Bottom-Up Nationalism and Discrimination on Social Media: an Analysis of the Citizenship Debate About Refugees in Turkey

dc.contributor.author Bozdağ Bucak, Çiğdem
dc.contributor.author Bozdağ Bucak, Çiğdem
dc.contributor.other New Media
dc.date.accessioned 2020-12-12T13:34:21Z
dc.date.available 2020-12-12T13:34:21Z
dc.date.issued 2020
dc.department Fakülteler, İletişim Fakültesi, Yeni Medya Bölümü en_US
dc.description.abstract This study analyzes social media representations of refugees in Turkey and discusses their role in shaping public opinion. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey has created heated debates about their presence and future in the country. One of these debates was triggered by President Erdogan's statement that Turkey would issue citizenship rights to Syrians in July 2016. Due to a lack of critical voices about refugee issues in Turkey's mass media sphere, social media has become a key platform for citizens to voice their opinions. Through a discourse analysis of tweets about the issue of refugees' citizenship, I will map different perceptions of refugees in Turkey. I argue that despite contesting discourses about Syrians, the debate on social media reinforces nationalism and an ethnocentric understanding of citizenship in Turkey. As the number of refugees and migrants increases rapidly worldwide, they become the new 'others' of national imagined communities. Social media becomes a key communication space where the nation is discursively constructed in a bottom-up manner through manifestations of 'us' and 'them'. The analysis shows that social media contributes to trivialization and normalization of discrimination and hatred against Syrian refugees through disseminating overt discourses of 'Othering'. Social media also enables more covert forms of discrimination through 'rationalized' arguments that are used to justify discrimination through the basis of false/non-verified information. Thus, Twitter becomes a space for critical, bottom-up, yet nationalistic and discriminatory statements about refugees. en_US
dc.identifier.citationcount 22
dc.identifier.doi 10.1177/1367549419869354 en_US
dc.identifier.endpage 730 en_US
dc.identifier.issn 1367-5494 en_US
dc.identifier.issn 1460-3551 en_US
dc.identifier.issn 1367-5494
dc.identifier.issn 1460-3551
dc.identifier.issue 5 en_US
dc.identifier.scopus 2-s2.0-85074090071 en_US
dc.identifier.scopusquality Q1
dc.identifier.startpage 712 en_US
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12469/3530
dc.identifier.uri https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549419869354
dc.identifier.volume 23 en_US
dc.identifier.wos WOS:000490035100001 en_US
dc.identifier.wosquality Q2
dc.institutionauthor Bozdağ Bucak, Çiğdem en_US
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.publisher Sage Publications Ltd en_US
dc.relation.journal European Journal of Cultural Studıes en_US
dc.relation.publicationcategory Makale - Uluslararası Hakemli Dergi - Kurum Öğretim Elemanı en_US
dc.rights info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess en_US
dc.scopus.citedbyCount 26
dc.subject Citizenship en_US
dc.subject Discrimination en_US
dc.subject Internet en_US
dc.subject Nationalism en_US
dc.subject Refugees en_US
dc.subject Social media en_US
dc.subject Syrians en_US
dc.subject Turkey en_US
dc.subject Twitter en_US
dc.title Bottom-Up Nationalism and Discrimination on Social Media: an Analysis of the Citizenship Debate About Refugees in Turkey en_US
dc.type Article en_US
dc.wos.citedbyCount 28
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