Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric along with the PhD in Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor invite you to a talk by
Dimitris Serafis
University of Malta
“Multimodal argumentation in the press: Unveiling discriminatory reasoning in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’”
The arrival of migrants and refugees, fleeing from war and conflict zones, to Europe (2015), threw the European public debate into turmoil, giving rise to discourses of solidarity vis-à-vis racist and hateful ones (see Krzyzanowski et al. 2018). In this polarized context, media discourse played a key role in the (re)production of discriminatory portrayals, underpinning extreme right-wing voices and perspectives (see e.g. Viola and Musolff 2019). Against this background, this presentation aims to unveil the reasoning that lies behind multimodal constructions of the migratory phenomenon in the Greek and Italian mainstream press. In particular, following approaches that favor an integration of principles coming from multimodal discourse analysis and argumentation (see Tseronis and Forceville 2017), we will examine how social agency is represented (van Leeuwen 2008) in headlines and press photos of news articles as well as the argumentative inferences (Rigotti and Greco 2019) that these trigger in an attempt to be justified and naturalized in the public sphere of the European south; the one mostly affected by the mobilization of migrant and refugee populations.
Friday, October 23, 2020
3:00pm
Weekly presentations conducted via Zoom. Please contact us at crrar@uwindsor.ca for more information.