Refugee Discourse Research Articles

Rohingya women as refugees: Examining displacement, refugeehood and ‘bare life’

Abstract Based on Agamben’s assertions (1998) refugees are often compared to ‘bare life’ (homo sacer) without any political agency. They are considered to be outside the purview of national or international legal and yet at its mercy for survival. For refugee women, this stripping of their autonomy stereotypes them as reproductive vessels in need of chivalrous protection within the larger refugee discourse. Policy projects frequently regard them as ‘vulnerable populations’ in need of assistance. Given this theoretical framework, the present study contextualizes the life of Rohingya women prior to displacement and as refugees in India. It aims to assess the de jure and de facto rights of these women through the process of displacement. Moving beyond rigid assertions, this study postulates that refugeehood does not mean a complete absence of decision-making spaces for Rohingya women nor does it in any way mean a sudden disappearance of their sufferings. It focuses on their experiences as women and steers clear of homogenizing their narratives as refugees.

Narrative Characteristics in Refugee Discourse: An Analysis of American Public Opinion on the Afghan Refugee Crisis After the Taliban Takeover

The United States (U.S.) military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was met with turmoil as the Taliban regained control of most of the country, including Kabul. These events have affected many and were widely discussed on social media, especially in the U.S. In this work, we focus on Twitter discourse regarding these events, especially potential opinion shifts over time and the effect social media posts by established U.S. legislators might have had on online public reception. To this end, we investigate two datasets on the war in Afghanistan, consisting of Twitter posts by self-identified U.S. accounts and conversation threads initiated by U.S. politicians. We find that Twitter users' discussions revolve around the Kabul airport event, President Biden's handling of the situation, and people affected by the U.S. withdrawal. Microframe analysis indicates that discourse centers the humanitarianism underlying these occurrences and politically leans liberal, focusing on care and fairness. Lastly, network analysis shows that Republicans are far more active on Twitter compared to Democrats and there is more positive sentiment than negative in their conversations.

“To Live Is a Matter of Time”: Memory, Survival and Queer Refugeehood in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong attempts to reweave the historical threads that have been brutally severed by American imperialism, forced migration and the imperatives of assimilation, as a practice of survival. Drawing on his own experience as a Vietnamese refugee, Vuong situates a Vietnamese American queer protagonist at the centre of his non-linear narrative, which excavates the boy’s family history to trace the multiple histories of displacement informing who he is today. The novel’s temporal disorientation becomes a formulation of queer temporality that activates a critical reorientation of how experiences of refuge are typically represented—a coming into consciousness known as “refugeetude”. Such a critical reorientation serves a dual purpose. Firstly, by foregrounding the protagonist’s—and his family’s—shattered recollections, Vuong challenges dominant accounts of the Vietnam War and recovers the voices of those that are effaced by Western representation, thus assembling a more inclusive “just memory” of the war. Secondly, the novel disrupts the teleological narrative of progressive assimilation that is prevalent in refugee discourse by revealing the enduring forms of violence that displaced subjects must still face in contemporary America. By queering the normative temporality of refugee experience, the novel demonstrates how the characters’ refugeehood is not finite but ongoing, necessitating a continuous search for healing and resilience.

Crafting Recognition: Understanding Gendered and Ethnicised Experiences in an Arts-Based Integration Project

In Denmark, heightened public interest surrounding migration politics has become embodied in the arts, leading to the development of migration-related arts projects. In this study we explore the experiences of women taking part in an arts-based integration project designed for migrant and Danish women to knit, sew, and crochet in female company, with a view to professionalise their handicrafts. Our findings, which are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews with members of the group, demonstrate how handicraft acts as a prism through which categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity are negotiated within the project. We found that group members’ national and cultural backgrounds shaped their different expectations and experiences in the project. The roles they occupied and their self-perception within the group were also shaped by other factors, such as their family status, their state of employment, and whether handicraft was more of a ‘hobby’ or a source of income. The study makes a case for appreciating the importance of social recognition. Understanding how these women perceived their own and each other’s work becomes a magnifier of the socio-political context in which the integration project is situated. Artistic practice both enabled members to respond to an integration and refugee discourse, while simultaneously positioning them within such frameworks.

Visual humanization of refugees: A visual rhetorical analysis of media discourse on the war in Ukraine.

