Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In Australia, the issue of people seeking asylum has received widespread media attention, resulting in considerable debate and division among the community. For people who support refugee resettlement in Australia, discourses of humanity and compassion are commonly voiced (Peterie, 2017; Fozdar and Pedersen, 2013). Conversely, those who oppose asylum seekers coming to Australia have routinely constructed them as illegal immigrants (Every and Augoustinos, 2008; Pedersen, et al, 2006; Klocker 2004; Pickering, 2001), queue-jumpers (Markus and Dharmalingam, 2014; Augoustinos and Every, 2007; Pedersen, et al, 2005), and economic migrants (Saxton, 2003; Pickering, 2001). Some empirical evidence suggests that similar negative discourses are pervasive in Australian news content about asylum seekers, often mirroring political discourses that serve to justify punitive policies for managing asylum seekers (e.g. McKay, et al, 2011; Saxton, 2003). While some Australian research has explored media representations of people seeking asylum, no prior studies have focused on community perspectives regarding these news discourses. In this study, Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995) was combined with Audience Reception Theory (Hall, 1993) to examine the perspectives of a sample Western Australians concerning news representations of people seeking asylum. The key discourses observed were concerned with reliability and transparency in Australian news constructions of asylum seekers. Participants often voiced these perspectives in the form of recommendations for how news content can more adequately inform the Australian public about people seeking asylum. This paper discusses these recommendations with emphasis on the wider implications from both a research and policy perspective.