Abstract

Humanitarian actors often present refugees as vulnerable to mobilize support. Their visual framing, in particular, moves refugees’ helplessness to the center. Critical scholars, however, argue that this representation can have exclusionary effects. In this article, we outline a research agenda to examine this claim empirically and provide initial results testing it. Based on a survey experiment, we show that vulnerability representations have significant effects on the perception of refugees as more dependent than refugees in capacity representations. These perceptions are linked to the view that refugees are economically burdensome, which, in turn, is linked to negative attitudes towards asylum seekers.

摘要

人道主义行动者经常将难民描述为易动员支持的弱势群体。尤其是他们的视觉框架将难民的无助感转移到中心。然而，批评学者认为，这种表示可能具有排他性效果。在这篇文章中，我们概述了一个研究议程，以实证检验这一主张，并提供对其进行检验的初步结果。基于一项调查实验，我们表明，在能力表征中，脆弱性表征对难民比难民更依赖的看法有显着影响。这些看法与难民在经济上造成负担的观点有关，而这种观点又与对寻求庇护者的消极态度有关。