Suchergebnisse

Following a Social Representations approach, the article examines the representations of citizenship held by both migrants and Greek citizens in Greece after the announcement of a heavily debated citizenship legislation. Essentialism, a way of representing social categories as holding an underlying essence that determines their characteristics, was used as an analytical tool to understand the inclusive or exclusive function of representations of citizenship towards migrants. Findings showed that Greeks construct representations based on ethnic, civic, and cultural ideas, while migrants construct representation of citizenship based on civic and cultural ideas. Essentialism was a way of constructing ethnic and cultural representations of citizenship and functioned in both exclusive and inclusive ways, but assimilatory terms accordingly. Civic and cultural representations of citizenship were constructed in nonessentialist ways and functioned in inclusive ways. However, from Greeks' perspective, civic inclusion was conditioned upon an often‐questioned legality of migrants and upon cultural assimilation terms. Studying both the content and the essentialist/nonessentialist formulation of representations of citizenship is an important tool in understanding the politics of inclusion and exclusion of citizens in the social arena.

Abstract
Introduction
While there is extensive quantitative research on factors related to support/opposition of attitudes towards same-sex parenting (SSP), relevant qualitative research is limited, despite the need to identify subtle and ambivalent forms of prejudice. In this study we examined ways that young people, university students at the Republic of Cyprus formulated favourable arguments that constructed only at first appearance supportive representations of SSP.

Methods
Data were collected in 2021–2022, through 11 focus group discussions with undergraduate and graduate students (26 females and 16 males, 18–27 years old), of different fields of study. Following the principles of discursive/rhetorical analysis, we identified three argumentative lines, all of which included contrasts and comparisons.

Results
The first argumentative line juxtaposed SSP to being raised in an orphanage, the second to irresponsible/disadvantaged (single) parenting and the third compared the upbringing of children in same-sex to that in heterosexual families. All arguments demonstrate a seemingly supportive stance towards SSP rights. Nevertheless, drawing on heteronormative norms, they construct SSP as "a lesser of two evils" and undermine seemingly positive attributes of same-sex families, through reference to children's exposure to adverse societal reactions.

Policy Implications
We discuss the implications of the findings for SSP social recognition and for sexual citizenship. We also discuss the implications of this approach for attitude research on the topic, underscoring the ideological implications of 'attitudinal discourse'.

The problematic of diversity today circulates a discourse on human differences and similarities which is also taken up by actors with controversial political agendas, notably right‐wing populist and neoconservative movements. Focusing on contestation over the meaning of "diversity" by lay actors in social media, we suggest here that different constructions of diversity may be seen as clashing projects largely shaping each other through their emphasis on differences or similarities among people. In a qualitative analysis on the tweets mentioning diversity in Greek over a year, constructions of diversity were mirror images of each other across two independent ideological tensions, with distinct social stakes. Individualist constructions of diversity praising individuals' differences clashed over the legitimation of power with majoritarianist constructions emphasizing social homogeneity, and universalist constructions of diversity advocating the fundamental similarities of individuals clashed over the legitimation of social identities with particularist constructions praising cultural differences. Those constructions converse with basic social psychological models of diversity, suggesting that the emphasis on difference or similarity across people may stem from a dynamic context of political confrontation. The findings also suggest that right‐wing populist representations may be channeled by the content of contestation and the positions held by the other side.

AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which LGBT+ flag raising in a university at the Republic of Cyprus was debated in a social media environment. It aims to examine the ways in which discourses around sexuality intersect with discourses around the nation in a postcolonial, ethnically divided, European context. One hundred four comments posted on the university Facebook page were analysed through Thematic and Rhetorical analysis. Analysis revealed three main ways of accounting for the flag incident in which sexuality and LGBT+ issues are represented as (a) inferior to national issues, (b) symbolic and/or tangible threat to the nation and (c) personal (instead of collective) identity that should not be waved in public. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the findings differentiate from literature on homonationalism and on their implications for constructing collectiveness and understanding citizenship.

In this article we bring a critical social-psychological approach to the study of sexual citizenship. This approach seeks to understand how citizenship is constructed through ideological resources and negotiated in local contexts. We do so by studying newspaper representations of the Civil Union (CU) law in the Cypriot context. This law represented a major legal development for a largely heteronormative, patriarchic social context and sparked debate around sexual rights in general. We analysed 82 opinion articles that appeared in four newspapers of different political orientations between 2011 and 2015, through thematic and critical discourse analysis. The analysis revealed that CU was debated in terms of two oppositional themes. The first theme debated whether CU protects universal rights or introduces special rights, which are either not deserved or create inequality. The second theme approached the CU law as a sign of a much-needed societal progress or as a sign of decline and national degeneration. We show how these themes draw upon two broader ideological dilemmas, that of universalism versus particularism and that of Occidentalism versus Orientalism, and discuss the implications of these ideological streams in constructing the boundaries of citizenship for LGBT+ in this context.

