Majid KhosraviNik

‌

Dr Majid Khosravinik

Lecturer in Media & Discourse Studies, MA Degree Programmes Director
Email: majid.khosravinik@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: 0191 208 6571

Overview

The relation of media and society regarding the perceptions of contentious issues such as national(ist) identity, immigration, class, gender has always been at the heart of media and communication studies. Discourses of immigration and its trajectories including the debates on national identity, rise of right-wing populist parties, and multiculturalism has specifically been a crucial constituent of contemporary British politics.

With an interdisciplinary approach, combining nuanced linguistic analysis and insights from media, journalism, and political studies, Majid KhosraviNik critically explores the representations of immigration in the British media within ten year coverage of national leading press. The political contextualisation of the study illustrates how various political and material events in Britain and around the world impact on evaluations of migrant groups and shape the choice of micro-discourses. Maintaining that much of the debate is derived from party politics, rather than a healthy inclusive deliberation, Majid illustrates that communicated messages crucially rely on short-cut conclusion rules which perpetuate ready-made (and fallacious) micro-arguments around, economy, culture, and national identity.

Context

As one of the outputs for the ESRC-funded project of (Representation of Refugees, Asylum seekers and Immigrants (RASIM), Majid investigates the main overall discursive characteristics of immigration perception from micro-categories such as the types of linguistic references to macro-argumentative categories of topoi. It critically compares representations in newspapers with different socio-political perspectives and accounts for processes of encoding and decoding for their perspective readerships. Drawing on a political history of the selected period, Majid presents a critical discourse analysis of the link between certain world events and size, qualities, and consequences of discourses of immigration in Britain by focusing on textual, ideological and stylistic similarities and differences in the left and right-leaning newspapers in two specific time-marks of ‘refugee’ crisis of the Bosnian conflict and immigration debate during the British general election. Drawing on a plethora of suggested methods and approaches within critical textual studies and by combining classic approaches Majid has developed a hands-on analytical systematisation of an overall research design, with flexibilities in applying various methods, for analysing socio-political group identities in discourse. The paper uniquely concentrates on operationalisation of textual analysis in media reporting.

By extension, and in a major comparative study, Majid has investigated discourses of immigration, Islamphobia, xenophobia in Britain (e.g. BNP and EDL) as well as several European countries in the way that various populist right wing groups and parties represent and constructs their political identities. Following on the recent trends in the rise of right-wing populist parties, the research investigates the origins and different discursive manifestations of these parties/movements by bringing insights from political science, rhetorical/discourse-analytical, anthropological, and media studies approaches. The study hosts a range of conceptualizations including populism, fascism, racism, ethno-nationalism, risk society, neoliberal populism, along with in depth analysis of several case studies in Europe. The study presents a unique interdisciplinary angel and engages with a variety of data sources including electoral campaigns, party propaganda, and structured interviews while accounting for the contemporary ‘personality politics’ and how the populist parties appropriate pop culture, new hybrid genres, and new media in their recent political campaigns.

Outcomes

Majid’s work has been taken up by United Nations reports on Xenophobia, International and Human Development as well as being incorporated in ICAR (the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees). His articles are on reading lists for various academic programmes in communication and discourse studies internationally e.g. at Swedish Orebro University. Findings of RASIM project have been widely disseminated through a large number of public talks and media outlets. For example, Ruth Wodak has been interviewed by Michal Rosen on BBC2; Word of Mouth, on aspects of everyday exclusionary rhetoric. In 2012, Majid has been invited by Newcastle Amnesty Group to give a public talk as the 4th Aisha Ibrahim Doholow Annual Lecture at Newcastle Brunswick Methodist Church. He has been invited to join academic boards of two leading journals in the field (Journal of Language and Politics and Critical Discourse Studies) and has been a regular referee/reviewer for book proposals and grant applications. Majid’s proposed analytical approach has attracted substantial attention among postgraduate students and scholars in the field. It has been incorporated into PhD studies e.g. at SOAS on analysing representation of Muslims in British newspapers, and at Valencia University on representation of gypsy communities in Spain.

Further Information

Majid is currently working on a manuscript on discourses of political identity and legitimacy in British and Iranian newspapers for John Benjamins DAPSAC series. In the meantime, he is pursuing research and writing on theoretical challenges of applying critical discourse analysis in social media environment. He is also carrying out joint research on critical discourse analysis of the Middle Eastern identities on Facebook and Youtube.

Majid is guest editing a Special Issue of Critical Discourse Studies on the discourses of austerity, http://media.ncl.ac.uk/pages/research/cfp-cds.php, serves as a co-editor of the journal: Journalism and Discourse Studies journal, www.JDSjournal.net, and is a co-convenor of the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group, http://www.criticaldiscoursegroup.net/.

His publications include:

Ash J. Rethinking affective atmospheres: Technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human. Geoforum 2013, 49, 20-28.
Ash J. Technologies of Captivation: videogames and the attunement of affect. Body and Society 2013, 19(1), 27-51.
Ash J. Videogames. In: Dittmer, J., Craine, J., Adams, P, ed. Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013.
Ash J. New Media and Participatory Cultures. In: Bragg, S., Kehily, M.J, ed. Children and Young People's Cultural Worlds. London: Policy Press, 2013, pp.219-268.
Ash J. Attention, videogames and the retentional economies of affective amplification. Theory, Culture and Society 2012, 29(6), 3-26.
Ash J. Between War and Play, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture by Patrick Crogan Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Cultural Politics 2012, 8(3), 496-497.
Ash J. Technology, technicity, and emerging practices of temporal sensitivity in videogames. Environment and Planning A 2012, 44(1), 187-203.
Ash J, Gallacher L. Cultural Geography and Videogames. Geography Compass 2011, 5/6, 351-368.
Ash J. Architectures of affect: anticipating and manipulating the event in processes of videogame design and testing. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, 28(4), 653-671.
Ash J. Teleplastic Technologies: charting practices of orientation and navigation in videogaming. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2010, 35(3), 414-430.