European Security Under Threat: Mediating the Crisis and Constructing the Other

Abstract

Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezależna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

Citation

Kopytowska, M. and Grabowski, Ł. (2017), "European Security Under Threat: Mediating the Crisis and Constructing the Other", Karner, C. and Kopytowska, M. (Ed.) National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 83-112. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78714-513-920171005