Physiotherapy and the European Refugee Crisis: can social media enable volunteers?

Physiotherapy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. e219-e220
Author(s):  
B. Palmer
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511878563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ju-Sung Lee ◽  
Adina Nerghes

In recent years, increasing attention has been dedicated to the hazardous and volatile situation in the Middle East, a crisis which has pushed many to flee their countries and seek refuge in neighboring countries or in Europe. In describing or discussing these tragic events, labels such as “European migrant crisis” and “European refugee crisis” started being widely used by the media, politicians, and the online world alike. The use of such labels has the potential to dictate the ways in which displaced people are received and perceived. With this study, we investigate label use in social media (specifically YouTube), the emergent patterns of labeling that can cause further disaffection and tension or elicit sympathy, and the sentiments associated with the different labels. Our findings suggest that migration issues are being framed not only through labels characterizing the crisis but also by their describing the individuals themselves. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis jointly, our study offers valuable insights into the direction of public sentiment and the nature of discussions surrounding this significant societal crisis, as well as the nature of online opinion sharing. We conclude by proposing a four-dimensional model of label interpretation in relation to sentiment—that accounts for perceived agency, economic cost, permanence, and threat, and identifies threat and agency to be most impactful. This perspective reveals important influential aspects of labels and frames that may shape online public opinion and alter attitudes toward those directly affected by the crisis.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Yantseva

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of media discourse on migration in Sweden from 2012 to 2019. Using a novel data set consisting of mainstream newspapers, Twitter and forum data, the study answers two questions: What do Swedish media actually talk about when they talk about “migration”? And how do they talk about it? Using a combination of computational text analysis tools, I analyze a shift in the media discourse seen as one of the outcomes of the European refugee crisis in 2015 and try to understand the role of social media in this process. The results of the study indicate that messages on social media generally had negative tonality and suggest that some of the media frames can be attributed to a migration-hostile discourse. At the same time, the analysis of framing and sentiment dynamics provides little evidence for the discourse shift and any long-term effects of the European refugee crisis on the Swedish media discourse. Rather, one can hypothesize that the role of the crisis should be viewed in a broader political and historical context.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adina Nerghes ◽  
Ju-Sung Lee

The European refugee crisis received heightened attention at the beginning of September 2015, when images of the drowned child, Aylan Kurdi, surfaced across mainstream and social media. While the flows of displaced persons, especially from the Middle East into Europe, had been ongoing until that date, this event and its coverage sparked a media firestorm. Mainstream-media content plays a major role in shaping discourse about events such as the refugee crisis, while social media’s participatory affordances allow for the narratives to be perpetuated, challenged, and injected with new perspectives. In this study, the perspectives and narratives of the refugee crisis from the mainstream news and Twitter—in the days following Aylan’s death—are compared and contrasted. Themes are extracted through topic modeling (LDA) and reveal how news and Twitter converge and also diverge. We show that in the initial stages of a crisis and following the tragic death of Aylan, public discussion on Twitter was highly positive. Unlike the mainstream-media, Twitter offered an alternative and multifaceted narrative, not bound by geo-politics, raising awareness and calling for solidarity and empathy towards those affected. This study demonstrates how mainstream and social media form a new and complementary media space, where narratives are created and transformed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimei Yang ◽  
Adam Saffer

In the 2015 European refugee crisis, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) offered help and actively advocated for millions of refugees. The current study aims to understand what communication strategies are most effective for NGOs to influence media coverage and the public’s social media conversations about refugees. We found that agenda building on traditional media and in social media conversations require different strategies. Specifically, although providing information subsidies could powerfully influence traditional media coverage, its effect waned in the context of social media conversations. In contrast, NGOs’ hyperlink network positions emerged as the one of the influential factors for NGOs’ prominence in social media conversations. Moreover, stakeholder-initiated engagement could influence agenda building both in traditional media coverage and social media conversations. Finally, organizational resources and characteristics are important factors as well. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512098105
Author(s):  
Victoria Yantseva

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of media discourse on migration in Sweden from 2012 to 2019. Using a novel data set consisting of mainstream newspapers, Twitter and forum data, the study answers two questions: What do Swedish media actually talk about when they talk about “migration”? And how do they talk about it? Using a combination of computational text analysis tools, I analyze a shift in the media discourse seen as one of the outcomes of the European refugee crisis in 2015 and try to understand the role of social media in this process. The results of the study indicate that messages on social media generally had negative tonality and suggest that some of the media frames can be attributed to a migration-hostile discourse. At the same time, the analysis of framing and sentiment dynamics provides little evidence for the discourse shift and any long-term effects of the European refugee crisis on the Swedish media discourse. Rather, one can hypothesize that the role of the crisis should be viewed in a broader political and historical context.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001083672198936
Author(s):  
Lene Hansen ◽  
Rebecca Adler-Nissen ◽  
Katrine Emilie Andersen

The European refugee crisis has been communicated visually through images such as those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, by body bags on the harbor front of Lampedusa, by people walking through Europe and by border guards and fences. This article examines the broader visual environment within which EU policy-making took place from October 2013 to October 2015. It identifies ‘tragedy’ as the key term used by the EU to explain its actions and decisions and points out that discourses of humanitarianism and border control were both in place. The article provides a theoretical account of how humanitarianism and border control might be visualized by news photography. Adopting a multi-method design and analyzing a dataset of more than 1000 photos, the article presents a visual discourse analysis of five generic iconic motifs and a quantitative visual content analysis of shifts and continuity across four moments in time. The article connects these visual analyses to the policies and discourses of the EU holding that the ambiguity of the EU’s discourse was mirrored by the wider visual environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110249
Author(s):  
Peer Smets ◽  
Younes Younes ◽  
Marinka Dohmen ◽  
Kees Boersma ◽  
Lenie Brouwer

During the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, temporary refugee shelters arose in the Netherlands to shelter the large influx of asylum seekers. The largest shelter was located in the eastern part of the country. This shelter, where tents housed nearly 3,000 asylum seekers, was managed with a firm top-down approach. However, many residents of the shelter—mainly Syrians and Eritreans—developed horizontal relations with the local receiving society, using social media to establish contact and exchange services and goods. This case study shows how various types of crisis communication played a role and how the different worlds came together. Connectivity is discussed in relation to inclusion, based on resilient (non-)humanitarian approaches that link society with social media. Moreover, we argue that the refugee crisis can be better understood by looking through the lens of connectivity, practices, and migration infrastructure instead of focusing only on state policies.


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