Mediated Multiculturalism: Newspaper Representations of Sudanese Migrants in Australia

Abstract

While multiculturalism has been central to the Australian political and social landscape since the 1970s, it has been recently challenged, with the (re)emergence of discourses of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘integration’. In this paper, we engage with these contests by focusing on newspaper coverage of Sudanese Australians around the time of the 2007 Federal Election. We ask: how did the Australian print media represent Sudanese people during this period? In addition, what do such representations suggest about contemporary media discourses around multiculturalism? Drawing on a content analysis of 203 newspaper articles published in The Age, The Herald Sun and The Australian, we argue that dominant media discourses are both influenced by and contribute to integrationist agendas that situate Sudanese Australians as outsiders to the Australian mainstream, thereby providing a significant challenge to contemporary multiculturalism.