Panel 2 | Populism & (im)migration

This study addresses the presence of liquid racism in overtly anti-racist, pro-immigration narratives in UK public discourse. We concentrate on the collection of a small corpus of 37 UK (success) migration stories posted on the blogs of charity organisations and NGOs during the period of January 2017 to August 2021, following recent changes to the UK immigration and asylum-seeking policy after Brexit. Unlike existing studies that focus on explicit discriminative representations of RASIM - comprising refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008) - in the UK media, we focus on more subtle forms of racism. Following a critical discourse studies (Fairclough, 1995) in combination with a narrative positioning framework (Bamberg, 2005) we investigate the linguistic traces of prevalent discourses that, despite the seemingly antiracist nature of the texts, contribute to sustaining a hegemonic racist ideology. Recent research in countries other than the UK focuses on the ways in which assimilation of RASIM is promoted as central value by the media and public discourse in the host countries, despite the declared pro-immigration intentions of the publications (see among others Archakis, 2021). Assimilation, implies linguistic and cultural homogenisation, resulting thus in a polarised representation between those who manage to succeed i.e. assimilate and those who do not.

We conducted a quantitative analysis of linguistic traces of (sub) discourses to identify prevalent discourse patterns. We then selected representative texts for micro-level analysis of linguistic traces used in the construction of dominant discourses. Our analysis shows that migration and asylum seeking are often represented as transactional, promoting the concept of an ideal RASIM who integrates, if not assimilates, and consistently pays the country back in return. This is achieved via the promotion of a positive collective face (Sifianou and Bayraktaroğlu, 2012) of the British public who are presented as welcoming and appealing via positive politeness strategies to the positive face of RASIM who, in turn, internalise integration as a one-way street. The dominant ways in which integration is naturalised results in the exclusion of addressees who might not conform to this image. We discuss the complex ways immigration is represented in said stories and, as such, our study situates itself within and beyond the binary of racism and non-racism.

Archakis, A. 2021. Tracing racism in antiracist narrative texts online. Ethnic and Racial Studies, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1904145

Bamberg, M. 1997. Positioning Between Structure and Performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7: 335–342. doi:10.1075/jnlh.7.42pos.

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman

Gabrielatos, C. and Baker, P. 2008. 'Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: a corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press 1996-2005)' Journal of English Linguistics 36(1): 5-38

Sifianou, M., & Bayraktaroğlu, A. (2012). ‘Face’, stereotyping, and claims of power: The Greeks and Turks in interaction. In C. Bratt Paulston, S.F. Kiesling & E.S. Rangel (Eds.), The handbook of intercultural discourse and communication, pp. 292–312. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell.

In the context of the recent political and migratory events occurring in Europe, the dynamics of inequality is a recurrent topic in public discourses in international spheres (Deardoff, 2017). While much has been written on media representations of migration in the linguistic modality (Baker et al., 2008; El Refaie, 2001), comparatively little has been written about the visual depiction of migrants and refugees. This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities more generally (Economou, 2006). This paper advocates a cognitive linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) and analyses online newspapers multimodal phenomena (Hart, 2015) of the 2015-16 Refugee Crisis in language and image, in order to assess the interactions between these modalities in terms of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021) and their potential ideological implications.

This paper focuses on event-construal (Langacker, 2008), and my claim is that the ideological purport of newspapers in the process of forcing a specific perspective toward the event can serve to create alternative, ideology-vested, realities, both in language and image (Hart, 2016). Analysis of enactors of schematisation, metaphor and viewpoint can potentially be applied across languages and modalities (Hart, 2017a), and such approach will be shown in the analysis of Spanish and British news reports. This paper focuses on the critical examination of and emerging interactions between images and specific linguistic elements within online news reports (headline, subheading, caption and lead paragraph), and the (in)congruent relationships there might occur in the shape of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021).

References:

Baker, P., et al. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273-306.

Deardorff, S. (2017). Political and Humanitarian Responses to Syrian Displacement. Abingdon: Routledge.

Economou, D. (2006). The big picture: The role of the lead image in print feature stories. In I. Lassen, J. Strunck y T. Vestergaard (Eds.), Mediating Ideology in Text and Image. Ten Critical Studies (pp. 211-233). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

El Refaie, E. (2001). Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalized themes in Austrian newspaper articles about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(3), 352-371.

Hart, C. (2015). Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 238-260.

Hart, C. (2016). The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse analysis: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods. Discourse and Society, 27(3), 335-350.

