Global Migration

Xu, AM. (2021). "Constructing the refugee: Comparison between newspaper coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK.” Current Sociology 69 (5): 660-681.

This article challenges the pitfall of methodological nationalism in research on refugee representation in the Western context. This project provides a comparative analysis of news coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis in the UK and Canada, showing how racialized discourses about refugees travel across national contexts to contribute to divergent nation-building projects. It demonstrates how media reports in both countries adopt a ‘victim-pariah couplet’ framework to unsettle refugee rights. While they emphasize distinctive discursive elements to construct different imaginaries about “the nation”, the construction of refugees as threats and passive victims both erase refugee’s own voice and reproduce their racialized image in the Western media.