School of Journalism and Mass Communication assistant professor, Alex Scott, recently published his new monograph "Visions of Migration: News Images and the Production of Knowledge on the U.S. Southern Border," detailing migrant representation in the media. Utilizing his expertise in photojournalism and social representations, Scott aimed to shine a light on how the media portrays migrants at the US southern border.

“It’s a content analysis on the patterns of representation when it comes to migration, and the way that audiences see migration most frequently in news,” Scott said. 

For his monograph, Scott spent time studying how the current media portrays the migrant community before interviewing photojournalists who have spent time capturing the migrant community at the southern border. He found that many media cover stories of migrant groups rather than individual migrants. Scott said many photojournalists accompany law enforcement to the border and are expected to tell a story from that point of view, rather than through the migrants’ experiences as well. These findings led Scott to the conclusion that many stories coming from the southern border do not illustrate the stories of migrants.

“A photojournalist that I interviewed talked about how it’s a very, very weird enterprise that they have to negotiate with,” Scott said. “There’d be no pictures at all if there wasn’t that sort of interaction…with law enforcement.” 

Scott said photographs don’t always show the entire story, posing challenges for coming up with solutions to representations issues.

“Scholars often critique the way we represent things without offering any solutions and I think a very detailed account of the entire process is the first step to finding some solutions to that.” Scott said.

Professor Scott’s monograph is now available through the quarterly journal Journalism & Communication Monographs (JCM).