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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. 239–262

Chapter 10
Representation of unaccompanied migrant children from Central America in the United States

Media vs. migrant perspectives

This chapter examines the representation of unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America (namely Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) in U.S. online national news sources over a one-year period and compares this to the way these children talk about their own perceptions of migration and their motivation for moving. Data collection consisted of online news reports on unaccompanied minors from Central America in the United States as well as interviews with children collected from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations. Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a qualitative difference in discourse (e.g., use of metaphor, metonymy, deixis and visual elements) that varies depending on whether the sources are media reports or personal accounts from the children themselves.

Keywords: Unaccompanied migrant children, Central America, media discourse, multimodal critical discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Relevant research
  • 4.Theoretical foundations
  • 5.Method
  • 6.Findings
    • 6.1National coverage (2016)
    • 6.2Counter voices: Metaphors of migrant discourse
  • 7.Conclusion
  • 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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.11cat
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Zhao, Kai
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