Contemporary Discourses on Migrants: The Role of The Media (original) (raw)

The world continues to observe the occurrences of armed conflicts, economic crises, and other dehumanising circumstances. And such events have forced vast numbers of innocent people to flee their homes with little hope of finding some safe place where they could collect themselves together and start a new life. In this regard, human migration is one of the most arduous challenges faced by nations. This phenomenon is depicted, in its practical conceptualisation, as the movement of people from one place to another with the aim at settling, permanently or temporarily, in a new location. Since the advent of the twenty-first century, the world has witnessed massive escalations of involuntary migrations because of transformational crises (such as the Syrian civil war 2011- ), and new research needs to understand such mass movements. To a degree, themes associated with the migration phenomenon have increasingly informed research topics with ties to other already well-established disciplines (e.g., media, politics, economics, sociology, public health) and they overlap productively. People who entirely leave their home countries to settle in new ones are referred to as migrants, immigrants or refugees based on their reasons for movement. And despite the different motivations behind people’s movement across borders, the terms, migrants, immigrants and refugees are commonly used interchangeably in media and public discourse (UNHCR, 2016). In brief, this chapter represents an attempt to produce a scholarly synthesis of current media and political discourses upon migrants.