Presented by: Dr Susanne Eichner

While Europe has long been a destination for asylumseekers, refugees, displaced people and economic immigrants, the Syrian Civil War (2011-present) has triggered a spike in migrant numbers. There is a rich reservoir of scholarship on factual representation of the ‘refugee’; however, there is a gap when it comes to television fiction. This talk will explore how Europe’s recent refugee ‘Crisis’ is crystallised, conveyed and transformed within and across European television fiction. Several European (mainly public broadcasters) productions have picked up the topic explicitly – e.g., the Italian production Lampedusa (2016), the German children’s series Dschermeni (2017) and the French- German co-production Eden (2019) – which have attempted to give refugees a voice. This voice has, however, been largely neglected in popular European television drama, producing an asymmetry in representation and in agency. By identifying these strategies and mapping out patterns of inclusion/exclusion, the role and responsibility of fictional formats for understanding the world is addressed.

Biography:

Dr. Susanne Eichner is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, department of Media Studies and Journalism. She employs a crossmedia approach focusing on reception aesthetics and audience research, media sociology, production ecology and popular (serial) culture. She is co-director of the Centre for Transnational Media Research and co-director of Cultural Transformations. Her publications include the books: Agency and Media Reception (Springer, 2014), Transnationale Serienkultur (co-editor, Springer, 2013) and Fernsehen: Europäische Perspektiven (co-editor, UVK, 2014).