This paper aims to understand how media outlets, political actors and activist groups have come to interpret the dead of the Lampedusa shipwreck on the 3rd of October in 2013. Moreover, it defends the hypothesis that these mediations work around and play with the invisibility/visibility of the dead. Through a genealogy of the various interpretations that were made, this paper shows how the dead were first represented as bodies, to be treated materially and symbolically; secondly, as public policy issues, caught up in political controversies; and finally, as people with fundamental rights, to be respected and remembered.
Topic:
Migration, Refugees, Immigrants, and Humanitarian Crisis