This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.
Mediated politics in/and the "refugee crisis" Much has been said in 2015-2016 and beyond about the so-called Refugee Crisisthat is, yet another pan-European "crisis" caused by the sudden massive asylumseeker flow from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. Across Europe and especially in the key EU countries, there have been divergent interpretations of this process. Therein, various mobilizing and politicizing conceptsincluding humanitarianism, security, diversity, protectionism-were deployed in public discourses to legitimize the ever-new restrictions of migration and asylum policies and diverse expressions of solidarity or lack thereof. While, in general, we have experienced and witnessed many calls for control and urgency to manage the European borders more tightly-and to illustrate the sheer existence and plausibility of an EU-wide coordinated asylum policy response-there have also been many comments about a presumed regionally specific, including "Eastern" versus "Western" way of dealing with the issue. While central and eastern European countries generally seem to have failed to fulfill their asylum obligations, central, western and northern EU countries did, or at least attempted to, honor their commitments. Nevertheless, there has generally been a huge degree of change in attitudes towards openness and inclusion with, in the majority of cases, increased hostility and at best various reservations towards the incoming asylum seekers (for an extensive outline, see Triandafyllidou's article concluding and summarizing the findings of this Special Issue). Moreover, diverse interpretations have been put forward as far as this "new odyssey" (Kingsley, 2016) and a genuine human tragedy, indeed unprecedented in the postwar period, is concerned. These interpretations not only pertained to the geopolitical and politico-economic ontology of the so-called Refugee Crisis. They CONTACT Micha» Krzy_ zanowski
Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country's right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable and legitimate perspective in perceptions of immigrants and refugees. The paper highlights the strategic as well as opportunistic introduction of anti-immigration rhetoric in/ by the political mainstream in Poland in recent years, often on the back of the so-called post-2014 European "Refugee Crisis". It explores normalisation as part and parcel of a wider multistep process of strategically orchestrated discursive shifts wherein discourses characterised by extreme positions have been enacted, gradated/perpetuated and eventually normalised as an integral part of pronounced right-wing populist agenda. The paperfurthers a view that normalisation entails the creation and sustainment of a peculiar borderline discourse wherein unmitigated radical statements are often married with seemingly civil and apparently politically correct language and argumentation. The latter are used to pre-/legitimise uncivil or even outright radical positions and ideologies by rationalising them and making them into acceptable elements of public discourse.
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