Iris Beau Segers

Researcher

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Email i.b.segers@c-rex.uio.no

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Postal address P.O.Box 1097 Blindern 0317 Oslo

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Academic interests

Mobilization, immigration, far right, participatory democracy, social movements, gender studies, international development

Background

Dr. Iris Beau Segers holds a PhD in Media and Communication, acquired at the University of Oslo. She also has a BSc in International Communication in Media and an MSc in Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts, both acquired at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL).

Her work focuses on far-right protest, with a specific focus on anti-immigration and anti-asylum seeker mobilization in Western Europe. She is the author of Mobilization against Asylum Seekers in Contemporary Urban Spaces: Not in Our Backyard, which is part of the Routledge Mobilization Series on Social Movements, Protest and Culture. At C-REX, she manages the data collection for the Comparative Far-right Protest (CFP) project, and she is part of the Horizon 2020 funded DRIVE project, which examines the main drivers of far right and Islamist radicalisation in North-Western Europe.

Awards

Awarded a conference fee waiver at the 2016 ICA conference in Fukuoka, as one of the best student papers presented at the Feminist Scholarship Division.

Positions held

Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo (2020-2021)
Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication – Erasmus University Rotterdam (2015-2016, 2017, 2020-2021)
PhD candidate at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo (2016-2020)

Tags: Political communication, Social Movements, right-wing politics, Migration, Gender

Segers, Iris Beau (2019). New neighbours or a security threat? The role of local stories in anti-asylum seeker centre mobilization in the Netherlands. International Communication Gazette. ISSN 1748-0485. doi: 10.1177/1748048519883514. Full text in Research Archive

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Segers, Iris Beau (2020). ‘Not in my backyard’: A story-based local approach to anti-asylum-seekers’ centre mobilization in the Netherlands. Oslo 07-Media. Show summary
This thesis seeks to explain why certain communities in the Netherlands mobilized against asylum seekers’ centres (‘AZCs’) in the aftermath of the European refugee crisis. It presents a study of one case of protest that occurred in late 2015, in a relatively deprived, multi-ethnic neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city of Rotterdam. The existing literature predominantly focuses on macro-level factors such as material and/or cultural grievances, and institutional and/or discursive political opportunity structures, in explaining anti-immigration attitudes and/or mobilization among European citizens. Although these theories all provide partial answers as to why large numbers of European citizens are increasingly skeptical towards (non-Western) immigration, they fail to explain why only some communities actively mobilize against the establishment of an AZC in their area, whereas most do not. In response to the current limitations of the existing literature, this thesis provides a supplementary explanation that integrates the significance of local storytelling with existing theories. Based on a multimethod, qualitative approach that combines the analysis of interviews, mainstream media and social media, this thesis studies if and how local stories at the community level contributed to anti-AZC mobilization. In doing so, it recognizes that anti-AZC mobilization is inherently a meso-level phenomenon, contrary to dominant mobilization literature that emphasize macro-level mobilization factors. This thesis presents a theoretical model that suggests that macro-level mobilization factors such as grievances and opportunities may apply to local cases of anti-AZC mobilization, but only when these issues become relevant to the community, through local storytelling. Overall, it argues that anti-AZC mobilization at the local level is shaped by interactions between individual perspectives, storytelling, and broader ‘objective’ material, cultural, and political conditions.