Re-Orienting Refugee Representation? A Multimodal Analysis of Syrian Refugee Representation on the Social Media Platform "Humans of New York"
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines a selection of photo-narratives from the social media account Humans of New York, which documented the experiences of Syrian refugees in the fall of 2015. It questions how an alternative media platform may challenge or reinforce traditional tropes utilized by mainstream media to represent a marginalized group such as Syrian refugees. To engage in the analysis, codes were developed from the literature review on Orientalism, neo-Orientalism, media representations of Islam and of refugees, as well as from theories of visual social semiotics and narrative analysis. The results suggest that while alternative platforms may challenge aspects of the Orientalist discourse, this discourse is also seen to adapt and persist through more subtle manifestations. The HONY audience is more likely to affirm representations that fit within the neo-liberal notion of who is an acceptable and “worthy†refugee.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it