This study examines how news images of refugees in the context of the war in Ukraine mobilize intergroup relations. A visual rhetorical analysis is used to examine the rhetorical strategies employed in news images of Ukrainian refugees in a mainstream Finnish national newspaper from February 25 to May 31, 2022. The data consisted of 465 images. The study constructed four humanizing visual rhetorical strategies based on the visual expression in news images: maternalizing, fragilizing, agonizing, and activizing. The rhetorical strategies constructed four subject positions for Ukrainian refugees: vulnerable victims, innocent victims, suffering Ukrainians, and persistent/resilient Ukrainians. All rhetorical strategies implicitly communicated the subject position of evil to Russia. The paper contributes to the current knowledge of the humanization of refugees in media discourse and the potential of media images to mobilize intergroup relations. Methodologically, the paper elaborates visual rhetorical analysis as a means of social psychological study of refugee discourse in the context of war.

Representation of Refugees in the Western News as Victims and a Threat:

This paper investigated the representation of refugees in Western news with reference to the Guardian newspaper that covers global humanitarian crises. Adopting critical discourse analysis, the discursive practices used in this paper are analysed with the concept of security and securitization of migrants in the context of a global pandemic as the main analysis framework. It examined the representation of Libyan refugees in a Guardian newspaper article, which created a major controversy in the media after its publication. Based on this newspaper article, the study highlights that evolving immigration policies have changed the refugee discourse, including the individuals’ health situation and travel restrictions. Also, the lockdown during the global COVID pandemic added to the discrimination and inequalities that the refugees face. Some linguistic tools selected for the analysis help in understanding whether this representation has contributed to the victimization or the alienation of the refugees in Libya in the event of the outbreak.

Understanding Iranian Refugee Discourse in Turkey on Twitter by Using Social Network Analysis

The problem of asylum seekers is still a major concern worldwide, including for the transiting countries like Turkey, which hosted more than 4 million asylum seekers in its territory. The main question is, how long is this going to continue? To answer that question, understanding what Iranian asylum seekers want is also very important, in order to define a long-term solution. Based on the data analysis in the paper, most of the refugees who have already settled in Turkey for more than 3 years, mostly want to join the programme of resettlement to several refugee recipient countries, such as Canada and the European Union (EU), conducted by the UNHCR. However, there are some obstacles for them to successfully be admitted in the resettlement programme. First, the acceptance rate is very low, under 5% yearly, and the required processing time is sometimes more than five years. The proposed solution is to open access to education for Iranian refugees and implement the EU Blue Card for the refugees and asylum seekers to resettle them voluntarily to EU territory. Hopefully, that legal solution can become a long-term solution for Iranian asylum seekers and refugees who are to this day still struggling in the Turkish territory.

A Refugee Discourse in Malaysia: Issues and Concerns From Human Security Perspective

The influx of illegal immigrants (PATI) [or refugees] is one of the non-traditional security issues that has long plagued the Southeast Asian region. Malaysia is no exception. Despite not being a member of any international refugee-related conventions, including the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, Malaysia has 185,920 registered refugees and asylum seekers until August 2022 (UNHCR 2022). The government has made it an unwritten policy for refugees to be treated on a humanitarian basis. Therefore, this study is designed to explore the issues and concerns of Rohingya refugees in Malaysia from a human security perspective. This research was conducted using qualitative methodology by utilising primary sources from in-depth interviews, direct observation through participation in seminars, and field studies in selected areas in Northern Peninsular Malaysia, particularly in Kedah. The study findings concluded that there are five areas of concern that often-become obstacles to the livelihood of refugees in Malaysia, namely the right to work, education, documentation, security (due to xenophobic sentiments), and healthcare. These areas are fundamental to refugee livelihood; therefore, this research found that it is very timely for the government to formulate a more transparent and proactive policy to deal with this issue effectively.

Violence by any other name: constructing immigration crises, the threat of the sick refugee and rationalising immigration detention through moral panic

This article is concerned with the employment of pathologising discourses of mental health and trauma by the mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. Using critical discourse analysis, this research contrasts mainstream media coverage of four major publications on immigration detention. It explores the media’s role in the (re)creation of refugee discourse, and as a purveyor of racial ideology, which problematises people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. The resulting discourse pathologises the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the socio-political conditions and violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse is infused with biomedical understandings of mental health, it also legitimises the nation state’s practice of coercive social control for these populations through detention.

