Cover not available

Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 2:1 (2019) ► pp.136–161

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Place identity construction in Greek neomigrants’ social media discourse

 | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | Hellenic Open University
Published online: 20 May 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00026.geo
Abstract
The phenomenon of brain drain migration from Greece, also known as Greek neomigration, has acquired an astoundingly massive character due to the ongoing economic crisis in the country. Considering that a migrant’s identity is defined by a physical move from one place to another, this paper aims at exploring the discourse practices of place-making by Greek neomigrants, focusing on the role of social media in this endeavour. Drawing on discourse analysis (. 2010. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Aguirre, Alwin C., and Sharyn Graham Davies. 2015. “Imperfect strangers: Picturing place, family, and migrant identity in Facebook.” Discourse, Context & Media 7(1): 3–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), identity construction theories (Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Benwell, Bethan, and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), environmental psychology (Proshansky, Harold, Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff. 1983. “Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3(1): 57–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and discourse-centred online ethnography (Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2008. “Potentials and limitations of discourse-centered online ethnography.” Language@Internet 51, article 8. [URL] (accessed 10 Feburary 2017).), this study presents and discusses empirical data from a Greek neomigrant settled in the UK, who writes about his migration experience on his blog as well as on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. The analysis demonstrates that the Greek neomigrant place identity construction can be realized through a complex of linguistic and discourse strategies, including comparison and evaluation, construction of in-groups and out-groups, language and script alternations, entextualisation of other voices, and visual connotations. It is shown that, for migrants, social media constitute significant outlets for place-making, constructing place identity and asserting (or eschewing) belonging. In so doing, it also brings to the surface crucial social, cultural and psychological aspects of the current Greek neomigration phenomenon and confirms the potential of social media discourses to heighten awareness of neomigrants’ dis/integrating processes, placing discourse analysis at the service of global mobility phenomena.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Social media, migration, and the Greek brain drain phenomenon
  • 2.Theoretical perspectives
  • 3.Research context
  • 4.Constructing a neomigrant place identity on social media
    • 4.1Flying the flag
    • 4.2Naming specific places (or not)
      • 4.2.1Evoking nostalgia
      • 4.2.2Comparing and contrasting
      • 4.2.3Labelling
      • 4.2.4Evaluating
    • 4.3Constructing in-groups and out-groups
    • 4.4Using two languages/scripts
    • 4.5Projecting other voices
      • 4.5.1Identifying
      • 4.5.2Critiquing
      • 4.5.3Dramatising
    • 4.6Visual place-making
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (54)
References
Aguirre, Alwin C. 2014. “Negotiating the Filipino in cyberspace: New Zealand-based Filipinos’ identity construction in social media.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Auckland University of Technology.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aguirre, Alwin C., and Sharyn Graham Davies. 2015. “Imperfect strangers: Picturing place, family, and migrant identity in Facebook.” Discourse, Context & Media 7(1): 3–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2008. “Potentials and limitations of discourse-centered online ethnography.” Language@Internet 51, article 8. [URL] (accessed 10 Feburary 2017).
. 2013. “Code-switching in computer-mediated communication.” In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. by Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen, 667–694. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies (trans. by Annette Lavers). London: Paladin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barton, David, and Carmen Lee. 2013. Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bate, Adam. 2015. “Why is 4-4-2 thriving? Is it the key to Leicester and Watford’s success?” Sky Sports. [URL] (accessed 7 July 2017).
Beine, Michel, Frédéric Docquier, and Hillel Rapoport. 2001. “Brain drain and economic growth.” Journal of Development Economics 64(1): 275–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benson, Michaela. 2016. “Deconstructing belonging in lifestyle migration: Tracking the emotional negotiations of the British in rural France.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(5): 481–494. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benwell, Bethan, and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bozatzis, Nikos. 2015. “Making sense of sense making: Greek neomigrants’ interview accounting for their migration and settlement in Melbourne.” Paper presented at the Identity, Otherness and Citizenship in Contemporary Europe Conference, 5 December 2015, Alexandroupolis, Greece.
Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘identity’.” Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “From space to spatialization in narrative studies.” In Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices, ed. by James Collins, Stef Slembrouck, and Mike Baynham, 109–129. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dekker, Rianne, and Godfried Engbersen. 2014. “How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration.” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 14(4): 401–418. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delanty, Gerard, Ruth Wodak, and Paul Jones (eds.). 2008. Identity, Belonging, and Migration. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diminescu, Dana. 2008. “The connected migrant: An epistemological manifesto.” Social Science Information 47(4): 565–579. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(ed.). 2012. “Diasporas on the web” [Special issue]. Social Science Information 51(4).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dixon, John, and Kevin Durrheim. 2000. “Displacing place-identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other.” British Journal of Social Psychology 39(1): 27–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Doutsou, Ioanna. 2013. “Ethnicity mediated: Identity practices of Greek diaspora on a social network site.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, King’s College London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fotakis, Kostas. 2016. “Hellenic parliament minutes.” [URL] (accessed 7 July 2017).
