Chapter 8Souls before Numbers
with Mohamad Waked
Figure 8.1: “The Unwelcomed”
Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality [...] Sometimes, in the philosophy of mind but also elsewhere, the truth is not to be found by traveling as far away from one person’s perspective as possible.
—Thomas Nagel
On September 2, 2015, two boats carrying two dozen Syrian refugees capsized near Bodrum, Turkey. Half of them drowned, including two‐year‐old Alan Shenu and his brother. A photo of Alan lying on a Turkish beach soon appeared in social media, where it was viewed by tens of millions of people.
Alan became a symbol of the ongoing refugee humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, which had begun in 2011. After his death was reported in news publications worldwide, there was an outpouring of attention to the civil war in Syria. Mohamad Waked, a data scientist and visualization designer based in Cairo, Egypt, remembers being moved to action by Alan’s photograph:
That photograph is the origin of my “The Unwelcomed” (Figure 8.1). I had been reading terrible stories about refugees and immigrants desperately trying to cross the Mediterranean for a while, and Alan’s photograph horrified me.
In an article published in 2017, “Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to ...
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