Hart, C. (2017a). Cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies: Connecting language and image. In R. Wodak & B. Forchtner (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge.

Hart, C., & Mármol Queraltó, J. (2021). What can Cognitive Linguistics tell us about Language-Image relations? A multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(4), 529-562.

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: OUP.

In the year 2003 Migration Law No. 25871 was passed in Argentina. This law replaced the legislation in force since the last civic-military dictatorship and recognized migration as a human right, establishing guaranties by the Government. In 2017, President Mauricio Macri issued Act No. 70/2017 as a modificatory of the Migration Law. In this work, we seek to determine what social representations are constructed about immigrants in the Act of 2017 and what resources are used to legitimize them. For this porpoise, we analyse the introduction of the Act, the general considerations, which justifies the need and urgency of changes in the legislation of 2003.

We include our research in Critical Discourse Analyses (Fairclough, 1992, 2003), theoretical field that considers discourse as a political and ideological practice, which is in a dialectical relation with other social practices (Fairclough, 1992). Considering discourse as a social practice has some implications. First, it means discourse is a kind of conduct or action through which people act upon the world and other persons. Secondly, it supposes that discourse is a mean of representation, a way of structuring the knowledge about the world. Finally, it means discourse constructs identities and social relations. This constructivist aspects of discourse can influence persons and institutions’ attitudes, behaviours and decisions (Fairclough, 1992; Hart, 2010, 2014). Thus, a change in discourse practice can have as a consequence a modification of attitudes and behaviours. For this reason, CDA begins from social problems -in our case, discrimination, exclusion and xenophobia- to observe the discursive aspect of such problems.

From a functionalist perspective, we develop a qualitative methodology. According to Hart (2010, 2014), political discourse –understood in a broad sense, which includes the discourse from the media, the legislative discourse, etc.- has as its goal coercion. This means political discourse seeks to generate a change in people’s representations and, in consequence, in their attitudes and behaviours. To reach this aim, it uses two types of strategies: representation strategies and legitimising strategies. Among representation strategies, we analyse referential and predication strategies. With respect to the former, we use the classification made by Hart (2010), who divides the linguistic means in four strategies: nationalisation, de-spatialisation, dissimilation, collectivisation. For the analysis of predication strategies, we consider: 1) the distribution of processes and participants in the clauses (Hodge and Kress, 1993) and 2) the conceptual frames and metaphors (Lakoff, 2002, 2010) activated to talk about immigrants. Finally, for studying the legitimizing strategies, we follow the categories proposed by Hart (2010, 2014), who considers two basic resources to legitimise the representations constructed in a discourse: evidentiality and epistemic modality.

Our working hypothesis is that the Act insistently associates migrants with criminality and with the insecurity feeling present in Argentina at that moment, and in turn, legitimizes this representation by presenting it as an evident truth, known and accepted by all. Therefore, the Act restricts the rights of foreigners residing in the country and shows this restriction as justified.

The Israeli Ma’abarot (Israeli Jewish people refugee camps) are one of the most ignored chapters in Israeli political, historical and cultural discourse.

In 1952 Israel faced a new socio-political normality. Only four years after the state's establishment and a violent war in 1948, there were 132 Ma'abarot in Israel and 250 thousand people lived there. In fact, most of the Jewish immigrants who came to the young State of Israel had to pass through Ma'abarot. Many of these immigrants lived in the Ma'abarot for a year, while others for up to 20 years in unbearable conditions.

Therefore, our lecture will focus on two questions:

1. Why has this phenomenon been ignored in Israeli varied discourse?

2. What are the discursive strategies that used to hide the Ma'abarot? And in particular, how normalization discourse was used in order to vanish any symbolic and physical collective memory of the Ma'abarot?

To answer these questions our research adopts the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis – CCDA (Gavriely-Nuri 2018). It is reflected in the analysis and the explanation of the cultural representations of the Ma'abarot, as well as in revealing the cultural codes embedded in the Ma'abarot discourse.

We examined a varied corpus composed of hundreds of items in newspapers, novels, history textbooks and even children's magazines from 1950 to date. In each part of the corpus, we found some strategies that made use of the discursive construction of "us" versus "them" (Van Dijk 2001, Wodak 2009), while others utilized tools of colonial discourse such as normalization, euphemization and demonization. Doing so, our research contributes to develop a systematic and interdisciplinary critical and cultural discourse analysis method.

