Rites de Passage: Elucidating Displacement to Emplacement of Refugees on Twitter

Aparup Khatua, Wolfgang Nejdl

Abstract: Prior refugee-related studies have primarily examined social media deliberations to probe societal opinions around a specific refugee event. Contrarily, our study attempts to identify the various stages of their journey from displacement to emplacement in the host nation. We draw insights from Gennep's seminal work, i.e., Les Rites de Passage, to identify four phases of the refugee journey: Arrival of Refugees, Temporal stay at Asylums, Rehabilitation, and Integration of Refugees into the host nation. To test our proposed framework, we have collected multimodal tweets from April 15, 2020, to March 15, 2021. A fusion of BERT+LSTM (for text inputs) and InceptionV4 (for image inputs) has reported an F1-score of 80.93%. Subsequently, to test the practical implication of our proposed model in real-time, we have considered the multimodal tweets related to the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis. An F1-score of 71.88 % for this 2022 crisis confirms the generalizability of our proposed framework.