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POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Emotion
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1358556
This article is part of the Research Topic Sociology of Emotion and Affect in the Age of Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information View all 3 articles

Disinformation and Calculated Care Beyond the Global North: Comparing Refugee Discourses in Australia and India

Provisionally accepted
Sukhmani Khorana Sukhmani Khorana 1*Nisha Thapliyal Nisha Thapliyal 2
  • 1 University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia
  • 2 The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This article explores what 'care' looks like in the specific context of Muslim refugees and asylum seekers within the dominant discourse of humanitarianism (Williams, 2015;Turner, 2019). India and Australia are chosen for this comparative analysis because our aim is to emphasise multidimensional anti-Muslim alliances that are now in place in both contexts between the governments and official and unofficial media that influence humanitarian policies and practice (Abdel Fatteh, 2019;Fazal, Vaid and Jodhka, 2024). We argue that the 'information disorder' that dominates current media ecologies about Muslim refugees in both countries is produced at this nexus of official agents -both state and media institutions -as well as social media content produced by local and global actors that perpetuate anti-Muslim bias (Massoumi, Mills and Miller 2017). More specifically, this article examines how India has responded to emergencies involving the Rohingya refugees (2017 to current -see Tiwari and Field, 2020;Bhattarai, 2022), and Australia's treatment of post-9/11 Muslim refugees and asylum seekers (Martin, 2015). We demonstrate that these states and the media they sponsor are linked to the use of disinformation, or deliberately inaccurate information to seed and perpetuate Islamophobic sentiments (Banaji and Bhat, 2019) and thereby practice a form of 'calculated care' (Silverstein, 2023). The examples in this article highlight the need to build on our understanding of what constitutes humanitarian care towards vulnerable and stateless populations. Furthermore, they call for response strategies that take into cognizance the fact that Islamophobia has been institutionalized in the public sphere in order to promote culturally supremacist discourses of traditional values as well as national security (Poynting and Briskman 2018).Deleted: In the literature on humanitarian care towards refugees and how it is enacted in contingent ways, policies and discourses prevalent in the Global North dominate (Williams, 2015;Turner, 2019).

    Keywords: disinformation, care, Refugees, Muslim, Rohingya, Biloela, India, Australia

    Received: 20 Dec 2023; Accepted: 31 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Khorana and Thapliyal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sukhmani Khorana, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia

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