COMMUNICATING ENVIRONMENTAL MIGRATION. Strategic Representations in the Discourse of International Organisations and News Discourse

This thesis is based on a corpus-assisted Ecolinguistic Discourse study and explores the discourse on environmental migration of international organisations and selected newspaper outlets. It is based on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and adopts a socio-cultural approach to the study of discourse and its relationship with socio-cultural behaviour. It has a major focus on representations of the ecological and humanitarian aspects of environmental migration. The study investigates and discusses written representations of environmental migration, migrant and host communities, and the role of the climate and environment in this phenomenon. More specifically, it focuses on representations shaped by authoritative international organisations and newspaper outlets, two “voices” which are often representative of dominant discourses on this phenomenon. The methodology adopted for the analysis is based on corpus-assisted eco-critical discourse analysis of two specialised self-collected corpora: the International Organisations Corpus (IOC), a collection of open-access publications published by international intergovernmental organisations; and the News Corpus (NC), a corpus of English-language newspaper articles from international media outlets. Corpus-analysis tools are used to interrogate the dataset according to specific criteria and research questions. The study aims at raising awareness on the complexity of communication about environmental migration, and on how the language used by different stakeholders for different publics construes specific viewpoints of this phenomenon and may impact on how it is dealt with. The discourse of international organisations and media discourse instantiate social and power-related variables, promoting specific ideological constructs and value systems. It therefore plays an influential role in knowledge-building and information-delivery processes, and it most likely influences the way environmental migration is understood and approached by either exacerbating xenophobic and intolerant behaviours or promoting partnership-oriented and inclusive reception of migrant people and actions in their favour. The analysis explores the extent to which the discourse of selected newspaper and official international organisations construct similar understandings of environmental migration; these two discourses are very influential and can impact on people’s understanding of this complex and controversial phenomenon. The discourses of the two corpora are multi-faceted and complementary. The discourse on environmental migration of the IOC promotes a proactive attitude towards environmental migration, encouraging practices and behaviours that should grant safety and wellbeing for all; however, these practices are often disregarded and represented as aspiring to. The discourse of the NC, instead, represents the present and future state of affairs as an impending ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. Both discourses evoke problematic future scenarios, but at the same time they do not promote a real transition towards innovative socio-ecological systems of living; rather, they seem to imply the need for preserving an unethical status quo. These representations often contribute to partial or superficial knowledge about migrants and origin communities, rather than promoting their wellbeing. An eco-cultural biocentric framework for understanding and communicating environmental migration in an innovative way is the first step to deal with it with a renewed mind-set that values partnership between communities, and the wellbeing of the eco-system.