Gendered violence in European media reporting on crisis migration скачать в хорошем качестве

Gendered violence in European media reporting on crisis migration

Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau, PhDPolish Academy of Sciences Abstract: The talk explores the intersection between crisis migration, gender, and violence in European press coverage of the movement of refugees a) from Asia and Africa during the so-called “European refugee crisis” (2015-2018) and b) from Ukraine following the full-scale Russian invasion (2022-). By examining what types of violence are discussed, and which (groups of) gendered actors are construed as victims versus perpetrators, it shows how this type of reporting can be employed to discursively deprive the displaced Africans and Asians of the right to seek asylum in Europe by presenting men as a threat to the native population’s safety, and by obscuring the suffering of both migrant women and men. At the same time, Ukrainians fleeing the war are, above all, victimized, which accentuates the gendered racism underlying the European responses towards refugees from Asia and Africa. It is argued that these unidimensional, essentialist representations of violence contribute significantly to the volatile status quo for one of the most vulnerable populations in the world, while, at the same time, hindering a critical engagement with violence and masculinity — or, in fact, upholding and reinforcing the hegemonic masculinist gender ideologies. Bio: Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2024 she was awarded her PhD from Warsaw University and Seville University. Her work is located mainly within (comparative) corpus-assisted discourse studies, with a particular focus on discourses surrounding vulnerable social groups, but she is also involved in projects adopting computational approaches to language. Her book, Discourses of Forced Migrations in the Media: A Triangulated Approach to the “European Refugee Crisis”, is soon to be published by Routledge.