Does emotive and evaluative language in online migrant narratives reinforce positive migrant stereotypes within host societies? An exploratory analysis

The sizeable presence of migrant care workers in the private care market in many European countries is confirmed by several studies that have explained the phenomenon through functional arguments, stressing the economic convenience of transnational markets and the crucial role played by public regulation. This paper focuses instead on the public and institutional discourses that have contributed to legitimising this private care market, characterised by the worsening of employment conditions and the decrease in care quality. The main argument of this paper is that the social recognition of these workers provides the public with the new concepts and rationales that determine the actual shape of the private care market.Migrant care workers are usually, compared to other migrant workers, more welcome in the host society and less targeted by xenophobic attitudes, especially where their labour helps to meet a lack of public provision as is happening in Southern European countries. Nevertheless, their rights are not fully granted either as citizens or as workers: basic requirements in this migrant care market include for instance reduced wages, great flexibility, and informal contracts.Our hypothesis is tested through the reconstruction of the public regulation and a content analysis of the public discourse that has accompanied this regulation for ten years (2002–2012) in Italy. The two main national newspapers have been taken into account. This analysis provides evidence on how market dynamics have been shaped by a deliberate political construction, which has relieved governments of the task of finding a public solution to care needs and has relegated migrant care workers to a subordinate social position, which is functional in making the care market work.

Williams Syndrome narratives tend to display atypically frequent uses of evaluative language. The aim of the present study is to determine the narrative language profiles of a group of 12 WS participants. We video-recorded their oral recounts of a wordless animated video and compared them to those of typically developing children matched for verbal abilities (matched by MLU). We analyzed narrative structure and evaluative devices referring to internal states and to evidentiality. Our findings suggest that the narrative length and structure of WS and TD groups were similar, but the WS narratives lacked overall coherence and clarity. The use of evaluative language in WS was at the level expected for verbal age, and thus, not significantly excessive.

In this study I examine Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. The questions addressed are: (1) How does the use of evaluative language vary in fictional and personal narratives? (2) Is there a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres and children's age and socio-economic status (SES)? The sample consists of 444 narratives produced by 113 Venezuelan school-age children participating in 4 narrative tasks, in which personal and fictional stories were elicited. Findings suggest that age and socio-economic status have a greater impact on the use of evaluation in fictional stories than in personal narratives. Low SES and younger children are at a greater disadvantage when performing fictional narratives than when performing personal narratives. These results strongly imply that children's narrative competence cannot be assessed in a single story-telling task, given the importance that task-related factors seem to have on narrative abilities.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

A growing, English‐language literature analyzes the public discourse of international education and students. One large set of studies highlight the discursive marginalization of non‐western, international students in western, host societies. They draw on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and meta‐narratives of western, White, and elite dominance, which diminish the theoretical importance of discourse in non‐western and non‐elite settings. A second, smaller set of studies analyze the public discourse of international education in non‐western, specifically Asian, countries; they generally reference educational discourse in both Asian and western countries. Relatively few studies critically examine patterns of discursive domination in Asian discourse; but the ones that do so compare both Asian and Western countries. Even rarer are studies of social media discourse among international students. We find a few studies of social media discourse among Asian students who studied abroad, but none of foreign students studying in host, Asian countries. Attention to multiple discourses and theoretical narratives offers a fruitful, research agenda and underlines the complex, dynamic, global nature of contemporary public discourse on international education.

This chapter revisits the concept of partial citizenship for migrant domestic workers, meaning their stunted incorporation as members of host and home societies. It further qualifies the experience of partial citizenship by focusing on the dynamic engendered by their conditional membership based on employer sponsorship. Host societies often limit the citizenship of migrant domestic workers by binding them to work only for their sponsors. At the same time, the experience of sponsored migrants varies across the diaspora between domestic workers who can transition out of employer sponsorship to permanent residency and those who are perpetually bound to temporary status. Illustrating variations of partial citizenship establishes differences in citizenship for migrant domestic workers across destinations.