The absence of the Israeli Ma'abarot is a case study that demonstrates how a settler-colonial society handles historical scars from its past. This case study is also highly relevant to other ongoing researches, which examine immigration and post-colonial discourse all over the world. Moreover, our lecture will shed light upon current wounds in the Israeli society, and explain how normalization discourse in the past evolves into new configurations in the present political culture.

References:

Gavriely-Nuri, D. (2018). Cultural approach to CDA (CCDA). In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (pp. 120-132). London and New York: Routledge.

Van Dijk, T. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. In (eds.) Tannen, D., Schiffrin, D. and Hamilton H. Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 352-371.

Wodak, R. (2009). The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Israeli Ma’abarot (Israeli Jewish people refugee camps) are one of the most ignored chapters in Israeli political, historical and cultural discourse.

In 1952 Israel faced a new socio-political normality. Only four years after the state's establishment and a violent war in 1948, there were 132 Ma'abarot in Israel and 250 thousand people lived there. In fact, most of the Jewish immigrants who came to the young State of Israel had to pass through Ma'abarot. Many of these immigrants lived in the Ma'abarot for a year, while others for up to 20 years in unbearable conditions.

Therefore, our lecture will focus on two questions:

1. Why has this phenomenon been ignored in Israeli varied discourse?

2. What are the discursive strategies that used to hide the Ma'abarot? And in particular, how normalization discourse was used in order to vanish any symbolic and physical collective memory of the Ma'abarot?

To answer these questions our research adopts the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis – CCDA (Gavriely-Nuri 2018). It is reflected in the analysis and the explanation of the cultural representations of the Ma'abarot, as well as in revealing the cultural codes embedded in the Ma'abarot discourse.

We examined a varied corpus composed of hundreds of items in newspapers, novels, history textbooks and even children's magazines from 1950 to date. In each part of the corpus, we found some strategies that made use of the discursive construction of "us" versus "them" (Van Dijk 2001, Wodak 2009), while others utilized tools of colonial discourse such as normalization, euphemization and demonization. Doing so, our research contributes to develop a systematic and interdisciplinary critical and cultural discourse analysis method.

The absence of the Israeli Ma'abarot is a case study that demonstrates how a settler-colonial society handles historical scars from its past. This case study is also highly relevant to other ongoing researches, which examine immigration and post-colonial discourse all over the world. Moreover, our lecture will shed light upon current wounds in the Israeli society, and explain how normalization discourse in the past evolves into new configurations in the present political culture.

References:

Gavriely-Nuri, D. (2018). Cultural approach to CDA (CCDA). In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (pp. 120-132). London and New York: Routledge.

Van Dijk, T. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. In (eds.) Tannen, D., Schiffrin, D. and Hamilton H. Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 352-371.

Wodak, R. (2009). The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Through forced displacement, many recent Muslim women refugees carry traumatic experiences of atrocity, torture and even rape in their homelands before facing social isolation in the new host countries. Yet, specific cultural/religious traditions may prevent these women from articulating their trauma publicly. Discourses around cultural and political integration of migrant populations have long been a major research topic in ethnic and migration studies (Hopkins, 2016). However, in the context of heightened fears around Islamic terrorism and rise of right-wing discourses, the issue has overwhelmingly been viewed within a securitisation frame, which in turn, deems migrants’ religion (Islam) as a merely political ideology. This study incorporates theoretical and methodological tools in gender and migration studies, ethnography, and discourse analysis to observe the online behaviour of a group of five recent Muslim women refugees in making connections between their religion/culture and their current lives. As such, I draw on insights from the proposals for Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (KhosraviNik, 2017) and Discourse Centred Digital Ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008) to embark on a digital ethnographic analysis to establish how digital media may facilitate virtual geographic connectivity between the (old) home and host countries. I conduct a digital discourse analysis of the discursive content, e.g., comments produced by these women via digital technologies, on five discussion forums to dissect how these online/offline discourses relate to their sense of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusion. Additionally, through semi-structured interviews and conducting a qualitative discourse analysis of these interviews content by drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009), this paper explores the linguistic patterns and nuances of how the participants express their repressed emotions and traumas experienced during the recent displacement. This paper advances the debates on gender, belonging, and inclusion in the context of refugeeism by making an integrative argument for the role of social media through the processes of adjustments, integration, and identity building among Muslim women refugees.

Androutsopoulos, J. (2008). Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography. Language@internet, 5. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/161

Hopkins, P. (2016). Gendering Islamophobia, racism and white supremacy: gendered violence

against those who look Muslim. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(2), 186-189.

KhosraviNik, M. (2017). Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDA). In J. Flowerdrew, & J. Richardson, Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. (pp. 582-596) London: Routledge.

Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed.) (pp. 87–121). London: Sage.

This study analyzes the political communication of far-right wing populism, in particular the case of Abascal in Spain and the discursive construction of a nostalgic imaginary past of “greatness” (Reyes, 2020). Abascal’s political party, Vox, founded in 2013 became the third most voted political party in Spain in November of 2019.

This work examines the political communication, both official (Rallies, Official Statements, media interviews) and in social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) from Abascal and Vox from June 2015 to the present (June 2021). Employing the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 2012), in particular, narrative structures as a “conceptual architecture of the DHA” (Forchtner, 2021, p. 317), and multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001), this study accounts for the textual and audiovisual semiotic resources employed by Abascal to index the past. Furthermore, this paper argues that Abascal himself reenacts that specific past in his political persona, as a hero of epic dimensions. The historical political ideology embraced by “La Reconquista” in medieval Spain and its consequential association to chivalric values is impersonated by Abascal, and with that, he is not only incorporating the epic theme to his Message (Lempert & Silverste̳in, 2012), but also drawing a synergy between political message and political persona. This political performance presents a “retrotopia” (Bauman, 2017), evoked by populism to benefit from a sense in Western electorates of being left behind, abandoned, ignored (not “listened to”), or being muted by elite politicians and main-stream media. In that context, “since the future appears as an almost certain apocalypse, the only consolation is offered by … heritage and tradition” (Önnerfors 2020: 136), far-right populist politicians focus on a “lost/stolen/abandoned yet undead past” (Bauman, 2017, p. 10), where everything was much better, real or not. Matter of fact, the past, indexed by the plagiarized slogan “Make Spain Great Again” is, for Abascal, a heroic past of epic narratives, self-created heroes, deeds and “villains”. As an epic hero from a mythologized history, Abascal displays an Ethos capable of completing inconceivable tasks such as saving Spain, and defeating contemporary villains” (political elite, communists, migrants).

References:

Bauman, Z. (2017). Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity.

Forchtner, B. (2021). “Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse studies.” Critical Discourse Studies, 18:3, 314-331, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2020.1803093

Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (eds.). (2001). Multimodality, London: Sage.

Lempert, M., & Silverste̳in, M. (2012). Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Indiana University Press, Indiana.

Önnerfors, Andreas (2020). “Retrotopia” as a Retrogressive Force in the German PEGIDA-Movement. In O. C. Norocel et al. (eds.), Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections between Politics of Culture, Welfare, and Migration in Europe. (pp. 135-149). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Reyes, A. (2020). I, Trump: the cult of personality, anti-intellectualism and the Post-Truth era. Journal of Language and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20002.rey.

Wodak, R. (2012). “Politics as Usual.” In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited

by M. Handford and J. P. Gee, 525–40. New York: Routledge.

CDA has increasingly come to recognise and investigate the role played by multiple modes of communication in discursive constructions of social identities and inequalities (e.g. Chovanec, 2019; Richardson, 2008; Richardson and Wodak, 2009). Within multimodal CDA, embodied semiotic modes including hand shapes, facial expressions, body postures, proxemics and gaze, are recognised as ideologically significant (Machin, 2007). Such modes, however, have tended to be studied with a focus on the way they are represented in images. Here, we focus on ‘co-speech gestures’ – that is, gestures used as a communicative resource alongside concomitant speech – in dynamic video texts capturing the situated performance of political discourse. Specifically, we draw on gesture research in cognitive linguistics to investigate hand movements produced in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage.

In cognitive linguistics, gesture is not treated as ancillary to language but as an integral aspect of it. Gestures are defined as the visible action component of composite utterances (Kendon 2004; Enfield 2009). Chiming with the notion of a ‘multimodal ensemble’ in social semiotics (Kress 2010), in spoken discourse, speech and gesture are seen as working together in a coordinated act of meaning construction.

In CDA, a number rhetorical moves characteristic of anti-immigration discourse are identified, whose ultimate function is the legitimation of discriminatory practices, where legitimation is defined as the act of ‘attributing acceptability to social actors, actions and social relations within the normative order’ in contexts of ‘controversial actions, accusations, doubts, critique or conflict’ (Rojo and van Dijk, 1997: 560–561). Such legitimating strategies include denial, othering, spatial proximisation, quantification and aspectising (Cap, 2019; van Dijk, 1992; Van Leeuwen, 2007; van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). We provide evidence that, in verbal performance of political discourse, these strategies are enacted multimodally through utterances that include both a spoken and a gestural component. For example, we show that when describing migrants through quantifications, as in (1), Farage performs a co-speech gesture that similarly indicates large numbers, conceptualised in terms of volume, with the palms held open, facing each other and far apart.

(1) What it looks like is that, not just the midlands and the north anymore, but because of the sheer volume of people we’re having to accommodate, increasingly it looks like hotels in the southern part of England are also filling up and this one appears to be in Priti Patel’s own constituency. (NF20 02:19)

Similarly, we show that when referring to ‘an explosion’ in the immigrant population, as in (2), Farage performs a gesture that is iconic of an actual explosion, with the hands moving rapidly upward and outwards, thereby explicitly construing a rise in the immigrant population as harmful.

(2) And what about primary school places? With an explosion in the birth rate of newly arrived people, we estimate that we are going to have to find another 200,000 primary school places by 2020. (NF16 09: 27)

We analyse data made up of four speeches delivered as leader of the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party plus a video from Farage’s YouTube series Nigel Farage Investigates addressing the ‘migrant crisis’. We show that Farage exploits a range of gestures as part of multimodal rhetorical moves characteristic of anti-immigration discourse, including denial, othering, proximisation, quantification and aspectising. Our analysis therefore points to gesture as a significant semiotic resource relied on in discursive constructions of prejudice. While our focus is on anti-immigration discourse, our analysis also suggests the communicative import of co-speech gesture more generally and therefore calls for further gesture research within CDA.

As part of a larger project looking at discourses about migration, integration and national belonging in Germany and the Netherlands, this study will examine just the German data to see how the use of the term Migrationshintergrund (‘migrant background’) has been used over time. A comparison will be made between data from 2005, when this became the official term in population statistics, to 2021. Previous research (refs) has shown that this label is often used in discussions of social problems (Scarvaglieri and Zech 2013). Further, although inclusion in the category of ‘migration background’ is defined through the experience of migration, not nationality, ethnic background or religion, it is often used to refer only to people of color and especially Muslims (Fuller 2018). Thus despite the fact that people of migration background may have any ethnic background, including those of German background, the usual connotation of the word is more limited and frequently a shorthand for ‘ethnic other’.

However, discourses about national belonging have changed and continue to change in Germany (Williams 2014), with less ethnonational and more inclusive definitions of what it means to be German circulating more widely. This research will examine if such a discursive shift can be seen in popular newspapers. The uses of this terms in a sample from the top 5 most widely read newspapers in Germany in 2005 and 2021. All articles using the term Migrationshintergrund in the last six months of 2005 (n=19) and the first six months of 2021 (n=257) have been gathered in a data base, and the uses of the term will be analyzed in these two time frames. Each use will be coded according to meaning; while these meanings emerge from the data previous research has shown that common meanings have to do with the ethnic other and the referent being in a position of social disadvantage, although there are also usages that treat this as a neutral social category.

These data will then be examined both in terms of the discourses represented in both qualitative and quantitative terms; that is, the research questions are: Does the use of this term reflect different discourses in the two time periods? and, Does the frequency of the presence of the common discourses change from 2005 to 2021? As media data not only reflect but also reproduce discourses in in or exclusion, this analysis can contribute to our understanding of changes in societal norms through competing discourses.

References

Fuller, J. M. (2018). Immigration, integration and Leitkultur in German newspapers: competing discourses about national belonging. Studii de lingvistica, 8, 175-189.

Scarvaglieri, C., & Zech, C. (2013). ganz normale Jugendliche, allerdings meist mit Migrationshintergrund „. Eine funktional-semantische Analyse von “Migrationshintergrund. Zeitschrift für angewandte Linguistik, 58(1), 201-227.

Williams, H. (2014). Changing the national narrative: Evolution in citizenship and integration in Germany, 2000–10. Journal of Contemporary History, 49(1), 54-74.

Relation of language and identity can be studied from various perspectives and in different fields and disciplines. The intertwined connection between these two concepts and constructs is even more prominent in the context of bi- and multilingualism and migration.

