Migration is one of the more politicised and polarising issues in European public and political debates. This is partly due to the rise of extreme right movements, but not only. All over the political spectrum and in all sorts of media outlets, more and more leaders and opinionmakers are adopting some of the frames promoted from exclusionary stances. On the other hand, a myriad of civil society organisations is trying to counter these hegemonic narratives and build alternatives ways of telling migration and integration issues. How can these organisations help counter exclusionary discourses on migration? What are the challenges they face? And the best strategies to promote more inclusive accounts from the grassroots?
These are some of the questions tackled in the second programme of the BRIDGES Podcast Series, which counts on the participation of civil society representatives from Germany, Italy, and Spain, including: Ada Ugo Abara, founder or Arising Africans and promoter of the campaign “Dalla Parte Giusta della Storia” (On the right side of history) in Italy; Juli Tello, a member of Stop Mare Mortum, a citizen platform founded in Spain against the backdrop of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015; and Lisa Lynch, an active member of the local chapter of Seebrücke in Mainz, a decentralised, international social movement that promotes safe havens for people fleeing to Europe. All of them bring their own experiences to this podcast conducted by Cristina Sala i Soler, BRIDGES Communications Officer.
This programme is the result of a workshop with civil society representatives hosted by CUAS Mainz on September 30, 2022, as part of the activities of BRIDGES Work Package 4, which aims to analyse the role of these organisations in countering exclusionary discourses on migration and integration issues. The podcast also includes some audio fragments from news stories by Al Jazeera English, The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal in order to better illustrate the social and political polarisation around migration and integration issues in the European public sphere.
The podcast is also available at BRIDGES Youtube channel.