Prior research overlooks highly educated migrants and their political incorporation in host societies. This study applies both classic assimilation and self-selection theories to understand political trust among highly educated migrants from Mainland China in Hong Kong, including their trust toward local (host society) and central (home society) governments. We also address the possibility of selective assimilation adopted by migrant parents as risk-reducing strategies. Based on a survey of highly educated Mainland migrants in Hong Kong ( n = 2,884), our results show partial support for both theories. Migrants’ political trust is influenced by both their post-migration political exposure and their pre-migration political attitudes. Moreover, migrant parents tend to remain bicultural, showing more positive attitudes toward both governments in host and home societies.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the efforts of an ethnic Miao migrant worker association to recreate and engage with festivals both in the host society of the Pearl River Delta and back home in Southeastern Guizhou province of Southwest China. It analyzes how and under what conditions the disadvantaged migrant workers collectively demonstrate and assert their cultural identity in festival activities, rekindling and strengthening their ethnic consciousness. Design/methodology/approach Based on ethnographic field data, this study focuses on the connections between migrant workers’ lives in modern host societies and their traditional culture back home. Special attention is paid to the temporal dynamics of migrant workers’ cultural identity and socio-economic development. Findings The leaders of the Miao migrants’ association created network linkages to channel the flow of labor, capital and culture between the host society and the migrants’ hometown, and made efforts to secure institutional embeddedness at both ends of the flow. Their use of festivals and related heritage as cultural capital has facilitated the cultivation of network linkages and institutional embeddedness for economic advancement and overcoming ethnic prejudices and institutional disadvantages. Originality/value By illustrating how the economic development has been imbricated with culture, this research enhances understanding about the role of network linkage and institutional embeddedness in the flow of labor, capital and culture between host society and home place of migrant communities.

Research documenting the re-configurations of ‘public–private’ boundaries encountered by migrant domestic workers has observed how they often create a sense of ‘home’ in public spaces in destination countries. Migrant workers’ occupation of, and interactions in, public spaces such as parks, malls, restaurants, and churches in effect create ‘private spheres’ where they can relax and be themselves with friends and sometimes partners. Yet migrant women also often face a double exclusion from the public sphere as political subjects, first as women and second as migrants. Their physical presence in the public sphere may be highly regulated by gender norms, and their participation in the public sphere is limited due to their exclusion from citizenship or even labour entitlements. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of subaltern counterpublics, this paper argues that migrant domestic workers’ experiences of re-configuring public and private spaces within Lebanon contribute to the creation of ‘migrant counterpublics’ that challenges the methodological-nationalist limitations of conceptualisations of citizenship and participation in the public sphere. I make these reflections through an auto-ethnographic account of my experiences while researching the working lives and conditions of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. Central to these reflections on our navigation of public spaces is the consideration of our embodied experiences as racialised women, which intersected with our differential class, sexuality, and migrant status positioning.

Massive migration both within and between countries has been witnessed over the last two centuries. Migration is a multifaceted event with significant socioeconomic, cultural, political consequences for both receiving and sending countries/regions. Migrants typically move to a more developed region with the hope of obtaining better employment and living standards. Migrants, a cheap labor source with high achievement motivation, seem to be the ideal workforce for aging societies that have an urgent need for working populations. Despite migrants being needed for local economic growth, migrant workers are often marginalized in host societies. In addition, lacking human, social, and cultural capital, migrants are more disadvantaged in the job markets, especially during economic downturns. Life establishment in host societies is by no means an easy task for migrants who are also confronted with issues such as cultural differences and extra socioeconomic pressures. Institutionalized and daily discrimination from host societies also have significant negative impacts on migrants’ professional and everyday lives. Thus, migrants often report lower levels of happiness, job satisfaction, and health than their local counterparts. It is urgent to facilitate migrants’ integration and diminish social division between migrants and locals to improve migrant workers’ life quality in the host societies.

