New “Crises,” Old Habits: Online Interdiscursivity and Intertextuality in UK Migration Policy Discourses

ABSTRACT

In this article I analyze Twitter accounts of key political actors to show that the topoi and legitimation strategies these actors employ change over time and argue that this change is in reaction to specific (mediatized) events throughout 2015. I also argue that such discourses can be seen as recontextualizations of existing discourses that have been present in the UK public sphere for a number of years. Situated within the critical discourse paradigm, the analysis takes a multimodal, multigeneric approach that includes both tweets and hyperlinked texts to show how Twitter offers new possibilities of hyper(inter)textual legitimation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• refugees
• Twitter
• recontextualization
• critical discourse analysis
• mediatization
• legitimation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their important comments on the first draft of this article.

Notes

1. See Reisigl and Wodak (2001) for overviews of discourses on race, ethnicity, and culture.

2. See also Wodak (2015, pp. 160–162) for examples of overtly racist BNP election material

3. The camp was evacuated and closed down by French authorities in late October 2016. Britain agreed to take in a small number of unaccompanied minors, and the remaining inhabitants were transferred to other centers throughout France.

4. Corbyn was nominated as a potential leadership candidate only to widen the spectrum of debate, but he won an unlikely victory (60%), which shifted the Labour party to the left after two decades of centrist policies. Since the period of analysis, Jeremy Corbyn has had to address questions of anti-Semitism within the Labour party, with 50 members being suspended. In the spring of 2016, David Cameron came under increasing pressure for not allowing in child refugees: Lord Dubs, a beneficiary of the Kindertransport, tabled an amendment to the Government's Immigration Bill to relocate 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children, but the amendment was defeated.

5. Verified accounts are used to establish the authenticity key account users. Accounts are verified by Twitter and are denoted by a small blue “verified” icon. This can be seen as a form of visual legitimation.

6. Only tweets that pertained to the refugee situation and wider issues of migration were coded as relevant.

7. See van Leeuwen (2007) and van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) for in-depth explanations on various forms of legitimation and how they are enacted at the micro-linguistic level.

8. Nomination based on a person's activity or profession (cf. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p. 48).

9. The Lord Mayor's Banquet is held annually after the election of a new Lord Mayor of London. Guests are politicians and business leaders and traditionally the prime minister makes a speech.

10. This was also evident in his “breaking point” poster in the days before the EU referendum, which was released the same day as Jo Cox was killed.