“We’re talking about real people”: Audience perceptions of dehumanisation and exclusion in Australian news representations of asylum seekers

This post forms part of our series in showcasing abstracts of presentations featured at our annual postgraduate interdisciplinary conference on refugee and forced migration research, hosted in November 2018 at The University of Melbourne.

ASHLEIGH HAW

The media is a critical source of information on people seeking asylum and in turn, plays an important role in shaping the public’s understanding of the issue. In Australia, few studies have investigated how media audiences respond to news discourses about asylum seekers, and no research has combined discursive and audience reception approaches to shed light on the topic. This paper discusses the findings of research employing Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) alongside an Audience Reception framework (Hall, 1980) to explore how Australian media audiences conceptualise and evaluate news representations of asylum seekers.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 residents of Western Australia (WA), who discussed their general views about asylum seekers, their media engagement preferences, and their perspectives regarding Australian news discourses about seeking asylum. Most participants cited news coverage as their main exposure to information about asylum seekers. The sample demonstrated a combination of dominant-hegemonic, oppositional, and negotiated readings of media messages, supporting the applicability of Hall’s (1980) ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication in research concerned with discursive responses to media coverage, particularly when used alongside a CDA approach. All participants critiqued the reliability of news content as an information source about asylum seekers. A common issue raised during these discussions was the dehumanising nature of news depictions, with many participants arguing that asylum seekers’ voices are frequently absent from news coverage about their plight. These findings reveal considerable disenchantment among WA media audiences, highlighting the importance of transparent, compassionate, and inclusive approaches to news coverage about asylum seekers.

Ashleigh Haw has recently submitted her PhD in Sociology at the University of Western Australia. Her thesis focused on discursive responses to news representations of asylum seekers among Australian media audiences. Ashleigh has a Master of Education from the University of Sydney and has worked in various research assistant, administration and tutoring roles at UWA, Edith Cowan University, the University of Sydney, and the University of New South Wales. She is currently employed as a sessional tutor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and volunteers as a campaign writer for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

Image Credit: Orr (2013) http://www.essentialbaby.com.au/news/current-affairs/dear-asylum-seeker-20130718-2q62z