By using critical discourse analysis, the article focuses mainly on ways in which migrants are constructed through language in the most widely-read Slovenian tabloid newspaper, Slovenske novice (Slovenian News). The article begins with a definition of tabloid discourse and continues with an empirical exploration of how migrants are constructed as "the other" and Slovenians as victims. The empirical material covers the period from 20 August 2015 to 31 December 2015. The author establishes that tabloid discourse mainly employs binary dichotomies between "us", who are represented as victims, heroes, and heroic victims, and "them", who embody a threat to the culture and security of the majority population.
This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the "Balkan" in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate "other" in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined asBalkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.
This article explores how the identity of immigrant workers (mostly ex-Yugoslavians) in Slovenia is constructed in the Slovenian print media. The article focuses on the interplay of the two main discourses on immigrant workers – Balkanist discourse and victimization discourse. The analysis shows how Balkanist discourse still constructs the immigrant as the other but avoids explicitly negative connotations by framing immigrant workers' identity within a discourse of victimization. The article explains how this interplay of discourses serves to normalize the immigrant worker in order to make him acceptable to the majoritarian Slovenian society. The article closes by exploring the victimization discourse as a process of desubjectivizing of the immigrant workers and argues that aspects of the victimization discourse reaffirm the long-standing power relations between Western Europe and the Balkans. ; Prispevek osvetljuje, kako se v slovenskem tisku konstruira identiteta migrantskih delavcev iz bivših jugoslovanskih republik. S pomočjo kritične analize diskurza prispevek pokaže soobstoj dveh diskurzov o migrantskih delavcih - balkanizacijskega in viktimizacijskega. Četudi se mediji skušajo ogniti stereotipizacijam in eksplicitnim oblikam sovražnega govora, se pri reprezentaciji migrantskih delavcev poslužujejo implicitnih diskurzivnih strategij s katerimi vzdržujejo dana družbena razmerja moči. Članek pokaže, da se delavčeva identiteta uokvirja skozi balkanizacijski in viktimizacijski diskurz. Prispevek pokaže, kako se igra balkanizacijskega in viktimizacijskega diskurza steka v proces normaliziranja, tako da migrantski delavec ni več predstavljen kot grožnja večinski populaciji, temveč kot od nje odvisna žrtev. Članek se zaključi z razpravo o viktimizaciji kot procesu politične desubjektivacije migrantskega delavca ter poudari utrjevanje razmerij moči med zahodno Evropo in Balkanom.
In 1992, the Slovenian Ministry of Interior Affairs deprived 25,000 ex-Yugoslavians of their citizenship. This symbolic act of violence is the most severe symptom of the Slovenian transition towards democracy. Since 1995 this group of erased citizens is known as the Erased of Slovenia. This contribution is a critical analysis of political discourses on the issue of the Erased that appeared in the Slovenian printed press between 1995 and 2008. The presented qualitative analysis explores 312 units of op-ed articles, mainly commentaries and editorials, which have been selected on the basis of two keywords: erased, erasure. The contribution aims to show that the notion of the Erased functioned as the "nodal point" around which two antagonistic political discourses were formed. The aim of the analysis is to find out which empty or hegemonic signifiers are produced in this antagonistic relation and how this affects the political desubjectivation of the Erased.
This article explores how the Slovenian women's lifestyle magazine Naša žena ( Our Woman) helped the Yugoslavian socialist project construct and shape the ideal socialist woman, and argues that she became the crucial ally in implementing socialist ideas in the everyday lives of Slovenians. The article shows how texts on food preparation and consumption, as well as those touching on household management and family care, published in Naša žena from 1960 to 1991 played an important part in the 'civilising' process that shaped behaviour, directed cultural and social practices, influenced social relations and constructed women's identities during socialism. We show how food-related texts (articles, recipes, columns, advertisements and advertorials) were never far removed from the larger political and economic socialist realities. In fact, they bore witness to changes in living standards and told stories about gender regimes, socialist ideologies and fantasies. These texts belong to a corpus of social transcripts that guide collective understandings of what it means to select, prepare, cook and eat food; what constitutes good cooking and eating; and who is responsible for preparing meals. Despite official socialist feminist rhetoric about freeing women from backward patriarchal arrangements, this article shows that texts offering food-related advice in socialist Yugoslavia contained explicit instructions for the 'correct' performance of the social roles of women, legitimising women's roles as worker, mother, wife and housekeeper. Above all, a woman was to be an 'engineer' of the private domain whose goals were to feed her family and keep the nation healthy and hence productive, and to modernise her kitchen in support of the technological and economic development of Yugoslavia.
Abstract The article discusses the use of "symbolic photographs" – images in news reporting which have no direct connection to reported events – in news reporting. Such images deviate not only from the self-professed journalistic norm of factual reporting but also fundamentally challenge the act of civic eyewitnessing constitutive for visual journalism. Concepts of floating and empty signifiers from Discourse Theory are applied to "symbolic photographs" to analyse their ambivalent act of signification, their particular mode of iconicity and, by extension, the journalistic and political implications of their repetitive use.
We conduct automatic sentiment and viewpoint analysis of the newly created Slovenian news corpus containing articles related to the topic of LGBTIQ+ by employing the state-ofthe-art news sentiment classifier and a system for semantic change detection. The focus is on the differences in reporting between quality news media with long tradition and news media with financial and political connections to SDS, a Slovene right-wing political party. The results suggest that political affiliation of the media can affect the sentiment distribution of articles and the framing of specific LGBTIQ+ specific topics, such as same-sex marriage.