This paper presents an analysis of the novel “Where You Come From” by Saša Stanišić originally written in German and titled “Herkunft”. Saša Stanišić is a German writer born in Bosnia and Hercegovina and one of the representatives of contemporary migration or guest worker literature.

A comparative analysis of the novel will show how this migrant identity is being constructed in German and how it is translated in Croatian and Italian. The chosen examples will illustrate how various translation strategies help to construct the identity and how they may interfere with it, especially regarding realia and culturally bound elements in the narrative discourse. Whereas in the case of German and Croatian due to author’s background the relation of mother tongue and first language may be taken into consideration, Italian translation demonstrates numerous challenges when it comes to translation of identity construction in a narrative, since Italian not only belongs to a different language family but it also embodies a culture which, despite geographical proximity, is very different from the culture the author and the protagonists of the novel are immersed in.

This paper focuses on the ways migrants are represented in terms of gender through gendered (and gendering) discourses (cf. Sunderland 2004). (Im)migration discourse is rightly a well-studied area (e.g. Baker et al. 2008, KhosraviNik 2014, Charteris-Black 2016, Drywood & Gray 2019). However, there are few studies specifically on the representation of gender and immigration in media (but note Blumell & Cooper 2019 and Liu 2021). Further research is still needed on intersecting aspects of identities and perceptions which together build complex phenomena of discrimination, fear and injustice – it seems that, in line with Blumell & Cooper (2019) and our own early findings, it is more acceptable for stereotypical gender roles to be perpetuated in immigration discourse than on other topics.

For this project we are looking at articles from six national UK newspapers. Here we focus on the analysis of the tabloids in our dataset (The Sun, The Mirror and The Daily Mail). We selected time periods when we were expecting a ‘spike’ (KhosraviNik, Wodak & Krzyzanowsky 2012 and KhosraviNik 2014) in media discourse on (im)migration (not necessarily on gender-related reporting), resulting in four two-week periods per publication. The first two-week period consists of the two weeks after the ‘Brexit’ referendum was announced (22/12/2016 – 07/03/2016); the second the two weeks following the referendum itself (23/06/2016 – 07/07/2016); the third between 22/12 and 07/03 2020; and the fourth between 23/06 and 07/07/2020.

Early findings indicate the not unexpected erasure of women in the data. Most commonly, people who migrate (or a specific type of people who migrate, such as refugees or economic migrants) are aggregated or collectivised as an impersonal mass (Van Leeuwen 1996). This does not constitute the representation ‘gender-neutral’ - (im)migration is largely represented as a ‘masculine' phenomenon associated with violence and threat, with some sympathetic depiction of women (and children) migrants as powerless victims.

References

Baker, P. et al. 2008. A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, Discourse & Society, 19(03): 273–306.

Blumell, L. & Cooper, G. 2019. Measuring gender in news representations of refugees and asylum seekers, International Journal of Communication, 13: 4444-4464.

Charteris-Black, J. 2006. Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign, Discourse & Society, 17(5): 563–581.

Drywood, E. & Gray, H. 2019. Demonising immigrants: How a human rights narrative has contributed to negative portrayals of immigrants in the UK media, in Farrell, M., Drywood, E., and Hughes, E. (eds) Human Rights in the Media: Fear and Fetish. London: Routledge, 777-808.

KhosraviNik, M. 2014. Immigration discourses and critical discourse analysis: dynamics of world events and immigration representations in the British press, in Hart, C. and Cap, P. (eds) Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 503–522.

KhosraviNik M., Krzyzanowski, M. & Wodak, R. 2012. Dynamics of representation in discourse: Immigrants in the British press, in Messer M., Schroeder, R. & Wodak, R. (eds) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Springer, 283–296.

Liu, S. 2021. Gendering immigration: media framings of the economic and cultural consequences of immigration, Feminist Media Studies: 1-18.

Musolff, A. 2015. Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 3(1): 41–56.

Sunderland, J. 2004. Gendered Discourses. Palgrave: Macmillan.

Van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The representation of social actors, in Caldas-Coulthard, C. & Coulthard, M. (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 32–70.

Textbooks for the teaching and learning of foreign languages represent a perfect place to examine discourse representations that are supposedly shared by a large share of the population, as these materials are usually very consensual (Tomlinson, 2021). However, what can be considered 'normal' in a foreign language textbook might not be the dominant idea shared by the society in which the coursebook is created. Moreover, opposing positions could also lie underneath this apparently homogenous surface.

