Regimenting migrant storytelling

Abstract In this study, we examine the online stories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers curated by UK-based charity organisations. Through a mixed-methods approach, we focus on the online emergence of a positive storytelling canon that privileges certain affective positions over others. These positions feed into a problematic sense-making about migration in the UK that celebrates the stories of those migrants who incur positive (affective) changes in their lives, at the expense of potentially marginalizing others. Using a critical storytelling perspective that draws on the frameworks of affective positioning and small stories, we take one representative story as our focus to illustrate the affective participation frameworks made available to migrants. We discuss the linguistic and multimodal configuration of the story online, and the implications of the affective positions created for migrants for wider discourses about migration in the UK. Finally, we show how certain exemplary stories are static and affect-centred and do not seem to capitalise on dialogic and interactive participatory formats, unlike other forms of online storytelling. We argue that they contribute to a positive migrant storytelling canon that is well established in advocacy contexts and may have overtly empowering but covertly disempowering effects.