Even before the current refugee crisis, immigration has been the most important political issue in Europe, even in countries that receive relatively few migrants. European attitudes toward migration are shaped heavily by media depictions of migrants and immigration.
Politics and International Affairs Associate Professor Alexander Caviedes is working on a project dealing with European press depictions of immigration. Through a five-country study spanning five languages across five years, Dr. Caviedes is assessing which issues are most commonly linked to migration by the press.
With the research assistance of Fredonia students with foreign language skills who have combined to read and code upwards of 2,000 newspaper articles, Caviedes compares the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain to trace out any common portrayals of immigration as well as gaining an understanding of which narratives are unique to individual countries. In a field where studies of media coverage focus on a single country or at most two, the collaboration has produced an extensive and expanding database that is unmatched in terms of its geographic span.
The fall semester sabbatical has presented Caviedes with the opportunity to collate the data and begin writing a book manuscript as well as a few journal articles and separate book chapters.
