Narratives of Migration and Their Relation to the Concept of Polycrisis

In this chapter, the notion of polycrisis is explored through an analysis of the term in online discourse. Special attention is devoted to the representation of migration as a part of polycrisis. Migration is a long-standing human experience that affects multiple aspects of people’s lives; framing it as a crisis—as has been done in public discourse for several decades, and as reiterated by its inclusion within the concept of polycrisis—is a contingent choice which risks obscuring the complexities and significance of this phenomenon. Therefore, the first part of the study features a corpus-based analysis of online content discussing polycrisis (articles, blog posts, essays and informative material), carried out to describe the discursive construction of polycrisis—its status as a term, the meanings and concepts it is associated with, its potential as a framing device and the representation(s) it provides of migrants and migration. In the second part of the study, these representations are contrasted with the analysis of a set of autobiographical migration narratives retrieved from two migration museum websites, in order to identify similarities and differences between the perspective of international organizations and scholars who use the term “polycrisis” and the personal perspectives of people on the move.