posted on 2014-12-19, 11:49authored bySimon Goodman, Shani Burke
ABSTRACT In this paper we explore the extent to which ‘discursive deracialization’, the removal of ‘race’ from potentially racially motivated arguments, is taking place in talk about asylum seeking. A discourse analysis is conducted on the part of a corpus of data collected from focus groups with undergraduate students talking about asylum seeking, in which they were asked if they considered it to be racist to oppose asylum. We show that speakers use three arguments for opposing asylum that are explicitly framed as non-racist: opposition is based on (1) economic reasons (2) religious grounds and the associated threat of terrorism and (3) the lack of asylum seekers' ability to integrate into British society. These findings are discussed with regard to the implications they have for our understanding of discursive deracialization in which it is shown that there is a common knowledge understanding, albeit one that needs qualifying, that opposition to asylum is not racist.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology
Volume
21
Issue
2
Pages
111 - 123 (13)
Citation
GOODMAN, S. and BURKE, S., 2011. Discursive deracialization in talk about asylum seeking. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 21 (2), pp. 111 - 123.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2011
Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: GOODMAN, S. and BURKE, S., 2011. Discursive deracialization in talk about asylum seeking. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 21 (2), pp. 111 - 123, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/casp.1065. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.