Framing discourse during the Lampedusa crisis

Abstract

This paper examines media discourse regarding the humanitarian crisis that took place in Lampedusa and by extension in the European Union during the first semester of 2011 as a result of the Arab Spring. Instability in North Africa became the source of outflows towards neighbouring countries. Reforming Schengen agreements was, beyond their temporary suspension, a major response to the Lampedusa crisis. The empirical analysis encompasses both frame and critical discourse analysis. The questions are a) whether the most read newspapers in Spain (Abc, El Mundo, El País, El Periódico, and La Vanguardia) framed people coming to Europe as asylum-seekers/refugees (victim-frame) or as immigrants (intruder-frame, i.e. conflict-frame), b) whether the five of them did it in the same way, and c) whether frame-shifts took place over the four-periods time.