Prelude: 2020 in Words Each year the Australian National Dictionary Centre, based at the Australian National University (ANU), selects “a word or expression that has gained prominence in the Australian social landscape”. In 2020, “iso” took out first place, with “bubble” following close behind. On the Centre’s website, Senior Researcher Mark Gywnn explains that “iso” was selected not only for its flexibility, merrily combining with other words to create new compound words (for instance “being in iso”, doing “iso baking” and putting on “iso weight”), but also because it “stood out as a characteristically Aussie abbreviation” (Australian National Dictionary Centre). Alongside the flexibility of the word “iso” and its affinity with the Australian English tradition of producing and embracing diminutives, iso’s appeal might well be that it does not carry the associations that the word “bubble” has acquired in the time of COVID. While COVID-19 has put many of us in various forms of “iso”, the media imagery—and indeed experiences—of many older people living in residential aged care during COVID has shifted some of the associations of the word “bubble”, heightening its associations with fragility and adding vulnerability and helplessness into the mix. 2020 was not the first time “bubble” has appeared in the Australian word of the year list. In 2018 “Canberra bubble” took out the first spot. What interests us about bubble’s runner-up position behind “iso” in 2020’s word of the year is what this might also reveal about the way ideas of independence vs dependence, and youthfulness vs aged underlie and inflect new usages of these words. In the era of COVID-19, the buoyancy of “iso” is tied to its association with a particular kind of Aussie-youth-speak, while the sense of heaviness and negative resonances that now accompany the word bubble are tied to its associations with the experiences of those in aged care. In 2020 “bubble”—a word that has primarily been associated with children and the child-like (bubble baths, bubble tea)—took on new associations and overtones. As the pandemic unfolded, “bubble” also became intertwined with media depictions of and popular discourses around those in later life, many of whom experienced “iso” much more brutally than the easy-Aussie-speak of “iso” would convey. There is much less play—and a lot less mingling—in the Australian National Dictionary Centre description of new uses of the word “bubble”: “a district, region, or a group of people viewed as a closed system, isolating from other districts, regions, or groups as a public health measure to limit the spread of Covid-19”. There have been various kinds of “closed system[s]”, isolated groups and regions constructed in the management of the pandemic, but there is one group—and one kind of location—that has been “bubbled” in quite specific ways. While the sectioning off and isolating of older age people in the name of protecting their health has often been ineffectively—and in some places, disastrously—managed in terms of disease prevention, it has been very effective in reducing the rights and voices of those it acts in the name of. Speaking from Ireland but commenting on the situation in the UK and parts of Europe, Anne Fuchs and colleagues write that “the discursive homogenization and ‘frailing’ of the over 65s meant that people in this category were an object of public discourse rather than participants in the debate” (2). In many instances the “bubbling” of older people, particularly those in aged care residences, has served to both isolate and render largely voiceless the residents of these care homes. Although the global impact of COVID-19 on the aged has been significant, including across many affluent societies, it has been particularly disastrous in Australia. At the time of writing (1 January 2021), of the 909 COVID-related deaths in Australia to date, 693 have been of people aged 80 or over: in other words, more than 75% of COVID-related deaths in Australia have been of people over 80. According to the federal government’s records of COVID-19 deaths by age group and sex, 685 of these deaths have been of aged care residents. It is not surprising therefore that many speak of the heavy impact of COVID-19 on older people as a form of genocide. Public discourse and government policies and priorities around COVID-19 have thrown into relief and exacerbated some of the deeply troubling ways that older people, particularly those living in aged care residences, are not recognised or treated as “equal partners in our future” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). Both the management of and public discourse around COVID-19 have highlighted and escalated the forms of ageism, especially ageism around later life, that have become embedded in Australian culture. In late 2019 the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety released its Interim Report, titled simply Neglect. In the Foreword, the commissioners write: the Australian community generally accepts that older people have earned the chance to enjoy their later years, after many decades of contribution and hard work. Yet the language of public discourse is not respectful towards older people. Rather, it is about burden, encumbrance, obligation and whether taxpayers can afford to pay for the dependence of older people. (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1) Written and released before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Interim Report highlighted the “fundamental fact that our aged care system essentially depersonalises older people” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 6) and identified many ways “the aged care system fails to meet the needs of our older, often very vulnerable, citizens” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). In 2020 we saw some of the effects of these failures in the often disastrous mismanagement of disease transmission prevention in many aged care residences in Australia. Equally troubling, the resulting deaths have at times been accompanied by a general acceptance of the loss of so many in later life to COVID-19. The fact that these deaths are often regarded as somehow more inevitable, or as less significant than the deaths of others, is an indication of how deeply “Australia has drifted into an ageist mindset that undervalues older people and limits their possibilities” (Royal Commission into Aged Care 1). It assumes that one’s later-life years are of less significance and value (to oneself, to the community) than one’s younger years. At various times in the pandemic, sizable parts of the global population have been variously asked, advised, or required by their governments to remain within their household or residential “bubble”. These COVID-related “bubbles” are more buoyant for some. Jackie Gulland has written a feminist analysis of the ways that the UK COVID-19 lockdown rules are premised on “neo-liberal assumptions about the family as autonomous and sufficient for the provision of reproductive labour” (330). In many places the requirement to stay within one’s “household bubble” both assumes that the home is safe for all, and that most care and dependency requirements are provided and received within a household. As Gulland’s essay demonstrates, the idea of the household bubble constructs an image or idea of who and what constitutes a household, and which relationships “count”. Drawing on critiques of neo-liberal and able-ist ideas about autonomy by feminist and disability scholars, Gulland “shows how the failure of policymakers to take account of interdependency has made lockdown more difficult for carers and those in receipt of care” (330). In this essay we look at some of the ways that the required and/or imagined COVID-19 bubbles for people in later life are thought of differently to the COVID-19 bubbles that younger, and mixed age, households are imagined as forming. This is particularly the case, we argue, for those in aged care residences. Younger and mixed age COVID bubbles often include extended or linked households (as we will discuss below in relation to the idea of the compassionate bubble) and function as a bubble that can link and enclose. In contrast, COVID bubbles in and for aged care and those in later life, work to isolate and separate. They function as bubbles that close off and shut out, as if placing the older person and older people behind glass (in some cases, quite literally). Likewise, while the COVID-19 bubbles for the “general” population (a category from which those in later life are often excluded) are regarded as temporary structures that will in time be dissolved to re-allow social movement and intermingling, the later life and aged care COVID-19 bubble is imagined very differently. This is because it is overlaid upon a pre-existing conception of later life—and in particular the fourth age—as itself a kind of bubbled existence, a fragile state held somewhat separate and apart from the general population and moving inexorably toward death—a bubble that pops. Bubbling the Fourth Age The idea that later life can be divided into different stages and ages has a long history, although the shape, meaning and valuing of different ages in later life is historically specific. Back in the late 1980s the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett proposed that rather than falling into three main stages—childhood, adulthood and old age—there are in fact four stages and that “later life can be divided into a ‘third age’ and a ‘fourth age’” (Gilleard and Higgs, “The Fourth Age” 368). Laslett’s distinction between a third age (active and characterised by personal fulfillment) and a fourth age (for Laslett an age of infirmity) has become increasingly significant in both age studies and in the provision and imagining of aged care. While the third age is increasingly depicted as something that, when managed “successfully”, can expand and fill with rich experiences and rewards (assuming one has the economic and social privilege and mobility to embrace these r

