Expériences de travailleurs des médias en Belgique, stratégies pour maintenir une identité professionnelle

Abstract

The interest of this master thesis is to identify how media workers in exile – meaning they cannot live in their home country—arrive, settle and make prospects in Belgium. A skilled segment of the refugee group, they develop specific strategies to maintain a professional identity while not integrating the national media market. Their exile is paradoxical in the sense that the impossibility of doing their job in their country led them to expatriate, but as they settle in their new country, they face multiple obstacles that force them to adapt their career and switch professional identity. The research does not try to be exhaustive but rather an exploratory experience mobilising a qualitative and ethnographic field approach and migration theories. We want to sketch a landscape out of ten individuals’ testimonies, the participants to this study are identified rather as actors than as agents of a system. This master thesis met real needs and potentials on the field as an association: Ensemble, Groupe d’Aide aux Journalistes en Exil (hereafter En-Gaje) was constituted by professional actors of the sector in Belgium as the research was initiated. The study highlights that a new analyses model could be thought to understand the integration of refugees with skills as their profile combines traits from multiple migration and integration theories.