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Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (BIM) | Aktuelles | News | New Article: „The ‘Arab Clans’ Discourse: Narrating Racialization, Kinship, and Crime in the German Media”

New Article: „The ‘Arab Clans’ Discourse: Narrating Racialization, Kinship, and Crime in the German Media”

Wie werden „Arabische Clans“ medial dargestellt? Özgür Özvatan, Bastian Neuhauser und Gökce Yuradakul liefern in einem Zeitschriftenartikel Antworten darauf, wie die Kriminalisierung und Rassifizierung von „Arabischen Clans/Großfamilien“ im deutschen Mediendiskurs von 2010 bis 2020 funktionierte. Der Artikel erschien heute in der Fachzeitschrift Social Sciences. / How are "Arab clans“ covered in the media? In a journal article, Özgür Özvatan, Bastian Neuhauser and Gökce Yurdakul provide findings for how criminalization and racialization of „Arab clans“ operated in the German media discourse from 2010 to 2020. The article was published in Social Sciences today.
New Article: „The ‘Arab Clans’ Discourse: Narrating Racialization, Kinship, and Crime in the German Media”


Online

  
„The ‘Arab Clans’ Discourse: Narrating Racialization, Kinship, and Crime in the German Media“ by Özgür Özvatan, Bastian Neuhauser and Gökce Yuerdakul

Full Article: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/104

 

Abstract

 
In the last decade’s media discourse, particular Arab immigrant groups received the name ‘Arab clans’ and have been portrayed as criminal kinship networks irrespective of actual involvement in crime. We question how ‘Arab clans’ are categorized, criminalized, and racialized in the German media. To answer this question, we collected clan-related mainstream media articles published between 2010 and 2020. Our first-step quantitative topic modeling of ‘clan’ coverage (n = 23,893) shows that the discourse about ‘Arab clans’ is situated as the most racialized and criminalized vis-à-vis other ‘clan’ discourses and is channeled through three macro topics: law and order, family and kinship, and criminal groupness. Second, to explore the deeper meaning of the discourse about ‘Arab clans’ by juxtaposing corpus linguistics and novel narrative approaches to the discourse-historical approach, we qualitatively analyzed 97 text passages extracted with the keywords in context search (KWIC). Our analysis reveals three prevalent argumentative strategies (Arab clan immigration out of control, Arab clans as enclaves, policing Arab clans) embedded in a media narrative of ethnonational rebirth: a story of Germany’s present-day need (‘moral panic’) to police and repel the threats associated with ‘the Arab clan Other’ in order for a celebratory return to a nostalgically idealized pre-Arab-immigration social/moral order.

 

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