CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Güner, Büsra |
|---|---|
| Title | The Representation of Refugees and Migrants in the European Mainstream Media: The Case of the United Kingdom and Germany |
| Summary | The surge of right-wing exclusionary populism and the failure of the Western states to respond to the so-called refugee crisis have been a fruitful discussion for students at the nexus of mobility, religion, and identity. Still, the recent into the representations of the refugees and migrants is rather limited to the analysis of anti-immigration discourse as well as single country or exploratory studies. This thesis scrutinizes the most commonly used frames about the refugees and migrants in the mainstream print media and offers a reading of the representations utilizing theories of Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Orientalism. This research hypothesizes that not only these frames dehumanize, deindividualize, and decontextualize people, but also the reproduced knowledge about the others of Europe inform articulation of messages across the political spectrum. In this end, two hundred seventy articles from the most circulated quality and tabloid newspapers across the political spectrum in the UK and Germany are qualitatively analyzed. Findings affirm the hypotheses that the underlying notions about non-Western individuals inform both anti-immigration and pro-immigration accounts. Liberal discourse is not only informed by the same Orientalist notions about the other, but also enforces a bio-political archetype for a deserving refugee and leave non-conforming individuals with agency in the necropolitical deathscape to die. Moreover, in addition to the extensively researched implication of the former, these findings point to a dilemma for the latter which reemphasize mechanism that allow marginalization, dehumanization, and deindividualization of the refugees and migrants for the sake of short-term action. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/guner_busra.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University