This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, as keynote speaker of the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Research Showcase of 2021, Professor Nuala Finnegan of University College Cork gave a plenary lecture entitled ‘Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities’.

Professor Finnegan began her lecture by showing an image of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine in June 2018, in which Trump is depicted looking down on a distressed child crying. This is a reconfiguration of a now infamous image, wherein this child is watching her mother being searched at the U.S.-Mexico border. This brought us to the child separation process of April 2018 during the Trump administration, and the inhumanity of this.

Professor Finnegan identified three primary tropes of representation of children at the border: children as dead, distressed, or imprisoned. She criticised the lack of integrity shown within the fields of journalism and politics regarding such representations, as the migrant child and their trauma has often been used for political photo opportunities, or as disaster pornography in humanitarian campaigns. Professor Finnegan therefore covered the faces of children and migrants in the images she used throughout the lecture to respect their privacy and agency. She considered what happens when other representations of children enter the fray, asking: how does this disrupt the narrative?

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