How Does Central Europe Imagine a Refugee? : Visual Analysis of Media Representation of Immigrants in Times of "Refugee Crisis" in Countries of the Visegrad Group
Abstrakt
The Visegrad Group represents a political partnership of four Central European countries. This coalition of political, military and cultural cooperation consists of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.
After many years of rather local and internationally invisible collaboration, the platform gained a strong political position on an international political scene at the beginning of the current so called "European Refugee Crisis". All four countries used a common relationship in order to create an opposition against the rhetoric of acceptance of immigrants.
This opposition was specifically built on a refusal of quotas related with a proportional distribution of immigrants among the states of the European Union. Due to this step the Visegrad Group has reached a new international recognition.
The paper explores visual signs based on which refugees have been depicted in main media of the Visegrad Group's countries since the summer of 2015. It reveals, how does a political approach of refusal correspond with visual representations of a group of refugees on pages of the most popular local media.
It names and analyses recurring signs, stereotypes and national filters based on which a narrative of "refugee crisis" has been constructed. The further confirmation of these visual figures in plurimedia networks is explored too.
The research combines methods of visual content analysis and social semiotic analysis, which are applied on a sample of 96 images. This sample represents a result of a selection of 4 cover pages published in 1 tabloid and 1 daily newspaper per country in three different periods of the crisis: summer 2015 (the beginning of the crisis), winter 2015 (after "Paris attacks") and spring 2016 (after the "EU-Turkey deal").
The sample includes the following media: Blesk, Lidove noviny (CZ); Novy cas, SME (SK); Fakt, Gazeta Wyborcza (PL); Blikk, Magyar Nemzet (HU).