Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for November 2020, Man Xu (Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Canada). Her article for Current Sociology, Constructing the refugee: Comparison between newspaper coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK, is Free Access this month.

Man Xu

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

M. Xu: I studied Persian language for my undergraduate in China and moved to Sweden for an MA in Middle Eastern Studies. For my MA thesis, I went to Lebanon and conducted research on the relationship between Syrian refugees and Lebanese residents in Beirut. I was interested in the complexity of social relations and inter-cultural encounters and that is how I came to sociology. During my PhD, I developed a strong interest in the sociology of migration. I have been living outside of China since 2012 and my interest in migration is very much driven by my own identity and experience as a migrant. In the first year of my PhD, I read some important literature on non-citizenship by scholars such as Bridget Anderson and Cecilia Menjivar. Their work inspired me to study migration in a way that critically reflects on the relationship between race, class, gender and national membership.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Constructing the refugee: Comparison between newspaper coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK”?

M. Xu: I began to pay close attention to the Syrian refugee crisis during my MA fieldwork in Lebanon. In 2013, I spent 8 months in Beirut working with Palestinian and Syrian refugees at a Lebanese NGO while collecting data for my MA thesis. This experience had a deep impact on me and gave rise to the initial idea of this article. Having lived in Europe and Canada, I saw how the refugee crisis was responded to and discussed in both continents. I wanted to know how the imagination of “the refugee” might be similar or different in different national contexts. This prompted me to adopt a comparative lens in this paper.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

M. Xu: The paper compares newspaper coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK and asks how a nation’s historical relationship with and current policies of immigration affect media construction of the refugee. I chose to compare news coverage in Canada and UK because these two countries are often said to represent divergent migration regimes and they also responded to the Syrian refugee crisis differently. My finding shows that the newspapers racialize refugee either as “victims” whose pre-conflict history is largely erased, or as threat to the receiving nations. This shared model of racialized representation serves the two countries’ distinctive asylum regimes: the acceptance of selective groups of refugees in Canada and the exclusionary asylum policy in the UK. I also compared the construction of refugees in newspapers with different political orientations. I found that left-leaning newspapers such as the Guardian are more likely to ‘give voice’ to refugees. Yet, these attempts often do not go beyond the representation of refugees as passive victims without agency and history.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate?

M. Xu: Across North America and Europe, the state has made increasing attempts to securitize borders and criminalize migrants and refugees. There is an urgent need for us to reflect on the public (mis)representation of refugees and the racism and xenophobia underlying these portrayals. My research shows the common frames of portraying migrants and refugees in the media which create a boundary between “us” and “them”, rather than shedding light on shared human issues amongst local residents and newcomers. Moreover, I tried to highlight how ideas travel and reproduce themselves in global media. For instance, newspapers in Canada have invoked the European “migration crisis” to alert Canadians of the threat of “unwanted migrants”. How we talk about migrants and refugees thus not only influences politics at home but also has global implications.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

M. Xu: I was really inspired by these studies in conducting my research:
Anderson, B (2013) Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kyriakides, C (2017) “Words don’t come easy: Al Jazeera’s migrant–refugee distinction and the European culture of (mis) trust”, Current Sociology 65(7): 933–952.

These are some fascinating pieces that discuss the limitation of humanitarian discourses:
Fassin, D (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Oakland: University of California Press.
Ticktin, M (2016) “Thinking beyond humanitarian borders”, Social Research: An International Quarterly 83(2): 255–271.

If you want to understand the implication of racialized construction of refugees, this is an interesting piece that talks about the issue in the Canadian context:
Kyriakides, C, Bajjali, L, McLuhan, A, Anderson, K (2018) “Beyond refuge: Contested orientalism and persons of self-rescue”, Canadian Ethnic Studies 50(2): 59–78.