Previous discursive research has found that minority group members may deny or downplay the existence of discrimination. However, to date little research has addressed the issue of violence against minority group members. This study therefore draws on interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in a Scottish city to analyse their reports of violence committed against them. One form of reporting violence was by way of a complaint available to any speaker, in making no reference to attributes of attackers of victim. When racism was alleged, it was presented as a tentative, reluctant or 'last resort' explanation. The descriptions offered by interviewees reflected the contributions made by the interviewer, highlighting the ways in which these reports are interactional co-productions. The results suggest that accounts from victims of seemingly racially motivated violence may function in similar ways to 'new racism' in making racism seem to 'disappear'. These findings point to the potential difficulties that arise in identifying and looking to challenge instances of 'new racism'.
Previous research has explored the 'othering' and dehumanisation of asylum seekers and refugees, yet comparatively little research has explored the opposite process: the humanisation of refugees. This article applies discursive psychological analysis to the transcripts of five UK Parliamentary debates on the European refugee 'crisis' from September 2015 to January 2016, examining an explicit form of humanisation: categorising refugees as 'human beings'. The analysis focuses on the nature and function of such categorisations to explore the social functions of the discourse. It illustrates how politicians draw on the human qualities of both refugees and 'us' to make the government and nation morally accountable for protecting refugees. Moreover, it shows how the humanisation or dehumanisation of others implicates or denies the self as morally responsible. This highlights how research on dehumanisation-and the opposite process of humanisation-needs to attend to the rhetorical, relational and dialogical aspects of discourse.
Word count including extracts: 6793Key words: Indigenous rights; Maori; Pakeha; discourse analysis; discrimination; racism; biculturalism Zealanders over Maori. The third submission works up the similarity between indigenous rights and general property rights, negotiating the relationship between equal treatment and self-determination to legitimise the claims. We argue that discursive research on discrimination should approach texts as contributions to a dialectics of racism and anti-racism. This is useful for gaining a better understanding of oppressive discourses, and developing arguments that actively challenge discrimination.
This article addresses political and media discourses about integrating refugees in the UK in the context of the “refugee crisis”. A discursive psychological approach is presented as the best way to understand what talk about the concept is used to accomplish in these debates. A large corpus of political discussions (13 hours of debate featuring 146 politicians) and 960 newspaper articles from the UK were discourse analysed. The analysis identified five dilemmas about integration: Integration is positive and necessary, but challenging; Host communities are presented as welcoming, but there are limits to their capacity; Refugees are responsible for integration, but host communities need to provide support; Good refugees integrate, bad ones don't; Refugees are vulnerable and are skilled. All are used to warrant the inclusion or exclusion of refugees. The responsibility of western nations to support refugees is therefore contingent on the refugees behaving in specific ways.
The development of scholarship related to particular categories of people who are subject to different forms of social control often results in subfields that become or remain isolated from each other. As an example, theory and research relating to the reintegration of ex-offenders and the integration of asylum seekers have developed almost completely independently. However, both processes involve people who are marginalized and stigmatized through legal and social processes, and policies and practices in the two fields share somewhat similar concepts and goals. This article therefore seeks to identify insights through a critical comparison of these two areas of research, theory and practice, with the intention of enriching our understanding of both. This comparison highlights that the frameworks reviewed here enable us to move beyond a narrow focus on service user's behaviours, needs or risks, and into an examination of questions of identity, belonging and justice.
Recent discursive research has shown that constructions of place may function to regulate social relations and reinforce particular notions of belonging. However, extant discursive research on place‐identity has so far neglected the mutually constitutive relationships between constructions of place and identity in legitimising people's presence. To address this gap, this study, undertaken in Scotland, applies the notion of place‐identity to the discursive analysis of interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, people who work in organisations that support asylum seekers and refugees and locals who live in areas where asylum seekers and refugees tend to be housed. The analysis suggests that constructions of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ countries of origin as dangerous, and the host society as relatively problem‐free, function to constitute their identities as legitimate and to justify their presence in the host society. Moreover, constructions of place may work to portray refugees and asylum seekers as benefiting the local community and as belonging more than certain other locals. In contrast, constructing the host society as ‘full’ functions to oppose their presence through portraying them as not being able to belong. This demonstrates the mutually constitutive roles of place and identity in legitimising or resisting people's movement and belonging. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
It is common for politicians to refer to "our proud history of supporting refugees," yet the historical record regarding responses to refugees is not straightforwardly positive. So how is history drawn upon in political debates regarding refugees? Applying discursive psychology, this article analyzes the use of history in five U.K. parliamentary debates that took place from September 2015 to January 2016 on the European refugee "crisis." The analysis identifies six "functions" of the use of the history: resonance, continuity, reciprocity, posterity, responsibility, and redemption. It shows how references to historical events create narratives regarding the United Kingdom's history of supporting refugees in order to construct the nation in particular ways, mobilize collective identities, and legitimize or criticize political actions. Specifically, references to the United Kingdom's role in providing refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany functions as a hegemonic narrative that reinforces the United Kingdom's "heroic" position and constructs the Syrian conflict as involving an oppressive dictator and innocent refugees in need to help, thereby legitimizing support for Syrian refugees. The analysis demonstrates the flexibility of historical narratives, reformulates the distinction between "psychological" and "rhetorical" uses of historical analogies, and reflects on the social and political implications of such uses of history.
Previous research on the integration of asylum seekers and refugees has aimed to develop conceptual frameworks for understanding integration or to measure the extent to which people are integrated. However, this research tends to pay insufficient attention to the rhetorical functions of integration discourse. The current study addresses this gap through a discursive analysis of 'lay' accounts of asylum seeker and refugee integration in Glasgow, Scotland. The analysis highlights that accounts of integration 'failure' may support 'two-way' conceptions of integration while still blaming asylum seekers for any lack of integration. Furthermore, accounts of integration 'success' may reinforce assimilationist policies or otherwise function to reinforce the view that adult asylum seekers generally do not integrate.The analysis highlights the importance of attending to the rhetorical functions of integration discourse in order to understand how particular policies and practices are supported or criticised at the community level at which integration takes place.
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