Canadian newspaper coverage and transnational human migration discourses: The 2015-2016 migrant and refugee crisis in Europe
Date
2024
Authors
Beaupré, Claude
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Abstract
The current dissertation serves as the only Canadian media analysis of the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe (RMC) of its kind, using said “crisis” as a case study of a time when migration was at the forefront of political and social debates.
The project had two aims. The first was to fill in the gap in the academic literature on discursive formations of migration in Canadian media coverage. There have been a total of seven studies that examined the potential links between the Canadian media and the migratory wave that occurred in Europe in 2015–2016. Each of these focused on the so-called ‘Syrian Refugee Crisis’ (SRC) and Canada’s role in it and either briefly alluded to the events in Europe or simply ignored them altogether, which is an oversight of key contextualizing elements of the time. The current research project demonstrates that Canadian media extensively covered the events in Europe during the 2015 Federal Election and the development of the SRC. The SRC might not exist, or at least not have been developed as such nor had the political and social support it received, without the constant and sizeable media coverage of the events in Europe not the least of which are the Alan Kurdi photograph and the numerous migrant-associated terrorist attacks throughout Europe between 2015 and 2016. The second aim of this project has been to contribute to the growing body of critical scholarship linking media coverage and transnational human migration discourses, researching how media acts as a discursive actor. It has served to decipher the narratives that emanated from said coverage and how these might change over time in reaction to the events unfolding.
The project posits, therefore, that the media acts simultaneously as agent and field of discursive deliberation, whose coverage has a complex and multi-layered influence on perception and discourse creation – especially when it comes to politically charged issues such as transnational human migration. As both field and agent, media coverage thus has an indirect discursive influence on how a subject matter is constructed and acted upon. It investigated the media coverage of 4 highly read newspapers in Canada (the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, and the Vancouver Sun). The qualitative and quantitative approach taken by the project allowed for the content and discourse analysis to be performed organically through the constant comparison method, not the least of which came from the careful and numerous reading and re-reading of each article to decipher the key events, topics, contextualisation, and so forth.
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Keywords
Migration, Discourse, Media