This blog was first posted in the seminar series “Citizenship and Migration”, a joint series by COMPAS and Politics in Spires, on December 5. It has since been updated.
In my current work with the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), I focus on the ways that British newspapers talk about migration issues and relate these narratives to public perceptions and migration policy changes. Using techniques from corpus and computational linguistics, which enables researchers to analyse large amounts of text, I look for (ir)regularities and significant patterns of words. These contextual patterns, called ‘collocations’, can provide insight into a concept: one of the major contributors to linguistics, John Firth, famously expressed this feature of language when he said ‘you shall know a word by the company it keeps’.
Applying Firth’s guiding principle to study of UK press portrayal of migrant groups reveals that, in the case of immigrants and asylum seekers, their company is relatively negative. Dr Scott Blinder and I showed that from 2010-2012, the British national press most often described ‘immigrants’ as ‘illegal’ while portraying ‘asylum seekers’ as ‘failed’. But what about citizens? It is clear that debates about ‘who’ citizens are (as well as normative claims about who they ‘should’ be) are important to understanding the politics of citizenship. However, another fundamental question occurred to me: what do citizens do, in the context of migration? Describing the kinds of actions and activities in which citizens reportedly engage—however we may define them—opens further discussion about the nature of citizenship itself.
I returned to our original corpus of 58,000 items mentioning immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from all UK national newspapers that had published continuously between 2010-2012 (more details and reflections on the dataset are available here). Using the Sketch Engine, a web-based piece of software that can look for collocations among nouns, verbs, and adjectives, I asked a key question: when the words ‘citizen’ or ‘citizens’ appear in this corpus of newspaper texts, what action is linked to them? As an exploratory way of initially getting to grips with the concept of a ‘citizen’, I think it reveals some interesting insights.
Table 1 shows the top ten verbs that are collocated with mentions of either ‘citizen’ or ‘citizens’ in national UK newspaper coverage of migration from 2010-2012. ‘Top Ten’ in this context refers to those verbs with the strongest statistical relationship to the target words, although the selection of ‘ten’ rather than five or 15 is admittedly arbitrary (more information about the precise statistical measure used is available here). The actual number of times each verb is collocated with ‘citizen(s)’ throughout the corpus appears in brackets as well. It’s also important to note that Table 1 refers to any citizens, not just ones from a particular nationality or country.
Table 1. Top Ten Verbs Collocated with ‘Citizen(s)’ as Subject and Object, MigObs News Corpus 2010-2012
Rank |
What Do Citizens Do? ‘Citizen(s)’ as Subject of a Sentence |
What Is Done to Citizens? ‘Citizen(s) as Object of a Sentence |
1 |
struggle (8) |
naturalise (31) |
2 |
enjoy (11) |
protect (53) |
3 |
live (48) |
become (214) |
4 |
emigrate (7) |
marry (35) |
5 |
travel (8) |
extradite (10) |
6 |
suffer (8) |
evacuate (10) |
7 |
flee (7) |
rescue (8) |
8 |
vote (5) |
advise (9) |
9 |
seek (7) |
expel (7) |
10 |
deport (4) |
detain (9) |
In the left-hand column, we see that mentions of ‘citizens’ occur alongside verbs mentioning movement (EMIGRATE, TRAVEL, FLEE). The word DEPORT actually refers to citizens being deported, not citizens deporting other people. Examples from the corpus illustrate how some of these verbs actually appeared:
Meanwhile, closer inspection of the eight instances of STRUGGLE appearing with mentions of ‘citizens’ reveals that these are almost entirely about people who are facing economic difficulties, which has implications for the meaning of ‘successful’ citizens:
Focusing on the verb ENJOY also shows emphasis on the types of wealth, legal rights, or other resources that are conferred to citizens:
Turning attention to the right-hand column, we can see the kinds of actions that are done to citizens. NATURALISE and BECOME refer to a process of changing into a citizen, illustrated by the following examples:
Also interesting to observe are two different clusters of words implying services provided by a state to its own citizens (PROTECT, EVACUATE, RESCUE, ADVISE) in contrast to more punitive activities (EXTRADITE, EXPEL, DETAIN):
Although this post did not set out to complete a full linguistic analysis of language around ‘citizens’ and citizenship, its initial descriptive findings do link with some of the debates and conversations already happening in both this series and wider scholarship. By turning attention to the activities associated with citizens—in this case, as reported by British newspapers in the context of media coverage about migration during a politically crucial time period—I believe we can gain additional insight not only into who counts as citizens, but also what kinds of citizens are valorised and vilified.
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