Electoral competition dynamics and Syrian refugee discourses and policies in Germany and France

ABSTRACT Among European countries, Germany has implemented the most generous policies toward Syrian refugees. Contrarily, its main partner within the EU, France, viewing the refugee crisis primarily as a matter of security, has avoided them. I argue that these divergent approaches are closely linked with electoral competition dynamics. Electoral competition dynamics have shaped the expected outcomes of adopting pro-Syrian refugee policies for ruling centrist parties in these countries. The risk posed by the centrist right-wing voters’ shift to the far-right due to the enactment of pro-refugee policies for CDU in Germany was eased to a great extent by a type of cordon sanitaire, other parties’ exclusion of Alternative for Germany (AfD) from coalitions. However, the electoral risk posed by the rise of a Populist Radical Right Party (PRRP), the National Rally (RN), against the Republic on the Move (LREM) has been higher in France. As a result, centrist French Presidents have been electorally more constrained or vulnerable in adopting generous refugee policies. By comparatively analyzing the Syrian refugee discourses and policies in Germany and France, this study permits us to better evaluate and understand the domestic sources of refugee politics in liberal democracies.

난민법 법률안의 비판적 담화 연구

This study aims to critically analyze the discourse about refugees formed in Korean society and find the social wrong in the discourse through the Discourse Historical Approach, which combines historical and sociological approaches with linguistic analysis. To this end, taking 2018 into account, when 500 Yemeni refugees arrived in Korea, we compare and analyze the bills proposed before and after 2018 and find the discourse topic and strategy (description strategy, argumentation strategy, perspective strategy) for each period. This study shows that the refugee discourse before 2018 mainly deals with the ‘crisis of refugee protection’ from a humanitarian perspective, and refugee discourse after 2018 deals with the ‘crisis of the state’ from the perspective of xenophobia and neo-racism. These findings suggest that the discourse strategies used in refugee discourse after 2018 have the characteristics of propaganda in that they eventually stimulate public anxiety and create an atmosphere of fear, which implicate social wrong.

Multimodal Practices of Empathy and Fear in Polish Refugee Discourse: Analysis of Magazine Covers

Multimodal Practices of Empathy and Fear in Polish Refugee Discourse: Analysis of Magazine Covers

이동통치의 관점에서 본 난민 담론의 형성과 변화

This study aims to analyze the changing issues of refugee discourse as the concept of governmobility. From the perspective of governmobility, refugees are not only politically interpreted, but also become a tool to represent the position of the receiving country. As a result of the keyword analysis on Afghanistan refugees in Korean newspaper articles, Afghanistan refugees were only an issue in Europe and Western countries until the 1990s, but are now at the center of refugee issues in many countries, including South Korea. The background of the change is related to the internalization of refugee issues, mainly focusing on the nation’s inclusiveness to refugees. Also, the domestic refugee issue is not composed of homogeneous forms and contents, creating new discourses and various political spaces.

Anti-Migrant Authoritarian Populism and the Global Vaccination Challenge

This article explores the ways in which anti-migrant and refugee discourses and policies have flourished throughout the Covid-19 pandemic despite dominant global public health concerns, especially around vaccines. Our argument is that pre-crisis authoritarian, populist, and nativist political tendencies have proven remarkably resilient, interacting readily with the pandemic to further justify a rolling back on refugee and migrant rights. These tendencies risk, in several contexts, undermining the comprehensive global vaccination effort needed to combat the pandemic.

A Crytical Discourse Analysis of the Ukrainian War Refugees’ Image in British Press

Introduction. The article examines the peculiarities of the image construction of the Ukrainian war refugees as the consequence of political changes that swept the world in the war in Ukraine unleashed by Russia on February, 24, 2022. The relevance of the study is due to the growing scientific interest in the phenomenology of the discourse of migrants and refugees and its aspects.Methods. The research of mass media discourse was conducted in the context of critical discourse analysis (CDA).Results. The study based on the material of the British press analyses the mechanisms of the refugees’ image formation. As an instrument of the impact on the society, mass media discourse is structured and meets certain requirements. We identify the discourse topics where the Ukrainian refugees are presented as the threat to European security, as the most socially vulnerable individuals suffering the consequences of the war in their home country or as heroes forced to risk their lives. As social actors, Ukrainian refugees are represented either as a collective identity, or as individuals. The study concludes about the strategies that form the image of refugees (impersonification, victimization, referential, in-group and out-group framing), about the linguistic means verbalizing the strategies (generalised nouns, numerals, adjectives, idioms and collocations), and the stylistic figures (metaphors, allusions, oxymoron, hyperbolas, personification). Discussion. The prospects for further exploration we see in the study of the image of the Ukrainian refugees in the social media discourse.

