Rafal Zaborowski

Voice and community in the 2015 refugee crisis: A content analysis of news coverage in eight European countries:

Drawing on a Content Analysis of 1200 news articles on the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ across eight European countries, we address the question of whether and how refugees ‘speak in the news. To this end, we categorized the language of these articles in terms of how they narrated the subjects, status and contexts of voice. Our analysis establishes three different linguistic practices through which the voice of refugees is managed in the news – what we call practices of ‘bordering’: bordering by silencing, by collectivization and by de-contextualization. In light of these findings, we reach two conclusions. First, the distribution of voice in European news follows a strict hierarchy – one that relies on specifically journalistic strategies of selection and ordering yet reflects and reproduces broader hierarchies of the European political spheres. Second, this hierarchy of voice leads to a triple misrecognition of refugees as political, social and historical actors, thereby keeping them firmly outside the remit of ‘our’ communities of belonging.

Figures of Crisis: The Delineation of (Un)Deserving Refugees in the German Media:

This article examines how borders are discursively reproduced in representations of the ‘refugee crisis’ in the German media. Based on an extensive content and discourse analysis of German press representations in 2015 and 2016, we argue that the discourse of crisis obscures the reasons for migration and instead shifts the focus to the advantages and disadvantages that refugees are assumed to bring to their host country. More specifically, we contend that press discourses construct a figure of the (un)deserving refugee around three key themes: economic productivity; state security; and gender relations. In doing so, we illustrate how the framing of some lives as more deserving of protection than others directly mirrors and extends the humanitarian securitization of borders into public discourse.