attitudes: A boundary work approach in the study of attitudes toward migrantś (with I. Rapoš Božič, R. Klvaňová and B. N. Jaworsky, 2021) in Sociology Compass. Email: [email protected].

Werner Binder

Werner Binder is an assistant professor of sociology at Masaryk University, (Czech Republic). His fields of interest include sociological theory, cultural sociology, textual and visual methods of interpretation, the civil sphere and the analysis of public discourses, and, most recently, the sociology of artificial intelligence. He is author of Abu Ghraib und die Folgen (2013, Transcript), and recently published articles are ‘Refugees as Icons: Culture and Iconic Representation’ (with Bernadette N. Jaworsky, 2018) in Sociology Compass and ‘Social imaginaries and the limits of differential meaning. A cultural sociological critique of symbolic meaning structures’ (2019) in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 In order to secure anonymisation of the research participants, we do not specify the name of the village.

2 Online interviewing was employed due to restrictions for preventing the spread of COVID-19.

3 ‘Foreigner’ is the most commonly used term in Czechia to refer to people with a migratory background, whilst ‘migrant’ is often used negatively, carrying connotations of illegality, and ‘refugee’ is its (relatively) more positive counterpart.

4 https://ceskokrumlovsky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/vysebrodsti-vietnamci-pomahaji-obyvatelum-mesta-20200324.html

5 https://www.blesk.cz/galerie/zpravy-svet/984559/lod-vytvarnika-banksyho-v-potizich-s-zenami-detmi-a-mrtvym-migrantem-na-palube-vola-o-pomoc?foto=15

6 http://13imigrant.cz/en/photograph

7 https://www.idnes.cz/ekonomika/domaci/pracovni-vizum-ukrajina-lesnictvi-kurovec-zemedelstvi-potravinarstvi.A191030_170846_ekonomika_mato

8 Although a comparison of ‘mundane’ photographs with ‘political’ photographs has analytical potential (i.e., the meaning of ‘mundane’ might indicate a higher level of integration of Vietnamese and Ukrainians into Czech society), it is beyond the scope of this article to bring deeper insights into the diverse range of narrations elicited by all four photographs. For the sake of analytical depth, we narrowed our analysis to two (political) photographs.

9 Although demographic characteristics were not a part of our analysis, no particular gender differences in meaning-making could be detected.

10 To ‘let someone drown’ is a Czech idiom for letting someone down; in this case, there is literal and figurative meaning.

11 A strong majority of Czechs (72 per cent) identify as atheist, agnostic, or ‘nothing in particular’ (PEW Research Center 2017). Only 29 percent believe in God, and even fewer (21 per cent) consider Christianity a part of their national identity (PEW Research Center 2018).

12 As we conclude this article, there are already some cracks in the largely positive reception of Ukrainians. A survey conducted by Gallup International in late March 2022 reveals that 79 per cent of Czech believe that enough has already been done to help the Ukrainians.