What is it about?
We discuss what strategies are used in anti-immigrant discourse, by analysing selected examples from the UK and Polish media, together with data on everyday discourse collected from interviews with migrants. We identify discursive strategies of othering, which aim to categorise, denigrate, oppress and ultimately reject the stigmatised or racialised ‘other’. The analysis identifies five shared strategies of othering: a) Stereotyping; b) Whiteness as the norm; c) Racialisation; d) Objectification; e) Wrongly Ascribed Ethnicity.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The paper analyses contemporary media texts and interviews with migrants to show the discourse strategies that people use to exclude, marginalise and oppress migrants - people of colour who are mistaken as migrants. This piece of research may be helpful in raising awareness on discriminatory discursive practices and identifying covert strategies of oppression through hate communication.
Perspectives
This paper is the result of a long collaboration between the co-authors on projects on racism, discrimination and hate speech. Writing about these discursive strategies has given us the motivation to work towards a more systematic study of hate communication in the UK and Poland with more and more recent data. We hope you find it a useful reference for research on similar discursive strategies and that it will trigger more research projects in different countries or with different foci.
Katerina Strani
Heriot-Watt University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Strategies of othering through discursive practices: Examples from the UK and Poland, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, June 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2018-0008.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