Georgalou, Mariza. 2017. Discourse and Identity on Facebook. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hellenic Statistical Authority. 2016. “Εργατικό δυναμικό [Workforce].” [URL] (accessed 7 July 2017).
Heyd, Theresa. 2014. “Doing race and ethnicity in a digital community: Lexical labels and narratives of belonging in a Nigerian web forum.” Discourse, Context & Media 4–51: 38–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Narratives of belonging in the digital diaspora: Corpus approaches to a cultural concept.” Open Linguistics 2(1): 287–299. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hiller, Harry H., and Tara M. Franz. 2004. “New ties, old ties and lost ties: The use of the internet in diaspora.” New Media & Society 6(6): 731–752. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, Richard. 2008. Social identity (3rd edn.). Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Komito, Lee. 2011. “Social media and migration: Virtual community 2.0.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62(6): 1075–1086. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Ruth Wodak. 2007. “Multiple identities, migration and belonging: ‘Voices of migrants’.” In Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities, ed. by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, and Rick Iedema, 95–119. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kytölä, Samu. 2016. “Translocality.” In Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, ed. by Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and Tereza Spilioti, 371–388. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kytölä, Samu, and Jannis Androutsopoulos. 2012. “Ethnographic perspectives on multilingual computer-mediated discourse: Insights from Finnish football forums on the Web.” In Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography, ed. by Sheena Gardner, and Marilyn Martin-Jones, 179–196. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labrianidis, Lois. 2011. Επενδύοντας στη φυγή: Η διαρροή επιστημόνων από την Ελλάδα στην εποχή της παγκοσμιοποίησης [Investing in Leaving: The Greek Case of International Migration of Professionals in the Globalization Era]. Athens: Kritiki.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lampropoulou, Sofia. 2012. Direct Speech, Self-Presentation and Communities of Practice. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lawson, Michele. 2016. Identity, Ideology and Positioning in Discourses of Lifestyle Migration: The British in the Ariège. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Carmen. 2017. Multilingualism Online. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen, and Elina Westinen. 2014. “Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media.” In The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, ed. by Philip Seargeant, and Caroline Tagg, 112–136. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leurs, Koen. 2015. Digital Passages: Migrant Youth 2.0. Diaspora, Gender and Youth Cultural Intersections. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers, Greg. 2006. “Where are you from?: Identifying place in talk.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(3): 320–343. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Proshansky, Harold, Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff. 1983. “Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3(1): 57–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stæhr, Αndreas. 2014. “Social media and everyday language use among Copenhagen youth.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Svašek, Maruška. 2008. “Who cares? Families and feelings in movement.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 213–230. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Twigger-Ross, Clare L., and David L. Uzzell. 1996. “Place and identity processes.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 16(3): 205–220. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 2009. Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Teun. 2003. “A multimodal perspective on composition.” In Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse, ed. by Titus Ensink, and Christoph Sauer, 23–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vertovec, Steven. 2004. “Cheap calls: The social glue of migrant transnationalism.” Global Networks 41: 219–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wiley, Stephen B. C., Tabita Moreno, and Daniel Sutko. 2012. “Assemblages, networks, subjects: A materialist approach to the production of social space.” In Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, ed. by Jeremy Packer, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, 183–195. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Witteborn, Saskia. 2015. “Becoming (im)perceptible: Forced migrants and virtual practice.” Journal of Refugee Studies 28(3): 350–367. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Vratsanos, Alyssa
2025.  Food as Greekness: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Rand Daily Mail , 1960–1985 . Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 43:2 ► pp. 273 ff. DOI logo
Lees, Christopher
2024. Language practices and identity construction on Facebook in the aftermath of Brexit: The case of a group of British migrants in Greece applying for Greek citizenship. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 10:1 ► pp. 55 ff. DOI logo
Georgalou, Mariza
2021. Emotions and migration in social media discourse: A new Greek migrant case study. Emotion, Space and Society 38 ► pp. 100745 ff. DOI logo
Georgalou, Mariza
2021. New Greek migrant (dis)identifications in social media: Evidence from a discourse-centred online ethnographic study. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue