Migration as a Political and Public Phenomenon: The Case of Poland

Publication within the project “The V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendations” is financed by Visegrad Fund

Introduction

Publication within the project “The V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendations” is financed by Visegrad Fund

Analyzing Disproportionate Reaction via Comparative Multilingual Targeted Sentiment in Twitter

Global events such as terrorist attacks are commented upon in social media, such as Twitter, in different languages and from different parts of the world. Most prior studies have focused on monolingual sentiment analysis, and therefore excluded an extensive proportion of the Twitter userbase. In this paper, we perform a multilingual comparative sentiment analysis study on the terrorist attack in Paris, during November 2015. In particular, we look at targeted sentiment, investigating opinions on specific entities, not simply the general sentiment of each tweet. Given the potentially inflammatory and polarizing effect that these types of tweets may have on attitudes, we examine the sentiments expressed about different targets and explore whether disproportionate reaction was expressed about such targets across different languages. Specifically, we assess whether the sentiment for French speaking Twitter users during the Paris attack differs from English-speaking ones. We identify disproportionately negative attitudes in the English dataset over the French one towards some entities and, via a crowdsourcing experiment, illustrate that this also extends to forming an annotator bias

Conclusions

Publication within the project “The V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendations” is financed by Visegrad Fund

Discourse on the Multicultural Policy in Sweden in Light of the Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attack

Multicultural policy has recently been undergoing a marked crisis and is subject to wide criticism. In the light of recent terrorist attacks it is often highlighted that the reason for such situations might be too much openness towards foreigners. Most European countries are changing their immigration and integration policies limiting their social security and restricting the possibilities of an influx of immigrants. Sweden, which is perceived as one of the most open and tolerant states in Europe also faces new challenges concerning the future of its multicultural policy. The crisis in tolerance towards foreigners is quite visible and it is obvious that the social moods in this state are evolving. Therefore, the aim of the article is to analyze changes in the attitude towards Swedish immigration and its integration policy in the light of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly offices

Islamophobia in European Schools: A Multinational Phenomenological Research

This study, which aims to investigate the existence of Islamophobia in European schools, an important part of the social structure, is designed as a phenomenological study. Data were collected through interviews with 36 teachers working in seven different European countries. As a result of the study, Islamophobia has been identified as an unignorable and a major problem in European schools. Moreover, it reveals that the teachers do not have enough knowledge about Islam, but the majority of participants have open or hidden Islamophobic tendencies. In addition, the teachers think that Islamic lifestyles and Muslims are not part of European cultures and that Muslim students should be subjected to intense cultural training. Again, the majority of the participants argue that the fight against Islamophobia can be achieved through prejudice and communication training for teachers. This study is important in that it is a pioneering work in the literature that investigates the entity of Islamophobia among teachers in Europe

SHAPING OF THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE ON REFUGEES IN SOCIAL MEDIA: "REFUGEES WELCOME LITHUANIA"

Social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are starting to become places, where people present and evaluate various events in the world: terrorist attacks in London, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels. What is more, these websites influence values of their users and readers. Technologies allow people to exchange views at the very moment of the event. The time zone, area, or other physical aspects of the platform participants do not matter. However, this ability might cause negative impact on the discussed social groups. The aim of this article – to analyse the discourse formation in media regarding refugees’ integration and humanitarian crisis in Europe. The goals of this study are: to figure out how the practices of public participation evidences in the context of communication through social media; to form a methodology according to up-to-date communicational concepts and analyse how the images of refugees are formed in social media; to reveal the main actors, involved in the formation of the discourse on refugees in Lithuania, by analysing the content in Facebook pages “Priimsiu pabÄ—gÄ—lį†(eng. “Refugees Welcomeâ€) and “Visuomeninis komitetas prieÅ¡ priverstinÄ™ imigraciją†(eng. “Public Committee against Forced Immigrationâ€)