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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 203–238

Chapter 9
Representations of the 2015/2016 “migrant crisis” on the online portals of Croatian and Serbian public broadcasters

This chapter investigates the verbal and visual representation of migration and migrants in Croatian and Serbian public broadcasters’ online portals during the “migrant crisis” in 2015/2016. The study shows that migrants are generally positively represented, which is congruent with the official policies of Croatia and Serbia. This positive representation was frequently used for positive self-evaluation of these countries’ influential social actors, and negative evaluation of neighboring countries. The chapter employs macro- and micro-linguistic analysis within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis.

Keywords: migrant "crisis", the Balkan route, Croatian public broadcaster, Serbian public broadcaster
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Theoretical and methodological framework
  • 3.Results and discussion: Representation of social actors and social actions
    • 3.1Naming strategies, determination, and functionalization
    • 3.2(Moving) water metaphors
    • 3.3Representing social actions: Non-agency and conditional agency
    • 3.4Visual presentation of social actors and social actions
      • 3.4.1Photographs of migrants in groups
      • 3.4.2Photographs of migrant children (and their mothers or families) and photographs focusing on migrants as individuals
      • 3.4.3Photographs of politicians
      • 3.4.4Photographs of other social actors
      • 3.4.5Photographs with no apparent/visible social actors
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.10sar
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