Essential Notions Concerning the Integration of Refugees

The latest wave of refugees, which peaked in 2015, raises the question of what we mean by integration, not only in terms of the rules adopted in the EU, but also in terms of the social inclusion of individual refugees and their families. This is because the concepts in the literature, in EU documents on asylum, and in individual sectoral policies (e.g. social, employment, housing, health and public education) are not necessarily harmonized. Therefore, the aim of the study is not only to review integration outcomes, but also to distinguish concepts related to migration, asylum, and refugee discourse, such as exclusion, disintegration, acculturation, and assimilation. Only clarification will bring us closer to selecting the most important social policy and asylum measures. This clarification is also urgent because a coherent integration policy must comply with both cultural diversity and non-discrimination requirements in the EU.

Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route

Abstract In 2015, the mass mobilities of refugees, many from Syria, towards Western Europe, were presented as a crisis threatening the integrity of nation-states. Whilst governments along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ increasingly responded with exclusionary measures, large-scale solidarity movements emerged and played a key role in assisting refugees in their journeys and settlement. All along the route, activists and volunteers (sometimes in loose collaboration with official relief organizations) established solidarity communities that tasked themselves with assisting people on the move. Their activities have been underpinned by discourses of solidarity and hospitality reflecting deep-seated popular beliefs about displacement, sanctuary and refuge—alternative narratives of what is today called asylum. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with solidarity and refugee groups in Greece, Serbia and Hungary, I examine the practices and discourses of refugees and those mobilized to support them along the ‘Balkan route’.

Becoming Mediterranean: semantic shifts in German asylum and refugee discourse

Becoming Mediterranean: semantic shifts in German asylum and refugee discourse

Your home, my refuge: being a refugee in Brazil

Abstract The objective of this study was to reveal how refugees who live in Brazil perceive the macro-dynamics of the local society and how their response to them varies in accordance with their different psycho demographic profiles. We interviewed 24 refugees from different countries, genders, ages, and races. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and subjected to critical discourse analysis, resulting in three a priori categories: social, discursive, and textual practices. We found out that social practices did differ in terms of their countries of origin, gender, and race. The analysis of their discourses revealed three different places and roles: hero, victim, or faker. Finally, the textual analysis indicated the choice of words that subverted the hegemonic discourse of refugees, revealing resistance to the place refugees are relegated to in Brazilian society.

Verbal and multimodal metaphorical patterns in Wikipedia migration discourse

The use of metaphors in the refugee discourse since 2015 has so far mostly been explored in newspapers in different EU countries. In this study, we combine linguistic discourse metaphor analysis with a corpus-based approach, complementing qualitative and quantitative corpus evidence from Wikipedia migration corpus to explore verbal and multimodal metaphorical patterns. As a multimodal and multilingual hypertext, Wikipedia, represents a highly relevant source of information and a unique source for the multimodal and cross-linguistic discourse linguistic analysis. In this paper metaphorical expressions are considered as a transtextual discursive phenomenon in the light of Foucaudian tradition. The results of the study show that the analyzed migration discourse in Wikipedia is like the newspaper migration discourse predominantly structured by metaphorical patterns that draw from the source domains water flow/natural catastrophes as well as military/warfare. These source domains are conventionally used in relation to a wide range of target domains (multivalency), however, they play a constitutive role in the analyzed discourse by providing a specific view of events and emphasizing certain aspects and evaluations. The patterning of water flow metaphors across Wikipedia articles and talk pages is in multimodal metaphors extended, elaborated and reinforced in visual mode, referring to those migrating as a flow, wave, influx. However, especially on Wikipedia talk pages Wikipedians point to the dehumanization of those fleeing and the securitization of migration through metaphorical expressions as a problematic linguistic discourse practice