Rationale
© G. Daflos
TRACE: “Tracing Racism to Anti-Racist Discourse: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (TRACE/HFRI-FM17-42, HFRI 2019-2022)
This project focuses on institutionalized/ official anti-racist discourse of the European public sphere, which refers to the migration and refugee issue. The mass migration and refugee movements in Europe from 2015 onwards and the ensuing intense discussions at a global level led to the rise of different stances and practices on behalf of European states, ranging from solidarity to xenophobia. In this context, this research program intends to reveal that racist views are not cultivated only through hate speech, which stigmatizes and overtly demonizes migrant and refugee populations, but also through seemingly anti-racist discourse, which aims at denouncing racist practices, but ends up disguising, reproducing and sedimenting inequalities.
To this end, the first aim is the creation of a corpus of anti-racist (multimodal) texts including, on the one hand, media texts such as advertising campaigns, news articles, TV shows, cartoons, and, on the other, institutional texts such as educational material, parliamentary proceedings, and other political and legal texts, which circulate in European countries. This corpus will be annotated and analyzed in order to detect texts indirectly perpetuating social and/or sociolinguistic inequalities: what we tentatively call ‘racist’ anti-racist texts. More specifically, drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis concerns the various linguistic and other semiotic strategies through which racist views infiltrate discourse intended as anti-racist. Through the creation of a critical toolkit (TRACE) based on the findings of the analysis, the main intention is to enhance individuals’ critical awareness so as to be able to detect racism in anti-racist discourse. The ultimate goal of the program is to inform and sensitize the public, particularly educational and institutional bodies, on this kind of latent racism via the use of printed and audio-visual material.