Suchergebnisse

The recent wave of immigration across European countries has precipitated an unprecedented political crisis in many Western countries. This is compounded by the fact that the large majority of these migrants originate from Arab countries. Research has demonstrated that Arabs are devalued relative to other socioethnic groups. The present study sought to investigate representations of Arabs and their integration. Twenty-one interviews conducted in Malta were used to analyse the logic and structure of argumentation supporting both favourable and unfavourable positions relative to Arabs. The findings demonstrate a variety of perspectives founded on six major themes, namely cultural, sociopolitical, psychological, religious, stigma and economic issues. All views were elaborated and warranted, and served to justify particular forms of social relations that make the integration of Arabs possible but highly difficult. In particular, findings demonstrate a lack of positive appraisals of Islam. These findings suggest that breaking the spiral of conflict between Europeans and the Arab communities they host requires affirmative action to redress the negative representational climate that Arab immigrants need to negotiate. Our study also introduces an innovative method for unpacking argumentation structures that mark representational fields. This serves to understand the ways by which social representations form and transform in everyday social interaction. This understanding is essential in designing smart policy that can cater to the logic of ordinary citizens.

Various forms of political participation are found in democratic societies, and these are diversifying at a steady pace. Scholarly literature presents us with an array of typologies of participation, some of which were conceived theoretically, and others derived from empirical research. This paper studies how political participation surfaces in media discourse in Italy and Greece. Specifically, it seeks to understand the social representations of political participation in both countries between 2000 and 2015, and to see which typologies of political participation are reflected in such representations. A media analysis was carried out on a sizeable corpus of newspaper articles in both countries. Data were analysed using a combination of correspondence and cluster analysis. The results indicate higher internal differentiation and gradualness characterising the social representations of political participation in the Italian corpus. In Greece, there was the presence of more radical ideological alternatives to electoral participation. Moreover, results indicate temporal stability in the themes pertaining to political participation over the years. The main contribution of this paper lies in showing that content pertaining to various typologies of political participation (e.g., relating to influence, in/formality and protest) features in the social representations of political participation in newspaper media. Findings are discussed in view of the temporal distribution of representational content, and by comparing country-specific typologies (for Italy and Greece) with those present in the literature. ; peer-reviewed