Visual humanization of refugees: A visual rhetorical analysis of media discourse on the war in Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 forced millions of Ukrainians to flee their homes and seek refuge in other countries, resulting in one of Europe’s largest refugee crises in decades. Many countries were quick to mobilise and provide the needed assistance to Ukrainians refugees. In contrast to the usual responses to asylum seekers coming from outside Europe, EU countries as well as the UK were uncharacteristically welcoming. Similarly, news reports of the Ukraine refugee situation have been marked by affectionate headlines and an outpouring of support and sympathy arguably not seen previously in the context of other refugee crises outside of Europe. This prompted questions and discussions about the alleged double standards and disparities in the treatments and portrayals of refugees from different countries. Inspired by such discussions and through a media frame analysis approach, this article examines a sample of relevant online UK news articles from the BBC and The Sun and compares their coverage of the Ukrainian refugee crisis to that of the Syrian and Afghan ones. The overarching aim is to identify how these distinct refugee crises are framed within the sampled articles and whether there are, in fact, discursive differences in the representation and framing of these crises, as often claimed in existing debates on the subject.

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“Refugees from Ukraine are called humans”: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Turkish tweets about Ukrainian refugees

Elmas,

Yılmaz,

Gürbüz

2024

Media, Culture & Society

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The arrival of refugees in large numbers has created heated political and public debates across various arenas. Online spaces, specifically social networking platforms, have become a major site for people to express their opinions, feelings, and beliefs toward refugees. Drawing on the principles of corpus analysis, the Discourse-Historical Approach, and multimodal critical discourse analysis, this mixed-methods study explores how online discourses are utilized to portray Ukrainian refugees in Turkish tweets in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The findings showed that the linguistic and visual elements used to characterize Ukrainian refugees, as well as the characteristics attributed to and presumptions and justifications made about them, constructed a positive portrayal, unlike the portrayals of other major refugee groups reported in the literature. This positive representation of Ukrainian refugees as welcomed guests was reinforced through the negative depiction of other refugee groups in Türkiye, particularly Syrians and Afghans, as threats.

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Visual humanization of refugees: A visual rhetorical analysis of media discourse on the war in Ukraine

Cited by 6 publications

References 89 publications

The Portrayal of Afghan and Ukrainian Refugees in the Leading Spanish Newspapers

The Portrayal of Afghan and Ukrainian Refugees in the Leading Spanish Newspapers

“It Could Have Been Us”: media frames and the coverage of Ukrainian, Afghan and Syrian refugee crises

“Refugees from Ukraine are called humans”: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Turkish tweets about Ukrainian refugees

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