Chapter 1 Theoretical Perspectives on Dehumanization and Resisting It

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Michael Frishkopf, Reza Hasmath, and Anna Kirova

In this chapter, we grapple with the manner in which dehumanization and humanization have been approached across disciplinary boundaries. As the editors of this book, we are a multidisciplinary team spanning political science, education, and ethnomusicology and have brought together other scholars in such diverse disciplines as comparative literature and sociology. We are fully aware of how humanization as a concept has been both unevenly and variably taken up across disciplines. Whereas fields like political science and economics have not made heavy use of the concept, others such as philosophy and particularly social psychology have. Below, we trace emergent themes from disciplinary traditions that have given consideration to humanization and point to ways our knowledge can be expanded by pushing disciplinary boundaries.

A range of disciplines have clear connections to the issue of humanization. The conceptualization of humanization presupposes a shared ethical framework denoting what it means to be human. We recognize that any such framework is shaped by socio-historical forces that reflect “unequal geographies of knowledge production” (Brankamp and Weima 2021, 5). In this and other ways, the Western philosophical tradition can be instructive in establishing a conceptual ethical and moral baseline. Foremost, being human intricately involves an experiential element. It is to experience ourselves as both the subject and the active spectator of objects in the world (see, e.g., Heidegger 2008). It is our ability to think consciously and ultimately to create and distinguish valid ethical knowledge claims about the world around us (see, e.g., Wittgenstein 2001). If human beings are social creatures, as Marx and Engels ([1845] 1998) assert, then humans can only develop their true nature in society. Being human thus has a socio-cultural and moral element, whereby there are formal and informal societal norms, rules, rights, behaviours, and expectations that are imparted onto us and are in turn embodied, codified, and governed by a society’s legal jurisprudence and political, economic, and social institutional structures.

Commonplace in understanding the act of being human and being afforded humanizing qualities within the psychological, sociological, and political spheres is the notion that humanization can be seen as empathizing with the common ethical humanity of the Other. This can be expressed at the individual level as well as performed in the groups, institutions, and structures of a society, whether political, legal, economic, social, or cultural. In other words, we recognize the humanity of others through connections—established through communications, live or mediated—from which we infer, affectively, that “they” are like “us,” subjects rather than objects. Likewise, we ourselves are human for others to the extent that “we” are perceived as connected to “them.” In fact, full humanistic recognition requires both directions to obtain and form a cycle: one must feel the other recognizing one’s humanity to fully recognize that of the Other and even to recognize oneself as human. Likewise, one’s humanity appears in one’s recognition of the Other, as in a mirror. Full humanistic recognition requires bidirectional connections underlaid with affect or emotive elements. Emmanuel Levinas’s (1991) philosophy of ethics summons a responsibility for the alterity of the “Other” as separate and different from oneself. Levinas’s overarching claim is that the ethical relation with the Other is the condition of possibility for all human consciousness. Phenomenologically, alterity is concerned with “the otherness of the other” (van Manen 2014, 64), which makes the Other uniquely who they are. Michael Frishkopf and Anna Kirova explore these elements in their respective chapters.

Such bidirectional connections must pervade a community to ensure robust collective recognition. Analyzing the epistemological basis for coordinating collective action, Michael Chwe (2001, 19) has called attention to “common knowledge,” which can be recursively defined as that which everyone knows and which everyone knows is common knowledge. Collective recognition of humanity, by contrast, requires a “common feeling”: a felt intuition of the Other as human, together with the feeling that such intuition is shared (Frishkopf 2021, 64). One then recognizes the Other in oneself, a mutual inclusion. If our humanity depends on the humanity of others, then our humanity is a mutuality we can all share within a socio-cultural context. Mutualities consist of qualities and faculties whose existence depends on a relationship between human beings. However, as Paulo Freire (2000) demonstrates, and a key point that we stress, Our humanity is bound among the humanity of others through processes of both humanization and dehumanization.

Dehumanization is the act of debasing the individuality of the Other as a subject and, instead, treating the individual as an object. In this commonplace act, accepted social norms, rules, rights, behaviours, and expectations that apply to every “human” do not apply (or are perceived not to apply) to the Other. Dehumanization can occur among individuals, socio-cultural groups, or institutions of a society. For example, ethno-racial group(s) and refugees can be targeted by state actors or state-organized institutions delegitimizing their status and power in society through exclusion and/or violence. This case is demonstrable in Abu-Laban’s chapter on refugee policies in the United States, Canada, and Australia as well as Harrington and Waissi’s chapter on Kurdish cultural identity.

Dehumanization proceeds from disconnection, rendering subject as object. Sophie Oliver (2011, 85) posits that the “standard definitions of dehumanization define the concept in terms of a negation of such positive ‘human’ qualities as individuality, autonomy, personality, civility, and dignity.” While some scholars reserve the word for the most extreme cases (e.g., American dehumanization of African slaves, Nazi dehumanization of Jews, Hutu dehumanization of Tutsis), others recommend a continuum of objectification, from “casual indifference” at one end to full-fledged “dehumanization” at the other (Rector 2014, 9–10). In many cases, particularly following trauma, the dehumanization of the self is also common due to both a disconnection from others who would affirm one’s humanity and a loss of connection to one’s world, culture, and identity.

In nearly all traditional cultures, the possibility of complete dehumanization (and the horrific atrocities that may follow) is by no means inevitable; while a certain suspicion of strangers may be common, such societies also uphold values of hospitality as a means of interacting with outsiders (Pitt-Rivers 2012). During such interactions, “the stranger” may be personally unfamiliar but occupies a familiar status as “guest.” Derrida (2000) clarifies the dual meaning of the word hôte in French to mean both “host” and “guest.” His idea is that hospitality, seen as a welcome to cross the threshold and join the host in their place, meets difficulties. The host who welcomes becomes a guest to the guest they are welcoming. They both receive from the house or place they are in. The welcome of the other who comes without invitation is exhausting whether the other is welcomed out of guilt (from the host) or out of his or her vulnerability.

Moving from philosophy to the vantage point of social psychology, dehumanization can be understood as “denying humanness to others, introducing an asymmetry between people who have human qualities and people who are perceived as lacking these qualities” (Volpato and Andrighetto 2015, 31). Notably, when we are considering the basis by which an asymmetry is introduced between an “in-group” and an “outgroup,” it is relevant to observe that they can take place along a variety of axes—including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, socio-economic status, and citizenship, among others; these often involve legal or perceived differences in status (Haslam and Loughnan 2014, 407–10).

Social psychological studies in the field dating from the 1970s to the 1990s have addressed dehumanization in relation to mass violence. These studies have asked how the perceptions that victimizers hold of victims may lessen the normal restraints governing violence as well as how perceptions of value differences and demonizing labels can fuel inter-group conflict (Haslam and Loughnan 2014, 401). Social psychological studies have also shown that a propensity to dehumanize can stem from a variety of factors, including feeling part of an in-group, feeling part of an in-group that has historically been accused of inflicting harm on an outgroup, seeing an outgroup as a threat, and having a sense of personal power (Haslam and Loughnan 2014, 414). There is some debate within social psychology about the explanatory utility of the focus on dehumanization. Critics have charged, for example, that comparisons to non-humans are not always negative (e.g., calling a toddler a “little monkey”), that outgroup members can be (negatively) labelled in ways that only apply to humans, and that being perceived as less than human does not always lead to harm (Over 2020, 5–10). However, other social psychologists have defended the concept by arguing that work on dehumanization does not suggest all animal metaphors are dehumanizing, that dehumanization is conceptually distinct from prejudice and labels that might be “human” but derogatory, and that the consequences of dehumanization are not just about harm (Vaes, Paladino, and Haslam 2020). We submit that such a perspective of dehumanization needs to be taken seriously.

We find the social psychological work on dehumanization to be relevant precisely because the dangers associated with dehumanization are well documented and go beyond psychological harm. Indeed, at the extreme, they can and do include violence and atrocities (Volpato and Andrighetto 2015, 31), a feature relevant to the growing number of works in genocide studies that make conceptual use of dehumanization (Haslam and Loughnan 2014, 401). However, social psychologists also trace a link between dehumanization and a lessening of pro-social behaviour (relating to empathy and sharing) as well as antisocial behaviour (e.g., aggression and excluding others). Put differently, there is a cost to dehumanizing behaviour that may be incurred by both those who are on the receiving end and those who do it. The costs make it worthwhile to study dehumanization and to ask how it might be mitigated.

We find the existing social science research on refugees and dehumanization to be illuminating. For instance, Brankamp and Weima (2021, 1) interrogate the dehumanization of politics and wider dehumanizing societal sentiments toward refugees in Europe and North America by drawing connections between the “existing systems of racialized inequalities, dispossession, and differential mobility that has grown out of histories of empire and a militarized liberal world order built on racial capitalism.” Refugees are typically dehumanized and are placed in a precarious position in several respects: (1) due to experiences of violence, disconnection from homeland and lack of connection to the host society; (2) exclusion of basic fundamental human rights enshrined in international jurisprudence, whether civil or political rights or economic, cultural, and social rights; and (3) exclusion from power, increasingly across generations as growing numbers of protracted refugee situations suggest (Abu-Laban 2021). Dehumanization is often exacerbated in refugee camps, where besides relative material deprivation, there is no connection to either the sending state or the receiving state, and identity loss accompanying the dehumanization of the self is also common. But the fact that dehumanization is typically driven by systemic forces means that it may be reversed once political or economic factors inhibiting rehumanization are removed. People have the capacity to humanize the Other, given a suitable context—that is, one enabling and promoting common feeling and mutuality. It is in this sense that our work is ethically grounded in critical scholarship: challenging researchers to re-examine and re-think humanity, the meaning of being human, the conditions of dehumanization, and those who are subjected to them. In this transdisciplinary collection, the prominent place of contributions from refugees themselves speaks to our commitment to widening the circle of knowledge production, challenging dehumanizing views of refugee identity by broadening our horizons to see beyond their experiences of displacement, torture, imprisonment, and other forms of dehumanization and embrace their success in retaining their humanness as writers, poets, and musicians.

From another lens, refugees have been subject to media, partisan, and popular discourses that construct them as a “threat.” For instance, media stereotyping in settler societies such as Canada and Australia has promoted negative characterizations of refugees (see, e.g., Khasanova’s chapter; McKenzie and Hasmath 2013). This negativity primes the general public to view refugees in a dehumanizing light (see, e.g., Hasmath 2012). An individual’s tendency to dehumanize refugees is associated with unfriendly verbal and nonverbal behaviours toward them. Moreover, some recent work posits that governments and political leaders can either feed refugee dehumanization or challenge it with alternative messaging, in keeping with their stated humanitarian and human rights obligations (see, e.g., Abu Laban’s chapter; Esses, Medianu, and Sutter 2021, 284–86). This brings us to consider strategies to resist dehumanization.

Strategies for Resisting Dehumanization

Moving from the theoretical to the pragmatic, the idea of challenging dehumanization—or, put differently and as a shorthand, rehumanization—is important because it allows us to establish a framework for understanding a shared common trust or distrust with the Other. Political scientists have pointed out that acts of rehumanization can help de-escalate conflict, violence, civil strife, and/or even genocide. Practitioners of conflict resolution have repeatedly suggested that we are less likely to rationalize engaging in such acts if we see the Other as a human being while maintaining minimal levels of mutual respect and trust (see, e.g., Saguy et al. 2015). Once all parties are able to empathize through recognition of shared humanity and basic ethical norms, they are more likely to listen, build, and engage in constructive resolution (see, e.g., Halpern and Weinstein 2004). This can even lead to taking responsibility, apologizing, and reconciling with the Other, as discussed in Bakan’s and Hasmath, Ho, and Kay-Reid’s chapters.

Increasing Inter-group Contact

For sociologists, fostering inter-group contact has been an essential component of rehumanizing the Other—that is, increasing social trust between groups, improving between-group relations, engendering forgiveness for past transgressions (see Hasmath, Ho, and Kay-Reid’s chapter), and creating a more differentiated perception of the outgroup. Pettigrew et al. (2011) found that the optimal conditions for inter-group contact—equal status, common goals, the absence of inter-group competition, and authority sanction—facilitate greater rehumanization potential. Cross-group friendships are particularly effective at promoting positive attitudes toward the outgroup (see Turner et al. 2007). These effects are usually generalized beyond the confines of an individual’s relationship with members of another group, to the outgroup at large. Additionally, these positive effects can occur, although to a lesser extent, merely by having an in-group friend with outgroup friends (see Pettigrew et al. 2011).

Recent research in contact theory has suggested that in much the same way as negative portrayals of outgroup members can increase bias and dehumanize the group—see, for example, Khasanova’s chapter in this volume for discussions on the media’s representation of Syrian refugees—positive portrayals can reduce prejudice (see Dovidio, Eller, and Hewstone 2011). Although vicarious contact in this form has fewer positive consequences, it can still help reduce prejudice and improve sentiments toward the outgroup. Significantly, this has been found to occur even in scenarios that involve ethno-racial or religious conflicts (see, e.g., Bilali and Vollhardt 2013). An additional benefit of vicarious contact via positive mass media is that it can influence a significant number of viewers, allowing the effects to occur faster at a population-wide level (see Vezzali et al. 2014).

Multicultural Education

In the context of integrating newcomers into host societies, education is described in multiple ways. In some cases, multicultural education is approached as an outcome of the successful integration of newcomers. In other cases, it is treated as a means of integration, since achievements in these areas can exert a recursive influence (see, e.g., Ager and Strang 2008). As an answer to cultural pluralism in society, multicultural education was conceived not only as a way of managing diversity and the integration of newcomers into the larger society but also as a way of providing continuity to the ongoing dialogue about the nature of multiculturalism. In Canada, it emerged as an application of the federal multicultural policy within many provincial education systems (James 2003). Thus, it has been linked to the influence of the original federal multiculturalism in Canada, the first country to adopt such a policy, which promoted ethno-cultural retention (Abu-Laban 2014).

From its inception, the goal of multicultural education “has been to foster appreciation of the cultural heritages of others towards increasing inter-group harmony” (Lund 2003, 5). However, as Ghosh and Abdi (2004) conclude, multicultural education programs only theoretically give access to all ethno-cultural groups, and these programs have not resulted in equal participation in the educational or economic sphere (see, e.g., Hasmath 2012). Other scholars have argued that such programs have solidified the boundaries between majority and minority cultures while reproducing white dominance (e.g., Kirova 2015).

Critiques of multicultural education, therefore, reveal tensions between theory and practice. Moreover, critiques also reveal how practices based on universalist structuralist theories may limit the ability to respond to the individual needs of marginalized people who do not fit within the generalized theoretical approaches. Kirova’s chapter reviews the promises and failures of multicultural and anti-racist education, particularly in regard to their essentialism and assumptions of normalcy.

In response to the widespread sense among some political and intellectual elites in pluralistic societies worldwide that multiculturalism has failed (see, e.g., Hasmath 2011)—an argument even heard in Canada, where multiculturalism policy has flourished for over half a century as a national policy—there is an ongoing “debate about the future of multiculturalism as a concept or model and whether inherited ideas of multiculturalism need to be replaced with new ‘post-multicultural’ approaches in an era of ‘hyper-diversity’” (Kymlicka 2009, 36). As a consequence, there is an emerging new theme in multiculturalism. In seeking new “post-multicultural” approaches, the various initiatives undertaken by the very institutions, including schools, charged with the task of facilitating the integration of newcomers into the larger society need not lose sight of the multiple causes of such hyper-diversity, the most prominent among which are the ongoing armed conflicts that threaten the very humanity of those who have been forcefully displaced from their homes, including children who were taken away from their mothers’ arms or have witnessed their parents and other relatives being tortured and murdered. As Hollenbach (2019, 5) aptly puts it, “When persons are displaced as refugees, they fall through the cracks of a world shattered by war or injustice.” Jalal Barzanji’s experience of imprisonment during Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime in Iraq (see Barzanji’s chapter), and, more recently, the experiences of the Yazidi people following the American-led war, reveal unspeakable crimes against humankind. These crimes, which produce the refugee flows we see today, are also interconnected with long histories of colonialism and colonial institutions (see Nyers 2019).

The unprecedented displacement of children poses even greater challenges for the world’s education systems. This is especially apparent when we recognize the fundamental rights of refugees to access education, earn a livelihood, and seek justice when wronged. However, as noted in Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s chapter addressing Germany, education is not often included in humanitarian responses to refugees. While free access to primary education is a child’s right, access to post-secondary education is seldom mentioned in the inclusion of refugees in education.

Dialogical Approach

A rehumanizing approach to knowledge production has its roots in Freire’s (1972) popular education in Brazil and his moral philosophy, which advocated a dialogical approach to the world and the liberation of the oppressed. Freire determined that rehumanization occurs via dialogue through which the oppressors and the oppressed can become more fully human. He argued that this dialogic inquiry “must be directed towards humanization—the people’s historical vocation” (Freire 2000, 85). In order to overcome oppression, this dialogue “cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity” because “no one can be authentically human while [preventing] others from being so” (85). He describes our humanity as bound among the humanity of others. Both the oppressed and their oppressors, all people can attempt to regain or to realize their full humanity or, in Freirean terms, their fuller humanity. Therefore, regardless of whether participants in dialogue are oppressors or oppressed, their rehumanization depends on the humanization of those in relation to them. As Alexander Sidorkin (1999, 12) puts it, “A failure to affirm the being of the other brings myself into Freirian non-being.”

To factor the Freirean approach to rehumanization in educational contexts, for example, educators have to succeed in creating dialogic spaces that would allow refugee students to regain their full humanity, especially since some of them have lost a part of their sense of self and their identity. A dialogue facilitating a horizontal relationship of mutual trust among participants must be founded upon love, humility, and faith in humanity. Those who cannot fully participate in the dialogue cannot develop their full humanity or even live life to its fullest. The language barriers to participation in dialogue encountered by refugee students are noted in Kirova’s, Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s, and Bhattacharyya, Songose, and Wilkinson’s chapters.

Expressive Culture and the Arts

Performing arts can induce “common feeling” (Frishkopf 2022, 78) through mutual participation. Music provides a good example, and similar considerations apply to all the performing arts. Treating music broadly—following Small’s (1998) generalized notion of “musicking”—to include a range of musical activities, from performing to dancing to toe-tapping or simply listening, musical participation engenders emotion, emotional recognition, and deeply felt humanistic connection. The generation of “common feeling” does not presume that everyone responds to music in the same way or even that participants think that they do. Music offers multiple layers of meaning, some of them limited by culture, while others enable intercultural comprehension or, at least, the intercultural recognition of meaningfulness. Observing others’ responses to musical stimuli confirms an intuitively felt recognition of their humanity, even without necessarily understanding music in the same way. Other collective activities—sharing a meal, say, or conversation (if allowed by a common language)—may induce a similar recognition. However, music and dance provide several uniquely humanizing properties resulting from their ability to communicate emotion broadly, across large collectivities, and beyond language.

Touching is perhaps the most intimate form of human connection through mutual feeling. Composer and soundscape theorist Murray Schafer (1994, 11) has described hearing as a form of “remote touching”: “Touch is the most personal of the senses. Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is a way of touching at a distance and the intimacy of the first sense is fused with sociability whenever people gather together to hear something special.”

Dance, varying widely in form and meaning across cultures yet providing a layer of transcultural mutual comprehension, frequently implies a socialized touch. But even without touch, dance enhances the power of music’s remote touch through visual communication of rhythm and form.

Music and dance, being both collective and relatively abstract, offer the greatest transcultural power to induce mutual recognition of humanity. But visual arts provide additional avenues, as well as literature, cinema, and the dramatic arts when language is shared.

For the expressive performer, poetry, movement, and musical sound constitute an extrusion of the self—an aura or subjective corona extending beyond the physical body, interpenetrating with those of others, forming a quasi-independent intersubject, confirming to all who participate that participants are human.

Through lyrics, expression, and temporal-tonal patterning, music is highly affective—even when not understood or not understood in the same way—particularly in collective contexts where its emotional effect is not only direct but also reflective, derived from the perception of others’ responses.

The affective power of sound is most intense in what Frishkopf terms socio-sonic-visual resonance: a collective cognitive-affective state resulting from communicative feedback, carrying, tuning, and amplifying musical meaning while gathering participants (Frishkopf in Rasmussen et al. 2019, 305–6; Frishkopf 2021, 2022).

Sound is particularly effective as it diffuses three-dimensionally, diffracting to pervade a performance space, masking competing dyadic communications, and demanding attention. Music enables mass participation while synchronizing and aligning participants through rhythm, melody, and harmony. Music provides, as Alfred Schutz (1951, 92) notes, the capability for social coordination, a “mutual tuning-in.” Participants are unified by a common sensory focus. Music’s sonic organization (temporal, spectral, and formal) connects participants by inducing social alignments (e.g., synchronized rhythm, call/response interactions, harmony). Over time, common feeling associated with a shared context leads to the sedimentation of shared meaning. All these factors induce social cohesion. At the same time, unlike the pragmatic functional language of quotidian interactions, poetry and music are inherently ambiguous, semantically powerful, symbols, “writerly” (Barthes 1990) and flexible in interpretation. Music may not be a “universal language,” as was frequently claimed in the nineteenth century. Yet when participants all find music meaningful, albeit each in their own way, musical connections form that are far-reaching, flexible, and individualized and through which mutual humanity can be recognized in response.

