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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 19:6 (2020) ► pp.894–915

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Subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration

ORCiD logo with link | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Published online: 4 May 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19069.rub
Abstract
Overt constructions of discrimination in political discourse towards immigrants are easy to detect and have been traditionally associated with far-right parties. However, mainstream political discourse on immigration delivered by so-called center or center-left parties has transformed into more subtle forms of discursive discrimination, which might not be obvious and need a closer analysis in order to be spotted in discourse. Overt discriminatory discourse has been studied by disciplines, such as political sociology, social psychology and Critical Discourse Studies, but subtle discriminatory constructions have been rather neglected. By combining these three disciplines, we propose here a multidisciplinary and multitheorical framework to systematically analyze subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. It aims at contributing to the development of a methodology for a socio-political analysis that allows to detect subtle discriminatory political discourse on immigration. Such framework is composed by four strategies with different degrees of subtleness: highlighting, diminishing, homogenizing and normalizing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The interdisciplinary foundations of the framework: Interpreting racism and its discriminatory manifestations
  • 3.Overt and subtle discrimination
  • 4.A framework to detect subtle discriminatory constructions in political discourse
    • 4.1Highlighting
    • 4.2Diminishing and omitting
    • 4.3Homogenizing and degrading
    • 4.4Normalizing
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
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