The ongoing migrant and refugee crisis in European countries (2015 – to date) has led to the rise of different stances and practices on behalf of European states, ranging from solidarity to xenophobia. In this context, the main goal of the proposed panel is to bring together studies investigating various linguistic and, more broadly, semiotic strategies through which racist views infiltrate discourse intended as anti-racist. Our focus is on the anti-racist discourse of the European public sphere, which refers to the current migration and refugee crisis. We intend to explore how racist views are not cultivated only through hate speech (see e.g. Assimakopoulos et al 2017), which overtly stigmatizes and demonizes migrant and refugee populations. Racist views can also circulate through seemingly anti-racist discourse, which aims at denouncing racist practices, but ends up disguising, reproducing, and sedimenting inequalities.

We are interested insociopragmatic analyses of data coming from various genres including advertising campaigns, news articles, TV shows, cartoons, educational material, parliamentary proceedings, and other political and legal texts. Our research aim is to detect anti-racist texts indirectly and implicitly perpetuating social and/or sociolinguistic inequalities and eventually racism (see e.g. Archakis et al 2018, Archakis & Tsakona 2019). Such texts could be perceived and scrutinized as instances of liquid racism. According to Weaver (2016: 63-64), liquid racism “does not produce a monolithic reading as racism but is experienced as racism in particular circumstances […]. It has a structure that is constructed with far more potential for ambivalence. […] [L]iquid racism should not be seen as a weakened or challenged residue of racism but rather as an ambiguous form that is encouraged nowadays and one that weakens various defenses against claims of racism” (emphasis in the original).

In order to identify instances of liquid racism in ‘racist’ anti-racist texts, we draw on the broader framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Given that one of the most important principles of CDA pertains to the relation between the macro-level (involving hegemonic discourses) and micro-level (involving texts produced by individuals) (see van Dijk 2008), we invite papers that explore:

• the multiple linguistic and multimodal strategies used by text producers at the micro-level to convey latent racist meanings despite their declared anti-racist stance; and

• the macro-level hegemonic racist discourses which are thus reproduced.

In particular, we welcome papers employing an array of methodological tools used to investigate racist discourse and useful for tracing liquid racism, including but not limited to the following:

• The analytical tools of Reisigl & Wodak’s (2001) discourse-historical approach     for media and institutional texts

• Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) for news articles, TV shows, advertising campaigns, parliamentary proceedings and other political texts, etc.

• van Leeuwen’s (2008) model of representation and viewer network for the analysis of multimedia texts such as advertising campaigns, advertisements, cartoons, newspaper images, etc.

• Bamberg’s (1997) model of narrative positioning for the analysis of news articles, advertising campaigns, TV shows, interviews, TV series, documentaries, parliamentary proceedings, etc.

• Attardo’s (2001) General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) for cartoons, comics, satirical shows, advertisements, sitcoms, educational material, movies, etc.

Οne of the main concerns of Applied Linguistics during the last thirty years in Greece has been to examine how migrant students who crossed the geographical borders and entered Greece will also cross the Greek symbolic borders. That is to say, how they will learn the Greek language and adopt the dominant Greek cultural characteristics in order to become accepted by the majority (cf. May 2017: 149, Bennett 2018: 1). In this paper, we rely on the premise that Greek national discourse promotes linguocultural homogenization within the Greek borders often through racism against migrants. Racist homogenizing practices are not always explicit, but are quite often liquid, namely covert, indirect, and hard to trace (Weaver 2016). The effective promotion of national homogenization not only naturalizes linguocultural assimilation, but may also infiltrate antiracist discourse, and eventually lead to migrants’ internalization of racism (Pyke 2010).

Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyze an article written by a young migrant in Greece and published in a newspaper of leftwing and antiracist orientation, investigating whether and how the migrant’s text aligns with the Greek national discourse promoting migrants’ assimilation. The article proposes that the communication problems migrants face in host countries such as Greece can be overcome ‘only’ through learning the host language and culture, in the present case, Greek.

Our analysis relies on the interaction between national discourse (at the macro-level) and the migrant author’s discoursal choices and their implications for the Greek readership (at the micro-level). Exploiting Hoey’s (1983) Problem-Solution pattern and the concept of face (Brown & Levinson 1987), we argue that the structural and interactional choices made by the migrant author (at the micro-level) comply with the homogenizing impositions and goals of the national discourse (at the macro-level), especially as far as linguistic assimilation is concerned. More specifically, the analysis in terms of the Problem-Solution pattern demonstrates that the author perceives learning Greek as the main and most effective solution to the communication problems migrants face in their encounters with Greek majority members. As a result, the migrant author’s proposal for assimilating to the language of the Greek majority enhances the collective positive face of her Greek majority readers (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987, Sifianou & Bayraktaroğlu 2012), while she simultaneously represents Greek speaking migrants as “suitable others” (Barsky 1994: 5, 164), namely as willing and ready to comply with majority norms and expectations. Concurrently, racism emerges as liquid (see above), since the text expressing the author’s internalized racism is published in an antiracist newspaper. The article reproduces racist standpoints typical of the dominant national discourse in a way (and in a context) that disguises such standpoints and deflects any antiracist criticism potentially raised against them. Thus, the hegemony of Greek national discourse is further reinforced.

A particularly prominent way in which the current refugee crisis seems to be consistently described, not just in elite texts but also in common parlance, is in terms of a ‘flood,’ a ‘wave’ and/or a ‘tide.’ Τhe long-standing tradition in the critical analysis of racist discourse (see, for example, Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Musolff 2015) has collectively shown that, by evoking an essentially dehumanising representation of migrants and refugees, descriptions of this sort tend “to normalise certain ways of thinking about” them and by extension “justify their discrimination” (Ng 2018: 220). Such metaphorical representations, however, are not only present in discourse that could be generally characterised as racist or even as leaning towards an exclusionary ideology.

Drawing on a corpus comprising the 115 political cartoons that formed part of the _Suspended Step_ exhibition, which was organised by the Greek Cartoonists Association with the aim of ‘mak[ing] the refugees’ voice be heard throughout the world,’ we will discuss how this (and related) representations can – and do typically – also crop up in texts of an explicitly antiracist orientation.

More specifically, we will focus on the ways in which particular metaphorical source domains (e.g. waves), metonymies (e.g. barbed wire fences) and symbols (e.g. the EU flag) visually recur creating what appears to be a coherent discourse surrounding the crisis. To this end, the annotation of the data is based on the VISMET’s scheme (Bolognesi et al. 2018), which was further adapted to allow for a deeper, qualitative analysis of the cartoons under study in terms of their ideological stance.

Our findings confirm the presence of representations that have been traditionally thought to underlie discriminatory attitudes, but also reveal cases where these very same representations can also be used to promote an inclusionary agenda. Against this backdrop, and in line with the background laid out by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), we will pursue the argument that, through their ubiquitous presence, and regardless of the modality in which they present themselves, metaphorical associations can become so entrenched that they end up underlying our way of thinking about particular social issues and manage to creep up even when we have the best of intentions in the fight against social injustice.

This paper offers a critical angle on the mobilisation of storytelling as a resource for social action and change in anti-racist campaigns.

Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in the reproduction of racism as shown, for example, in van Dijk’s (1993) study of everyday stories about minorities told by majority white speakers. In our paper we show that everyday stories told by migrants or refugees can also reproduce a subtle form of racism, also known as _liquid racism_ (Weaver, 2010), i.e. a form of racism, which generates ambiguous cultural signs encouraging the development of entrenched socio-discursive positionings alongside reactions to racism.

Our study is based on the EU Protects campaign, part of European Commission’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, which provides information on how Europe helps protects its citizens from diverse global risks and challenges through real-life stories of “ordinary heroes” (EU Protects campaign).

We focus on the story and positioning patterns of a personal experience story of a refugee featured in that campaign. Our analysis draws on the heuristics of small story research (Georgakopoulou, 2015) combined with a multimodal approach to metaphor scenarios (Spilioti, 2018) and affective positioning analysis at the three levels of events and characters, audiences, and the self in alignment or disalignment to master discourses (Giaxoglou, 2020).

