Decoding African narratives: a longitudinal corpus-driven critical discourse analysis of diachronic shifts in Irish media discourse (September to December 1998, 2008, and 2018)

Abstract

Scholars from non-ethnic minority backgrounds primarily examine discourses surrounding the representation of immigrants in Western media, focusing on asylum seekers, International Protection Applicants (IPA), refugees, and discrimination. Concurrently, there is a notable absence of minority representation and authorship. This study addresses the gap in the literature by employing a blend of methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001) and van Leeuwen’s (1996) strategies of foregrounding and backgrounding analysed a self-compiled corpus dataset from The Irish Independent and The Irish Times, amounting to 3,923,355 words portraying Africans across selected periods from 1998 to 2018 The combined methods show the relationship between data triangulation, semantic prosody, and topoi argumentation analysis regarding the perpetuation of racialised power dynamics and the marginalisation of Africans in Irish media discourse. The researcher identified keywords, topoi, and themes that frequently engaged in the form of representational repression, characterised by the systematic exclusion, misrepresentation, and stereotyping of Africans. While these perspectives evolved over time, they remained consistent. Furthermore, although Irish newspapers tended to adopt more covert, negative, and exclusionary representations of Africans, The Irish Times demonstrated a greater bias in comparison to The Independent. Additionally, a new topos was identified, and a methodological synergy (Baker et al. 2008) was proposed based on manual collocation in corpora to uncover journalistic strategies. A public policy approach was suggested, emphasising how marginalised groups implement discursive practices to emancipate themselves and reduce discrimination. Implications and recommendations for future research are also included.