Right wing populism is on the rise. Through the use of othering, right-wing groups delimit their own identities while excluding others. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on how European mediated public spheres (such as reader responses to media discourse) constitute an important domain of identity articulation and struggle through the discursive construction of the ‘Other’. In this case, the others come from the Central and Eastern European countries that are perceived as newcomers to Western Europe due to the consecutive enlargements of the European Union. Specifically, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of 236 reader comments responding to one online article from The Telegraph that discusses “new” immigration from Bulgaria and Romania to the U.K., a result of the lifting of work restrictions in 2014. Applying methods of Conversation Analysis and critical discourse analysis (including relevant EU history and background), we expose numerous levels of othering in the data (e.g. othering those who disagree with right-wing political views, othering the EU, othering non-native speakers, othering migrants/Roma) and demonstrate the various strategies that are used to accomplish this (e.g. argumentation strategies, perspectivization, etc.).
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Cited by (8)
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2023. Othering the expat majority: Qatari junior academics’ identity work at the interface of migration and institutional reform. Language and Intercultural Communication 23:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
Stamatović, Milica Vuković
2022. ‘I would never…’: Deictic shift and moralizing in anti-immigration reader comments. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 58:2 ► pp. 289 ff.
Breazu, Petre & Göran Eriksson
2021. Romaphobia in Romanian press: The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian migrants in the European Union. Discourse & Communication 15:2 ► pp. 139 ff.
Chovanec, Jan
2021. ‘Re-educating the Roma? You must be joking. . .’: Racism and prejudice in online discussion forums. Discourse & Society 32:2 ► pp. 156 ff.
Breazu, Petre & David Machin
2018. A critical multimodal analysis of the Romanian press coverage of camp evictions and deportations of the Roma migrants from France. Discourse & Communication 12:4 ► pp. 339 ff.
Breazu, Petre & David Machin
2019. Racism toward the Roma through the affordances of Facebook: bonding, laughter and spite. Discourse & Society 30:4 ► pp. 376 ff.
Catalano, Theresa & Grace E Fielder
2018. European spaces and the Roma: Denaturalizing the naturalized in online reader comments. Discourse & Communication 12:3 ► pp. 240 ff.
Burger, Dr. Csaba
2010. The Role of Social Partners in Transforming the German Pension System. SSRN Electronic Journal
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.