We show how the multimodal and positioning affordances of storytelling online reshape a personal experience story into a shared public story and contribute to the transformation of the ‘ordinary person’ to the ‘next door hero’. We look at how the story gets re-framed as an exemplar telling for public consumption alongside other ‘ordinary hero’ accounts. In this reframing, we notice the reproduction of established cultural scripts, metaphor scenarios and typical identity and affective positions that have become associated with shared narratives of transformation. Rather than subverting or challenging dominant ideologies, these narratives end up invoking a range of discriminatory discourses that fossilise subtle racist positions.

Our discussion, thus, calls attention to the specific orders of narrative discourse around migrants and refugees and their entrenchment in anti-racist discourse.

Several studies have shown that the media and political discourse on immigrants and refugees tends to stigmatize them (e.g. Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008). Besides, education policy texts on refugees tend to exclude their own voices and concerns (Stamou & Kiliari, 2020). In light of this, antiracist discourses, as a nexus of counter- discourses to racism, have also gained currency. However, it has been indicated that even a text overtly characterized as ‘antiracist’ may also adopt an assimilationist perspective (Archakis et al., 2018; Tsakona et al., 2020). Hence, racist ideas are still reproduced, though in a more latent and implicit way, what is called “liquid racism” (Weaver, 2016).

Drawing on the concept of liquid racism, we focus on five video clips recently launched as part of ‘antiracist’ campaigns in Greece and Cyprus, which all have included refugee voices. Departing from a Critical Discourse Studies perspective and employing a synthetic framework for the analysis of identities (Stamou, 2018), our analysis indicates that refugee voices are framed as non- elite in relation to the majority ones, which are constructed as elite. Specifically, drawing on Thurlow & Jaworski’s (2017) definition of eliteness, our analysis shows that the majority voices are systematically represented as having material (e.g. offering jobs), cultural/ emotional (e.g. showing empathy, being admired) and epistemic (e.g. exhibiting knowledge) superiority in comparison to the refugee ones. Thus, we would like to claim that eliteness is another form of liquid racism, as it normalizes the privilege of the elites in relation to the non-elites and leads to the deepening of social inequalities and material injustices. As long as the majority is the creator of antiracist videos, it is constructed as the only privileged voice to decide about which refugee voices to include (and which not), and more importantly, about how to represent them.

Racist views against refugees and migrants coming in Europe are not only disseminated via hate speech, which overtly demonizes the newly arrived ‘foreigners’, but also via anti-racist discourse, which, although designed to fight racism, ends up reproducing inequalities (Archakis et al. 2018, Tsakona et al. 2020). This ambiguity is captured in the concept of liquid racism, a ‘new’ and ambivalent form of racism which may be difficult to trace and/or it may yield multiple interpretations (Weaver 2016). Ιn order to examine liquid racism in Greek public discourse, we have compiled an anti-racist corpus (around 460.000 words). The aim of our presentation is to show how this corpus was created, to provide some descriptive meta-data about the anti-racist texts and to explore how racist views infiltrate anti-racist discourse.

Specifically, we collected texts concerning migrant/refugee issues and published between 2015-2020. Τhe data come from three major sources of the Greek public sphere: i) organisations which promote migrant/refugee issues, ii) news media and iii) political discourse. These are texts of various genres (news articles, stories, TV shows, tweets etc.), rhetorical modes (narrative/non-narrative, humorous/non-humorous) and channels/media (oral, written, multimodal).

Drawing on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1994) and adopting a critical perspective, we detected two main discourses connected to liquid racism: discrimination and assimilation. In the first case, anti-racist texts seem to cultivate the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, in most of the texts, the migrants-refugees are positioned as backgrounded individuals through the role of the goal (who receives an action). On the contrary, the majority group undertakes the role of the actor (who acts on migrant/refugee issues) or the sayer (who talks about migrant/refugee issues).

In the case of assimilation, anti-racist texts seem to promote migrants’ adoption of the Greek dominant norms and practices as a prerequisite for their integration. In other words, their linguocultural identities are devalued. For instance, in our data Greek language learning can be methodically dictated through appreciative and deontic modality.

Given the overwhelming presence of racist discourses in our corpus, we consider the sensitization of both the producers and the recipients of anti-racist texts in the particularities of liquid racism to be highly significant. In view of the above, it is also important to consider the redefinition of the term ‘anti-racism.