Migration and migrants within and to Europe: Reviewing media studies of the past decade (2001-2016)

This chapter reviews recent academic articles (2001-2016) about media and migration both in and to Europe. This study contributes to understand how contemporary understandings of migration and migrants intersect with media representations, while highlighting shortages in academic coverage and providing suggestions for future research. Articles (N = 89) from 10 prominent journals dealing with mass media narratives were analyzed using content analysis. Following a quantitative overview of the data, the chapter discusses the main themes present in the literature. Closely-related articles (i.e. directly dealing with (im)migration and (im)migrants) tackled representations of immigrants, immigrants’ media use, stereotypes in the media, ethnic and minority media, discourses about migration issues, and visual representations of refugees/asylum seekers. Articles considered moderately relevant referred to migration/migrants as a background to their primary topic of investigation. The findings firstly draw attention to the scarcity of research on media production in general and the need to further connect media discourse to concrete editorial and journalistic practices. Second, the lack of methodological transparency echoes validity concerns in (qualitative) scientific research. Remarkably, little studies considered refugees, though the current actuality of the refugee crisis is expected to cause a shift in research focus. Finally, this chapter suggests the construction of immigration as predominantly a non-European experience while drawing attention to the increased relation between race, ethnicity, religion, and migration. The suggested shift from the migrant category to religious, cultural, and racial denominations highlights the need to consider implications of these references as proxies of the migrant-category in future research.

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