"Beyond state of the art including socio economic impact:
One image’s ability to move people and bring them together around new values is a central aspect related to iconic images and their agency. The iconic image of Alan Kurdi may have motivated dominant narrative responses that functioned as an ‘affective intersection’, where central yet often disparate political currents and actors met. The affectivity experienced by the involved subjects in this research connects individual and collective practices and feelings to social meaning. This approach encourages awareness of bodily capacity being constantly shifting and redefined based on relations with other bodies and forces in the world. In addition to this, an image’s agency is not only located in the individual picture, but also ‘in the circulation of the image, its proliferation and durability in the whole sphere of visual culture’. The research emphasize that social ties are based on collective, shared stories that underwrite social relationships compose distinct types of social ties. The assemblages of the many young volunteers and the collective actions seen in my research were a response based on a collective shared story. The research shows that one image had the capacity to convert something abstract, distant and complex into something concrete, proximate and simple, which had affective significance.
The research bridges small scale data with big scale data as well as theories from feminist media studies on affectivity and social sciences and ICT – bridging methods and initiatives that often are interwoven within different disciplines and hence disjointed, which results in fragmented knowledge. The synthetization of disciplines, knowledge and methods has provided insight beyond state of the art in the field: Results from the interdisciplinary project shows that emotions and affectivity bring abstract political ideas close and somehow physical, and contribute to expand the circle of what is close and what we care about. In this case, the image of Alan Kurdi did not function solely as a by-product, but with its agency and affective power, supported by transportable social media channels and groups, it allowed for public assemblies and responses. This is not to say that the image of Alan Kurdi determined young people’s preferences, values or actions, yet it underscores the way in which the image was perceived and young people affectively responded to it, together shaping social assemblages based on connective emotional felt experience to which common meanings were assigned.
The novel insight from this project can contribute to recalibrate school curricula; it provides insight for future studies and points toward a richer understanding of the impact of images in a digitally connected world, vital for policy makers, NGOs and practitioners. The multifaceted understanding on the ""network generation"" correlations with new communication tools, is a much requested knowledge for governments and policy makers who are in need of advanced literacy in order to support the prevention on radicalization and extremism.
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