The study of affective regulation of migration and belonging is a flourishing scholarly field in the Nordic countries, mainly emerging amongst researchers within the fields of feminist, queer and gender studies, critical race and whiteness studies, cultural studies, and political science (see e.g. Myong & Bissenbakker 2016, D’Aoust 2013, Myrdahl 2010, Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019, Smedegaard Nielsen 2018, Andreassen & Vitus 2015). Although some of these studies investigate how media discourses partake in the affective regulation of migration and belonging (e.g. Nikunen 2015, Hvenegård-Lassen & Staunæs 2015, Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019, Smedegaard Nielsen 2015, 2018), there seems to be less attention towards the effects of more specific popular regimes of representation, as for instance ‘celebritization’, being the specific point of interest of this paper. I address celebritization in a situational context of it as being at work as a mechanism of affective regulation of migration and belonging. I study a case of the deportation of a Thai mother and her child from Denmark, after the death of her white Danish husband. Subsequently, they are subjected to a celebritized media representation, highly generated by the mobilization of a white Danish public, paving the way for legislative intervention by the Parliament, making them able to return to Denmark. The paper aims at exploring if and how celebritization can be viewed as an affective catalyst for the transformation of their belonging. For this purpose I invoke ‘compassionate celebritization’ as a way of conceptualizing celebritized representation as a form of affective intervention (see also Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong forthcoming 2019), capable of generating transformations of belonging through the public accumulation of compassion. In this sense, compassionate celebritization works to secure the renowness of the suffering migrant bodies, and the public orientation towards them as victims in need of intervention into their situation of being deported.

Asta Smedegaard Nielsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University. Her postdoctoral project is part of the collective research project ‘Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (LOVA)’ funded by the Independent Danish Research Council. She holds a PhD in Media Studies, and has published work within the intersecting fields of media, migration, race and whiteness, and affectivity studies.

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