© American Psychological Association, 2017. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: Kadianaki, Irini et al. "Using national history to construct the boundaries of citizenship: An analysis of Greek citizens' discourse about immigrants' rights" DOI:10.1037/qup0000087" ; In this article we advance a qualitative approach to study the interconnection between representations of history and representations of citizenship. We argue that representations of the national past are important resources on which different constructions of citizenship are based. Our empirical context is the heated debate that emerged as a result of the announcement of new citizenship legislation in Greece. We used the online comments posted in the forum of the Ministry of Internal Affairs following the announcement of the legislation to study how national history was represented by Greek citizens and how these representations functioned to form different arguments regarding migrants' citizenship rights. Our analysis identified 4 themes in representations of national history: Continuity of the nation, idealization of the past, moral obligation toward the past, and homogeneity or heterogeneity of the nation. We show that these ideas largely sustain an exclusive, essentialist, ethnic conception of the nation as a distinct, homogeneous, and continuous entity of people sharing a common genetic heritage. More inclusive arguments were based on seemingly pluralistic ideas that implicitly entailed banal nationalist assumptions or assimilatory ideas toward migrant inclusion. We conclude that commentators' historical representations inhibit critical understanding of the past and consequently of a more open and plural understanding of the future. Future research should focus on examining how formal and informal education may promote such representations and on the political implications of these for intergroup relations in multicultural contexts. ; Mario Carretero would like to acknowledge that this article was written with the support of Projects EDU2013- 42531P and EDU2015-65088-P from La Dirección General de Investigación Científica y Técnica (Ministry of Education, Spain) and also the Project PICT2012-1594 from the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina) that he coordinates. Also, this work was conducted within the framework of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology's COST Action IS1205 ("Social Psychological Dynamics of Historical Representations in the Enlarged European Union").

This paper presents a thematic analysis of a media criticism against the European Union (EU) during the so-called 2015 refugee crisis in one member-state, the Republic of Cyprus. Three inter-related negative representations of Europe were identified in the Greek-Cypriot newspapers studied at the time: inhuman Europe, fragmented Europe and Europe as perpetrator. All three represented Europe as unable or unwilling to deal with a crisis that Europe itself partly caused or reproduced. This media criticism focused on questioning Europe across pessimistic lines without offering or considering alternatives, thus served to reproduce the EU status quo. The paper discusses the implications of these findings in understanding the role of the media in the con-current skepticism towards EU in other member-states.

Continuous and increasing worldwide migration has sparked an intense social debate in multiple forums. Media play a key role in constructing, monitoring, and framing this debate. This study focuses on a qualitative analysis of the media debate around migration in Cyprus via (a) studying how migrants are represented in the Greek Cypriot Press and (b) assessing, the extent and the way in which favorable and unfavorable representations around migration are in dialogue. Toward this end, thematic and dialogical analyses were conducted on articles published in 4 daily Greek Cypriot newspapers between 2011 and 2015. Findings showed that migrants were constructed in economic (e.g., as assets to economy) and humanitarian (e.g. as victims) terms in the favorable representations, whereas in the unfavorable ones, migrants were constructed primarily as a threat to the local economy, to security, and to the nation's culture and existence. In terms of the relation between the 2. favorable representations engaged more clearly and in more detail with alternative representations of migrants than unfavorable ones. Favorable representations focused more on countering negative representations of migrants while unfavorable representations focused more on countering negative representations of the authors (e.g., being racist), through disclaimers. Nevertheless, authors of favorable representations managed alternatives by stigmatizing those who held opposing views and did not elaborate on their arguments. These findings speak to the superficial and polarizing character of the debate and point to implications for further research on the relation between the different stances on migration in other forums such as social media and TV.

A correction update is attached. ; This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries (Estonia, Greece, Italy, and UK). The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis±a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this study see the world as either a) an ordered universe; b) a matter of interpersonal bond; c) a caring society; d) consisting of a niche of belongingness; e) a hostile place (others' world). These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios. ; The study is part of the Re.Cri.Re Project (www.recrire.eu), that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 649436 ; peer-reviewed