From an intergroup relations perspective, attitudes toward immigration derive from assessments of immigrants’ ethnic proximity to the host society. However, attitudes are embedded not only in the notion of intergroup relations, they are influenced by the information environment in which public discourse about immigration is shaped. This paper investigates whether the quality of the media system contributes to the emergence of a well-informed public that is more likely to reinforce democratic values and thus have more positive attitudes toward immigration. The European Social Survey data (2002–2018) from 19 European countries are combined with media quality indicators from the Varieties of Democracy project and studied in a cross-national comparative perspective. Results confirm that Europeans prefer immigrants that are ethnically more similar to the majority of the host society, regardless of time or given country. Furthermore, attitudes are more positive in countries with stronger public services. Moreover, a higher quality media system that reflects the level of media freedom, opinion plurality, self-governance, and objectivity, fosters pro-immigration attitudes, especially for immigrants who are ethnically different from the host society.

Ritualizing the mundanity of holidays in usual environment

This study investigates the use of evaluative language in CNN International's headlines reporting on the legal case of American rapper Sean 'Diddy' Combs through the dual theoretical lenses of Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal System and Van Dijk's theory of ideological discourse. Applying a qualitative descriptive method and discourse analysis approach, we analyzed 31 headlines published from September to December 2024 using the Attitude subsystem's three categories: Judgment, Appreciation, and Affect. The findings reveal a striking dominance of Judgment (88%), particularly within the Social Sanction domain, demonstrating CNN's systematic framing of Combs through legal and moral evaluations. Appreciation (8%) and Affect (4%) appear minimally, relegated to passing references to cultural influence or emotionally charged victim quotes. This evaluative pattern aligns with Van Dijk's concept of ideological bias in media discourse, showing how CNN's linguistic choices construct a criminalized image of Combs before legal resolution. The analysis demonstrates how 88% Judgment-based language, predominantly negative, reinforces dominant moral discourses while marginalizing Combs' cultural contributions (Appreciation) and emotional complexity (Affect). These findings illuminate the media's power to shape public perception through strategic linguistic framing, highlighting the need for critical engagement with news discourse, particularly in high-profile cases where media narratives may precede judicial outcomes.

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation