Aylan Kurdi Report Published

I’ve mentioned previously that I contributed an article, called “On the Iconology of Aylan Kurdi, Alone”, to a report about the impact of the Aylan Kurdi photographs on social media. I’m pleased to say that the report has now been published, and you can download it from the Visual Social Media Lab’s website. This contains 15 reports covering quantitative and qualitative aspects of social media and viewer response to the images.

Everyone who was involved in this report recognised that the image of Aylan Kurdi acted as a cipher for the for the wider plight of refugees escaping intolerable conditions in their own countries, and that this was simply the most publicised of the incalculable tragedies suffered by so many. There are many reasons for this, and this is what many of us have set out to explore in our articles. I encourage you to download it and have a read. (Due to the terrible nature of the images involved, no pictures were published—we linked to them instead, which you can view at your discretion).

For my own purposes, I’m going to list where this report has been highlighted in the press (international, national, and local): Guardian (UK), Buzzfeed (CA), the Independent (UK), Daily Mail (UK), The Scotsman UK), Yahoo (UK), AOL (UK), BT (UK), Irish Examiner (IE), Corriere della Sera (IT), Asian Image (UK), Yorkshire Post (UK), Sheffield Star (UK), Lancashire Evening Post (UK), PR Week (UK/US/Asia), The Next Web (Internat’l), Quartz (Internat’l), .

The report can be referenced thus: Vis, F., & Goriunova, O. (Eds.). (2015). The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi*.  [Online]. http://visualsocialmedialab.org/projects/the-iconic-image-on-social-media.