Informing migrants, governing mobility: the politics of knowledge in public information campaigns on irregular migration

This doctoral dissertation explores how awareness-raising campaigns on irregular migration construct and circulate biassed knowledge that normalise restrictive understandings of mobility. Presented as a compendium of three articles, the thesis combines two in-depth case studies – one examining an International Organization for Migration campaign and one analysing a UNHCR campaign – with a third article focused on the production phase of several European campaigns. Across these contributions, the dissertation examines the dual sites of such campaigns, both as textual artefacts and as products of institutional production, showing how they operate as epistemic and political technologies rather than neutral instruments of communication. Combining multimodal discourse analysis with interviews and ethnographic insights into campaign design processes, the research traces how meaning is constructed across verbal, visual and digital channels, and how it is negotiated among the actors who produce and fund these initiatives. Theoretically, the thesis draws on critical discourse studies, feminist and postcolonial theory, and Foucauldian approaches to governmentality and biopolitics to interrogate the interplay between knowledge, power and representation in migration governance. It demonstrates that humanitarian and deterrent rationalities are deeply intertwined, producing selective truths that frame mobility primarily through risk, responsibility and protection while obscuring structural inequalities and alternative imaginaries. By conceptualising information as a persuasive rather than neutral force, the thesis contributes to broader debates on the politics of knowledge production, revealing how communication practices sustain dominant epistemic orders and delimit what can be thought, said and done about migration.