The next meeting of the Edge Hill Corpus Research Group will take place online (via MS Teams) on Thursday 9 November 2023, 2-3 pm (UK time).

Topics: Discourse-Oriented Corpus Studies, Immigration

Speaker: Katia Adimora (Edge Hill University, UK)

Title: Towards more positive portrayals of Mexican immigration/immigrants in the American and Mexican press

Abstract:

Various studies (e.g., Galindo Gómez, 2019; Taylor, 2009; Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008) have explored press attitudes towards immigration/ immigrants in different countries. To analyse the attitudes towards Mexican immigration/immigrants in the American and Mexican press, two specialised corpora of 30 million words were created. The American corpus includes more than 12,000 articles from six American newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic and Chicago Tribune. The corpus articles were published between 16 June 2015, which marked the start of Trump's presidential campaign, and 20 January 2021, the date of Biden's presidential inauguration. The Mexican corpus includes more than 20,000 articles from six Mexican newspapers, published during Trump's era: El Universal, Elimparcial.com, Reforma, El Norte, Lacronica.com and Mural.

Even though the negative discourse prosodies seem to dominate newspaper discourses, this study argues that the attitudes towards Mexican immigration/immigrants in American and, especially, in Mexican newspapers are not as negative as expected. The results show that two-third (66%) of the instances in American corpus newspapers and more than three quarters (78%) of the instances in Mexican corpus newspapers express a positive perspective. However, among the most frequent negative attitudes in American and Mexican corpus newspapers is the description of immigrants as criminals (20% and 18%). The diachronic frequency analysis of the attitudes towards 'immigration' and 'immigrant(s)' shows correlations between socio-political events and press discourses, which might contribute to public opinion about Mexican immigration/immigrants. For instance, Trump's family separation policy might have ignited empathy towards immigrants in the corpus newspapers.

You can register here: https://store.edgehill.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/events/edge-...

The EHU CRG programme for 2023-24 is here: https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/crg/next

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