This contribution aims to examine the conflicts between attitudes that are portrayed in a positive, natural way, and contrasting ideas that might need to be asserted more implicitly because of their less admissible nature. For this purpose, a corpus of eight textbooks of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) created for Japanese high schools is examined through the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis. By applying the framework created by von Münchow (2018, 2021) to analyse the status of discourse representations in discoursive communities, it is possible to reveal a conflict between dominant representations and declining or emerging ones, focusing on discourse marks. Moreover, an interdiscoursive study makes it possible to link these representations with political ideas circulating in Japan.

Despite cosmopolitanism not being a dominant discourse in Japanese society (Sugimoto, 2018), the findings suggest that in foreign language textbooks, this political idea is to be considered the norm (as the learning of a foreign language is intrinsically linked with this world's view). In opposition, opinions that were dominant for many decades in Japan (such as a certain degree of nationalism) and that appear to be degrading in nowadays' society might be harder to express for the textbooks' authors, that resort to implicit forms and peripherical places when stating controversial beliefs.

References

Sugimoto, Y. (2018). Kyōsei. Japan’s cosmopolitanism. Dans G. Delanty (éd.), Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (526‐540). Royaume-Uni : Routledge.

Tomlinson, B. (2021) Bringing the Coursebook to Life. IARTEM Virtual Rendez-Vous [seminar].

von Münchow, P. (2018) Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Identifying Meaningful Absences in Discourse. In: Schröter M., Taylor C. (eds) Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64580-3_8

von Münchow, P. (2021) L’analyse du discours contrastive. Théorie, méthodologie, pratique. Limoges : Lambert Lucas.

The German media landscape is characterised by discourses of ethnic tension, migration, integration and assimilation in relation to Turkish German individuals (Mueller, 2006; Orendt, 2010; Ramm, 2010) and has led to a stereotypical and negative public image of this very group (Kontos, 2020). Such discourses typically construct and portray German Turks as ‘the other’, ultimately intensifying discrimination (Bonfadelli, 2007) and feelings of alienation. This paper aims to give a voice to those who are targeted by these discourses and understand how Turkish Germans deal with and respond to mainstream discourses of social integration that contribute to this othering and how they influence the identity construction and sense-making processes of social integration of German-born Turks. This paper thus aims to answer the following Research Question:

How do Turkish German descendants experience issues of social integration currently discussed in the media and/or reflected in mainstream public discourses?

While there is a vast amount of research on the (social) integration of Turkish German individuals, they mainly employ quantitative methods to identify patterns rather than explore individual experiences, as this study aims to do. Drawing on over 13 hours of audio- and video-recorded focus group discussions, this qualitative study utilises Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse, promote and prioritise the voices of marginalised individuals and groups and draws attention to “the pressures from above and possibilities of resistance to unequal power relationships that appear as societal conventions” (Wodak, 2001, p. 3).

Findings illustrate that although participants challenge and resist such mainstream discourses, they at the same time orient towards power asymmetries reinforced by stereotypical discourses of Turkish German descendants. Having said this, they can only establish themselves in opposition to these discourses by reproducing the knowledge that is created by them and hence are ‘trapped in the discourse’. Findings moreover show, that mainstream discourses of the social integration of Turkish Germans strongly influence the subjectification, self-perception and identity construction of (Turkish German) ethnic minorities (Kontos, 2020). The study aims to enrich the theoretical understandings of social integration as a discursive construct by shedding light on its strong link to identity construction and to ‘de-silence’ the voices of stigmatised groups and individuals.

References

Bonfadelli, H. (2007). Die Darstellung ethnischer Minderheiten in den Massenmedien. In Medien und Migration (pp. 95-116). Springer.

Kontos, M. (2020). Die desintegrativen Folgen des öffentlichen Integrationsdiskurses: Eine biographieanalytische Untersuchung mit Migrantinnen und Migranten (1 ed.). Verlag Barbara Budrich. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15d7zft

Mueller, C. (2006). Integrating Turkish communities: a German dilemma. Population research and policy review, 25(5-6), 419-441.

Orendt, M. (2010). The Integration Of The Turks Into German Society: Turks On Their Way To Parallel Societies or To True Integration?

Ramm, C. (2010). The Muslim makers: how Germany ‘islamizes’ Turkish immigrants. Interventions, 12(2), 183-197.

Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. Methods of critical discourse analysis, 1, 63-94.

As Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011, p. 1) put it, metaphors are not “just fancy ways of talking” but powerful conceptual frameworks which shape how people think about social issues (e.g. Sopory & Dillard, 2002; Marshall & Shapiro, 2018). This study aims at shedding light on the role of media in shaping anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe during the “refugee crisis” by focusing on metaphorical representations of the displaced people in European press. It is conducted on a corpus of over 7 million words, consisting of newspaper texts published between 2015 and 2018 in market-leading newspapers in Poland, Spain, and the UK. The challenge of identifying metaphors in a large corpus using tools associated with corpus linguistics, however, is the fact that conceptual mappings are not attached to specific linguistic forms. Therefore, the present study resorts to a combination of semi-automatic methods proposed in preceding research (see Stefanowitsh, 2006, pp. 2-6 for an overview). Specifically, a concordancer is employed to retrieve all instantiations of metaphors 1) identified via a manual search in a sample of the corpus using Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2007); and 2) discussed in previous studies concerning metaphorical representations of immigrants (e.g. Charteris-Black, 2006; Musolff, 2015; Taylor, 2021).

Five main metaphors have been detected and, based on Arcimaviciene and Baglama’s (2018) categorisation, classified as dehumanising (MIGRANTS ARE A COMMODITY, MIGRANTS ARE LIQUID, and MIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS) and realising the myth of moral authority (MIGRANTS ARE INVADERS and MIGRANTS ARE (UNWANTED) GUESTS), with the former group prevailing significantly. At the same time, a considerable variation across the three subcorpora has been observed. The identified metaphors’ functions are examined and potential implications are discussed: they are argued to link the displaced people with a threat to safety and security; to legitimise support for securitisation and other harmful measures; to desensitise and emotionalise the audiences; to reinforce the us versus them division; to increase prejudice; and to legitimise racist language while, simultaneously, providing “plausible deniability”. With respect to the use of the corpus linguistics approach to metaphor analysis, it has helped put some of the frequently discussed mappings into perspective by pointing to a possible disproportion between the amount of attention paid to some metaphors in previous contributions and their actual frequencies in discourse.

References:

Arcimaviciene, L., & Baglama, S. H. (2018). Migration, metaphor and myth in media representations: The ideological dichotomy of “them” and “us”. Sage Open, 8(2), 2158244018768657.

Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse & Society, 17(5), 563-581.

Marshall, S. R., & Shapiro, J. R. (2018). When “scurry” vs.“hurry” makes the difference: Vermin metaphors, disgust, and anti‐immigrant attitudes. Journal of Social Issues, 74(4), 774-789.

Musolff, A. (2015). Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3(1), 41-56.

Pragglejaz Group (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1), 1-39.

Sopory, P., & Dillard, J. P. (2002). The persuasive effects of metaphor: A meta‐analysis. Human Communication Research, 28(3), 382-419.

Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS one, 6(2), e16782.

Stefanowitsch, A. (2006). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch, & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (1-16). Mouton de Gruyter.

Taylor, C. (2021). Metaphors of migration over time. Discourse & Society, 00(0), 1-19.

This paper examines a specific aspect of migration discourses, the framing of child migrants, from a diachronic perspective. Research in migration discourses has given us an overview of patterns of representation, in particular with reference to contemporary migration towards western Europe, the USA and Australia. What remains less well understood, even in a comparatively well-studied context like the UK, is the impact of intersectionality on discursive framings. This paper contributes to this area by focussing on child migrants. The study takes the stance that any analysis of migration must examine both immigration and emigration in order to avoid the erasure of emigration in the cultural and social history of a country like the UK. The data comes from the Times Online corpus which contains the entire digitised output of the Times newspaper from the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis combines tools and approaches from (critical) discourse studies and corpus linguistics to try and capture both the sweep of patterns across time and the nuanced identification of evaluation within those frames. In the first stage of the analysis, I show which terms potentially referring to child migrants (e.g. children, orphans, minors etc) occur in the collocates of migrant names (e.g. immigrant, emigrant, refugee etc) over the entire time period (1800-2019). This provides an empirical measure of the newsworthiness of child migrants in each period and, therefore, the opportunity to downsample from a data-driven perspective. In the second stage, I look at the collocates of the references to child migrants in the periods of peak newsworthiness to establish how these young people are categorised at different points in time. In the third, the analysis is funnelled further and I present the metaphors which are used to frame child migrants at these key points in time. In the concluding section, I illustrate the extent to which these children are presented in similar or different ways in the different time periods, and how this might both inform and be used to challenge contemporary attitudes.