Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding

Abstract

This paper examines the discursive construction of refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent immigrants and migrants) in a 140-million-word corpus of UK press articles published between 1996 and 2005. Taking a corpus-based approach, the data were analyzed not only as a whole, but also with regard to synchronic variation, by carrying out concordance analyses of keywords which occurred within tabloid and broad-sheet newspapers, and diachronic change, albeit mainly approached from an unusual angle, by investigating consistent collocates and frequencies of specific terms over time. The analyses point to a number of (mainly negative) categories of representation, the existence and development of nonsensical terms (e.g., illegal refugee), and media confusion and conflation of definitions of the four terms under examination. The paper concludes by critically discussing the extent to which a corpus-based methodological stance can inform critical discourse analysis.1

Sentiments and Perceptions of Business Respondents on Social Media: an Exploratory Analysis

“…Lexical analysis has also been proposed as a suitable method for analyzing qualitative textual data (e.g., Ryan and Weisner 1996;Doucet 1996, 1997), as it is more inductive than conventional qualitative approaches. It seems, however, to be especially suited to the conjoint qualitative (thematic) and quantitative analysis of large bodies of texts (e.g., Seale et al 2006;Gabrielatos and Baker 2008).…”

Immigration and the British news media: Continuity or change?

“…In relation to these latter campaigns, a recent study by Deacon and Smith (2017) Analysis of the level of immigration coverage in more "typical" periods of public life than election campaigns reveals similar, if not more emphatic, degrees of rising and sustained salience. Gabrielatos and Baker (2008) found a "clear, upward trend" (p. 17) in the amount of coverage of immigration between 1996 and 2005. Wars, disasters, and terrorist attacks were key to these spikes, but domestic political events and debates also featured as contributory factors.…”

Pathological integration, or, how East Europeans use racism to become British

“…I understand women and children, but most of them are young men – immigrants, not refugees!’ Anna added her Muslim husband's endorsement to keep him on the right side of an otherwise ambiguous boundary (a familiar strategy in mixed relationships; see Song : 1202–4). ‘Even my husband claims there are too many of them, and most of them aren't refugees.’ This was a skilfull inversion of the victim/perpetrator binary that recast refugees as at best economic migrants, at worst terrorists (a strategy that gained popularity following the Paris terror attacks in November 2015; see Goodman et al : 110–11; see also Gabrielatos and Baker ). It was the same for Marcin, also from Poland: ‘[T]hey say [refugees] are mostly women with children, but when you watch the news you only see young men.’ Marcin attributed these views to his British colleagues: ‘What I'm saying is nothing compared to [what they say].…”