Communicating Complexity: The promise of metaphors
How metaphors can nurture new narratives and imaginaries of forced migration
Editors: Annie Neimand, Lauren Parater, Hans Park, Cian McAlone
Language is brimming with metaphors. Our language is embedded with comparisons that, with the utterance of a word or stroke of a pen, can invoke familiar complexities of movements, patterns, emotions, and experience.
Metaphor is pervasive within the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and its associated lingo, thematics and discourses. From ‘waves’ and ‘inundations’ of displaced people to the ‘new dawns’ and ‘collapse’ of accords, metaphor not only lends rhetorical power, but also, through their very choosing, speak to the values and strategies at the core of an organization.
Indeed, it is through testing the persuasive and moral force of metaphors that UNHCR’s Innovation Service and the University of Florida seek to contribute to new narratives and imaginaries of forced migration. In this research, we examine the theory and practice of metaphor: what were the implications on host community sentiment of describing refugee movements as ‘floods’ during the Syrian crisis? How does the framing of crime as a ‘virus’ versus a ‘beast’ influence public opinion on the appropriate response? How can metaphors be used strategically to engage and persuade audiences?
The toolbox for communicating for social change would be incomplete without a reckoning with metaphor. The series of research articles in this series highlights the vital role metaphor plays in communicating complexity and abstraction, by connecting and comparing facets of meaning and experience. It unlocks the steps for creating persuasive and strategic messaging and stories, while contending with the metaphorical expression of emotion, image and ethics.
Metaphors as portals to new understandings of our world
It is the sincere hope of the collaborators in this series of essays that a world of strategy within a deeper understanding of metaphor has been opened up to the reader. We believe that messaging and storytelling that conjures an effective and moral imagination is a core skill when communicating for social good.
It is not lost on the editors of this series that metaphors have become a flashpoint for the ideological schisms in response to the crises of our day. The language of fortresses and sieges, deluges and dilutions, fears and dependence, have too often drowned out the language of refuge, and human and environmental solidarity.
It is incumbent on humanitarians to devise the metaphors for this moment: the language of freedom from persecution and freedom to build new worlds, new social, political and economic configurations against a woeful cycle of destruction; the language of helping and uplifting hands; the language of strength in interdependence and of broadening ‘us’ so wide it ceases to make sense. It is not a figure of the imagination, that courage should be figured in our imaginations.
