Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis(81 Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture)

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy. This title is in pledging for Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023

Review :
The volume Migration and Media appeals undoubtedly to a variety of academic disciplines beyond linguistics: researchers in migration, ethnic and area studies, anthropology, history, politics and sociology can find valuable insights and inspiration for their research. Analysing media coverage of migrants is intrinsically interesting, particularly because by influencing both the public and policy makers, it significantly impacts on the way that migrants and the host society interact. Migrants are often depicted in the media as a burden to the host societies, or blamed for complex socio-economic problems, but what we realised by analysing media discourse was that host societies are seen more and more as being threatened in their core existence by “migrants”, “asylum seekers”, and “refugees”. These categories often blend into each other to form one threatening entity. Understanding how migrants are represented in the media is therefore key to understand the growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities that dominates the socio-discursive landscape of migration. And this is precisely the focus of this volume. Drawing on a diverse range of methods and data sets, the contributors to this collection provide an in-depth investigation of migrant discourse that highlights the crucial role of language in constructing a causal relationship between migration and national identities in crisis. In short, this collection sheds new light on a timely topic that will likely remain significant for years to come.