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It was two extraordinary moments in Australia’s asylum politics that first set Associate Professor Sukhmani Khorana on course to becoming a leading scholar on migrant media, the politics of empathy and belonging, and self-representation for refugees. 

The first was ‘the Tampa affair’ in August 2001, when Prime Minister Howard stopped the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa from landing with 433 asylum-seekers rescued at sea – a dramatic standoff that gripped attention around the world. The second was another rescue at sea, in October 2001; photographs of this brave and life-saving operation would soon, in the throes of a finely balanced election campaign, be passed off by a government minister as pictures of children thrown overboard by their parents. It became known as the ‘children overboard’ affair.

An undergraduate at the University of Adelaide in the early 2000s, Sukhmani was rapt as a lecturer unpacked how these two sagas were leveraged for political benefit.

‘As a student of media and literature, I was not only intrigued by the construction of images that have subsequently swayed public sentiment and policy despite evidence to the contrary,’ she says, ‘but also motivated to help make change through research, advocacy and collaborations with the community and creative sectors.’

Now a Scientia Associate Professor at ºÚÁÏÍø´óʼÇ, she has pursued that initial spark ever since. 

Much of her work has been on refugee documentaries, empathy and witnessing. ‘I have written about, and conducted director interviews and audience research on a number of refugee-themed documentaries produced in Australia in the past couple of decades,’ she says. 

‘I am particularly interested in the ones that have moved beyond the film festival circuit and encouraged ‘community screenings’ in order to have broader impact,’ Professor Khorana says.

One of Professor Khorana’s projects was a series of three short films, Passage: Stories of Migration and Belonging (2019). She worked with six young migrants in southwestern Sydney and professional filmmakers to create work capturing the depth and emotion of their migrant and refugee experiences.

This year she a co-authored the book Migrants, Television and Australian Stories: A New History. She is also the author of Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (2023), The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia (2018).

Professor Khorana also researches on migration and mis- and disinformation. 

‘I am working on the mediated myths about migrants and refugees through the angle of mis- and disinformation. This includes the culturally specific tropes used, as well as the platforms that are used to amplify in the era of an information disorder,’ she says.

Dr Khorana will bring her expertise to this year’s Kaldor Centre Conference, to speak in the session exploring how to cultivate meaningful dialogue and counter misinformation in polarised and populist times. The complexity of the challenge in 2025 animates her work.

‘Forced migration is an issue that is highly dependent on media visibility, invoking public attention and sentiment, and also using advocacy ethically and strategically to ensure policy change for groups and not just individuals,’ she says. 

‘These issues are more complex and more pertinent than ever in the current political and media ecosystem in Australia and across the globe.’

What Dr Khorana wants more people to focus on is bringing meaningful participation into media and public discourse. ‘While there is growing recognition of including refugee voices/voices of those with lived experience of displacement in decision-making about forced migration, this is still not commonplace in mainstream media accounts of this issue. 

‘This is a longstanding problem,’ she says, ‘but it needs to be addressed alongside appealing to policymakers and other stakeholder groups. Holistic social change – which includes refugee protection and refugees having a sense of belonging – cannot take place unless the discourses of mainstream representation also shift significantly and represent those who have experienced forced migration on their own terms.’

See Dr Sukhmani Khorana, Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at ºÚÁÏÍø´óÊÂ¼Ç Sydney, at the 2025 Kaldor Centre Conference on the first panel, ‘Conversations across divides: Fostering constructive dialogue in the public square’. Find further details and register .

For more, visit the ºÚÁÏÍø´óÊÂ¼Ç Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.