Språkets makt: Om hur maktens diskurs skildrar och påverkar invandringen i Europa

Abstract (på engelska)

In this talk, I will present an idea for a postdoc project to be sent to both VR and CERGU, and hope to get a fruitful discussion on what is clear and unclear. The aims of the project are twofold: a) To understand, through quantitative and qualitative language analyses with new, corpus linguistic tools, how various political actors have slowly made illiberal and invented discourses a part of the representation of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (below abbreviated as RASIM, follow­ing Baker et al. 2008), and b) To analyse how the usage of linguistic features, including metaphors and analogies, over time have come to make two countries almost reverse their immigration policies, as has been done in Sweden and Czechia. This will reveal how the construction of refugee discourses connect to these shifts in immigration policies and in illiberal tendencies overall. I also aim to show how dis­courses and metaphors about RASIM have been connected to certain persons or parties and how they may have moved to or from other such persons or parties over time.