But the role of arts is not limited to live interactions. Mediated interactions—through broadcasts or recordings, as well as through written literature—can also induce a sense of shared humanity, particularly when they form the basis for subsequent discursive interactions. Thus, people can watch the same TV drama, listen to the same radio-broadcast song, or read the same novel and derive a sense of connectedness not only to those who acted in, sang, or wrote a work but also to one another. Literature is particularly powerful in expressing experiences precisely, in a manner such that others can experience the same vicariously, even when such experiences are foreign to their actual lives.

Performing and mediated arts are not an unmitigated good, however. While powerful, they provide a collection of double-edged swords, ethically neutral tools of ambiguous moral value. For instance, while music might erase systemic barriers to humanization, the connections induced by musical participation may also exclude, hence divide, and even dehumanize, as in music supporting the social cohesion of extremist groups, such as neo-Nazis (thus Boko Haram has its recruitment music; Vladimir Putin his pro-war music), or even less virulent artistic nationalism. Even well-intentioned musical interventions require efficacious strategies in order to avoid possible divisiveness and realize ethical aims. Inclusivity is key.

There are other limitations too. None of the arts—even music and dance, often regarded as such—are truly universal, and by their very nature, arts tend to trace certain boundaries (e.g., of linguistic comprehension or social class). One cannot understand a novel without the requisite language, and literacy may also be a factor. A poem, whether in elevated language or idiosyncratic argot, may presume a requisite background, even given general linguistic competence. Levels of connection can, therefore, vary widely, and such selective participation—or implicit, even explicit, exclusion—may induce dehumanization of various degrees and kinds. The impact of the performing arts, in particular, can often be ephemeral when used as the sole basis for connection. After creating a sense of Durkheimian “effervescence,” connecting participants through powerful shared experiences and emotions, and inspiring a sense of shared humanity, connections may quickly fade afterward if not supported by other more durable social structures undergirded by cognitive factors, such as a community association, a political party, or a religious group. Although expressive culture and the arts are not always practical for rehumanization—for example, one cannot hold a musical event in the midst of violent upheaval—they nonetheless provide useful tools for rebuilding connections and rehumanizing during the process of refugee resettlement in three directions. First, expressive culture helps refugees connect to one another, especially those arriving from the same geographical location, who share aspects of identity and culture—and perhaps language—to a great extent but do not know one another and would never have interacted in the homeland due to differences in language, locale, ethnic group, or social class. Such interactions regularly take place even in refugee camps, where “musicification” can serve as an effective tool for rehumanization (Frishkopf, Morgan, and Knight 2010; Morgan and Frishkopf 2011). Second, music helps refugees build connections to the wider host society (Frishkopf 2018), providing an effective catalyst for interactions in both professional and amateur contexts, with a variety of possible modalities for participation—especially for artists themselves, who begin to collaborate with their new fellow citizens. Third, music enables refugees to maintain connections to their homelands, ensuring that identities are not lost. These links may traverse vast distances. Indeed, live performances with members of their homelands may be impossible. But mediated artistic sharing—via books, newspapers, recordings, satellite broadcasts, or the internet—can still provide an important medium for connection. Ultimately, the arts help refugees—particularly those who have suffered through extreme trauma—effect the most critical form of rehumanization: that of the self.

We believe that the sections and chapters that follow contribute to the much-needed and largely absent dialogue across disciplines addressing the important question of how dehumanization can be reduced. The current global health and economic challenges have revealed how social injustices and socio-economic inequalities have unevenly affected marginalized populations. This has made the need for a dialogue on these salient topics urgent. The present-day protests across the world that erupted as a result of deeply rooted systems of oppression demonstrate that it is as important as ever to understand the impact of dehumanization. In recognizing the complexity of the contexts in which dehumanization occurs, the book offers potential strategies for resisting, minimizing, and potentially eradicating it.

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Part I. The Role of Immigration Policies and the Media in the Dehumanization of Refugees