The Sakarya University of Turkey and the Centre for Media, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding (CMHRP) in the UK are hosting an international conference under the title “Xenophobia in the Media” with a special focus on the issue of rising xenophobia against immigrants and refugees around the world. The conference will take place in hybrid format (online and in Turkey at Sakarya University) on 30 and 31 May 2022.

The conference is intended to climax a series of workshops for journalists in Turkey in May 2022 entitled ‘Capacity building for Turkish Journalists on Journalism of Tolerance’ organised jointly by Sakarya University and CMHRP with the support of the U.S. Mission Turkey Grants Programme.

The conference will focus on addressing the following objectives:

1.Discuss and understand the dynamics of the xenophobia construction in the media around the world with a special focus on Turkey, the effect of xenophobic discourse of the media and how it works, the nexus between xenophobia construction of the media and the social, economic and political conditions, and the impact of xenophobic discourse of the media on immigrants and host communities.

2.Bring together the experience of others and sharing information and knowledge of research on xenophobia and media from all over the world.

3.Deliberate on the means of overcoming the challenges and difficulties that have been identified in combatting xenophobia in the media.

4.Explore effective strategies and viable methodologies for preventing xenophobia in the media around the world.

5.Establish a network for cooperation and coordination between academics, researchers and journalists studying on media, refugees and xenophobia in Turkey and other parts of the world.

6.Collect the shared experiences and theoretical reflections with the aim of publishing a book on “Xenophobia in the Media”.

The conference will bring together academics, media researchers, experts, journalists and policymakers. It will provide a space for discussion and new ideas about combating xenophobia in the media, and would help delegates gain useful insights and encourage them to engage in critical research and take more proactive approaches to curtail hate speech and curb xenophobia.

The Organising Committee of the above conference is calling for abstract submissions from all over the world in order to achieve the research and action objectives of the conference mentioned above. The deadline for submitting abstracts (500 words maximum) for papers is  Sunday 10 April 2022.

Please submit your abstract via following link: Proposal Form

To present your research at the conference your abstract must pass peer review.

For further information please contact Dr Nesrin Kenar, Dr Pradeep Dhakal and Dr Senthan Selvarajah by email to  drpradeepdhakal@gmail.com and admin@cmhrp.org

A limited number of deserving participants will be supported to attend the conference in Turkey.

Click on the link below for virtual tour of the Sakarya University:  Sakarya University, Turkey.

Conference Coordinators

Dr. Nesrin Kenar, Assistant Professor, Sakarya University, Turkey; Co-Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding, UK.

Dr. Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, Associate Professor, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone; Chairman and Information Commissioner, Right to Access Information Commission, Sierra Leone; Co-Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding, UK.

Dr Senthan Selvarajah, Co-Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, UK; Academic, Unicaf University, UK Programme.

Dr. Pradeep Dhakal, Co-Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, UK; Director, Chetanalaya Institute, Nepal.

Organising Committee Members (in alphabetically order)

 Prof. Dr. Ali Poyraz Gürson, İstanbul Okan University, Turkey

Assistant Prof. Dr. Fatma Anıl Öztop, Kocaeli University, Turkey

Prof. Dr. Hilal Yıldız, Sakarya University, Turkey

Associate Professor Dr. Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone; Chairman and Information Commissioner, Right to Access Information Commission, Sierra Leone.

Associate Prof. Dr. İbrahim Kamil, Trakya University, Turkey.

Associate Prof. Dr. Mustafa Yasan, İzmir Demokrasi University, Turkey.

Assistant Prof. Dr. Nesrin Kenar, Sakarya University, Turkey, Consultant; Centre for Media, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding, UK.

Dr. Pradeep Dhakal, Co -Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, UK; Director, Chetanalaya Institute, Nepal.

Assistant Professor. Rajib Timalsina, Tribhuvan University; Nepal, Lead for Asia Pacific, Centre for Media, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding, UK.

Dr. Senthan Selvarajah, Co-Director, Centre for Media, Human Rights, UK; Academic, Unicaf University, UK Programme.

Assistant Prof. Dr. Vacide  Karaman, Sakarya University of Applied Sciences, Turkey.

Rationale for the Conference

Xenophobia, as defined by Wimmer is “an element of a political struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society”. In other words, xenophobia arises as a result of a feeling that the rights to benefit of the natives from the government is being eroded by the prerogatives of the foreign people. Xenophobia is generally accepted as an ideological construction about people who are not members of the imagined national collective. According to Heckmann (2001), xenophobia is an ideological thought, which manifests into activities against people of foreign ethnic background.

Discourse is considered to be the favoured vehicle of ideology (Van Dijk 2001). Accordingly, discourse acts as a conduit for the onset and function of xenophobia, between political parties, movements, media, activists and intellectuals. This conceptual insight sheds light upon the association between the function of the media and xenophobic construction.

There has been a significant rise in xenophobic rhetoric in the media around the world, because of the wake of increased immigration and Covid 19 infections in the recent past. The mainstream media is accused of reproducing and reinforcing negative stereotypes and hate speech based on religion, ethnicity, language, culture, colour and origin (Shaw,2016).

In an EU cross-country analysis (Eberl et al. 2018), it was deduced that underrepresentation of immigrants/refugees is common and usually, they are represented as threats to economy or culture and hence, the media covers them in an unfavourable light. In the UK media, the terms ‘migrants’ and ‘immigrants’ are closely associated with the frame of economic threat, such as the threat of higher competition associated with the labour market (Baker et al. cited in Ibid.). According to Balch and Balabanova (2016), the UK media coverage regarding immigration from Romania and Bulgaria largely depends on framing associated with welfare chauvinism and economic nationalism. Typically, while Eastern Europeans are associated with economic and welfare system threat, non-Europeans are associated with a threat to the culture of the host country.  It was found out by Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017) that usually, refugees in the UK are depicted in a manner that associates them with the economic crisis, the antipathy of Islam, or terrorism, thereby attaching them with the aforementioned threat-framing aspect.

According to Meeusen and Jacobs (2017), typically Roma is construed to be more of an economic threat when compared to other groups in the Netherlands. On the other hand, in comparison to Eastern-Europeans, North-Africans are perceived and portrayed as a cultural threat. Furthermore, especially in Belgium, North-Africans are construed as a group that would potentially pose a threat to the security, along with being associated to the cultural threat frame; no association with an economic threat frame is made (van der Linden & Jacobs, 2016). In their study (Ibid), it was also revealed that through journalistic tactics of selecting and ordering, refugees’ representation is subjected to a hierarchical representation and that “voice leads to a triple misrecognition of refugees as political, social and historical actors, thereby keeping them firmly outside the remit of ‘our’ communities of belonging”.

The situation is similar in Turkey, where xenophobic rhetoric has significantly increased in the wake of increased immigration in the recent years in the media. The mainstream media is accused of reproducing and reinforcing negative stereotypes and hate speech based on religion, ethnicity, language, culture, colour and origin. In Turkey, according to İnceoğlu (2018), media reinforces the prejudice against these marginalized groups – “the others” and at the same time make them feel unprotected and defenceless. This hate shows itself in outbursts of social lynch and discrimination and it reinforces the polarisation in the society.

A study of Australian mainstream newspapers and television coverage found that more than half involved negative depictions of race. Muslim Australians, Chinese Australians and Indigenous Australians are the most affected communities of the media reporting (Renaldi, Bahmani and Yang, 2020). In the United States, the media continues to express xenophobia and racism against immigrants. In particular, xenophobic expressions against Mexican and Latino are more common (Kang and Yang, 2021).

The function of the media to fuel xenophobia are found not only in the Global North countries but also in the Global South countries. This trend has been on the rise in recent times. Xenophobic crimes against ‘the others and non-nationals of African descent are rampant from Ghana to Nigeria and Zambia to South Africa (Akinola, 2018). For example, in South Africa, xenophobic discourse against people from other African countries is being reported in the media and portrayed as thieves and criminals (Tarisayi and Manik, 2020). Kariithi (2017) reported from a quantitative study that media narratives in South Africa characterized immigrants as “illegal immigrants” “undocumented” or a “dangerous threat” and foreign-owned shops as “fronts to conceal drug-dealing and other illicit activities”.  Xenophobia is on the rise against Rwandans in Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans in Botswana, with the opinion that they are responsible for the crimes these countries (Akinola, 2018). Increasing xenophobic expressions and incidents have been documented in Asian and South American countries on the basis of colour, race, and religion.  The Bangladesh media has become reflecting more and more nationalistic undertone regarding the Rohingya refugees, and as a result the sentiment about the Rohingya refugees among the people of Bangladesh has changed from “guest” to “menace” (Shishir, 2019).   The same situation is seen against Rohingya refugees in Malaysia (Daniel et al, 2020).

Similarly, xenophobic incidents against Venezuelan migrants and refugees are widespread in South America. In particular, hatred against Venezuelan migrants is prevalent in Peru. Due to misreporting by the media, there is a widespread perception that Venezuelans are to blame for the rise in crime in Peru (Associated Press, 2019).

Not only because of the increased immigrants and refugees, the spread of Covid 19 has also led to xenophobia reporting against Asian communities, especially the Chinese population, around the world including UK, US, Italy, New Zeeland, Australia, Russia and Brazil (Ittefaq et al, 2022; Haynes, 2021; Ong, 2020). Meanwhile, anti-foreigner sentiment against travellers from the U.S., Britain, Italy and other high-risk countries over the Covid virus has been on the rise in recent years in many African countries (York, 2020; Kiconco, 2020). In May 2020, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said “the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” (Haynes, 2021, n.d.).

The explanation above clearly showcases how refugees, immigrants and other minorities are portrayed by the media as the ‘enemy’. As Zur (1991, p.359-369) explains, “enemy image can be accurate or biased, imaginary or real”. This polarised situation influences the minds of the people and leads to the construction of “us” and “them,” tempting people to perceive themselves as ‘humane’ and the other side as evil. In other words, it creates fear in the minds of people who are convinced that immigrants are a threat to their job security, national security, culture and identity. As stated by Khosravi (2010), the discursive construction of ‘illegal immigrants’ as anti-citizens through xenophobic discourse creates moral panic in society. Often the media framing of immigrants depicts them as a ‘danger to society’.

Therefore, threat image is a psychological construct-as it is perceptions of threat.  In other words, it is a feeling of being unsafe that is rooted in people’s psychological insecurity (Maslow, 2006). Nohrstedt (2010) sees threat images as discursive constructions within communicative interaction between different societal actors. Thus, it is very clear that a communicative process facilitates the construction of threat image, as well as its spread, interpretation and interaction among media, citizens, public agencies, and other organized actors. Such a communicative process draws attention to the role of media in the construction of the threat image against immigrants, and its consequences on people and communities.

As Shaw (2012) observes, distorted stereotypical representations of asylum seekers and refugees in media have implications for promotion and protection of the rights of people seeking sanctuary.  The more the refugees are treated as the ‘other’, the more their rights are likely to be violated.  Media stereotyping creates hatred among its audience and leads to aggravated violence against immigrants and refugees, and public support to take adverse policy measures against immigrant and refugees. Therefore, it is extremely important to study the role of the media in the construction of Xenophobia in order to design appropriate media interventions to combat Xenophobia such as workshops and trainings for journalists and media literacy programmes for school children.

Although various studies have been conducted on the extent to which the media construct xenophobia discourse against immigrants and refugees and how they represent immigrants, the dynamics of the xenophobia construction in the media, the effect of xenophobic discourse of the media and its function, the nexus between xenophobia construction of the media and the social, economic and political  conditions, and the impact of xenophobic discourse of the media on immigrants and host communities, have not been adequately studied.

It is against this backdrop that the above conference is organised to achieve the above six objectives. Although xenophobia takes many forms for a variety of political, economic, historical, racial, and religious reasons such as islamophobia, anti-Semitism, this conference is limited to exploring xenophobia about immigrants and refugees in the media. This conference comes at a time when millions of people are currently entering European countries as refugees due to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

References

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