Noi, "loro" e "quelli": la ricontestualizzazione di popolo, ONG e rifugiati nel discorso sovranista = "We", "them" and "those": the recontextualisation of pepole, NGOs and refugees in sovereignst discourse

Abstract

The paper is aimed at understanding whether and how the criminalisation of NGOs has affected the discursive construction of identity and representations of migrants, Italians and NGOs themselves, assessing which aspects have consolidated and which have changed. The study considers Twitter as a privileged arena to understand public debate: the paper is focused on "common users", by analysing their linguistic, paratextual and discursive strategies. The research is based on a corpus of over 800,000 tweets published between 2017 and 2020, adopting a combination of digital corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis methods. The combination of these analyses has shown that the emergence of criminalising rhetoric towards NGOs entails the following outputs: on the one hand, it sheds light on the relations between identity and otherness by re-articulating the relationship between 'us' and 'them' within media representations of migratory phenomena; on the other hand, it allows us to understand the development of the sovereignist political imagery, as an evolution of nationalism and right-wing populism. Research outputs highlight a strong de-humanisation of migrants through passivisation, impersonalisation and objectification. Through the study of the criminalisation of NGOs, this work contributes to shed new light on the static and dynamic elements of the media representation of migration in Italy and migrants' identities.