The thematic workshop on National Identity and the Media (WP4) took place in Galati (Romania) on May 14-16, 2009. It was organised by the WP4 coordinating team from “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati and it was attended by representatives of all three partner teams involved in WP4, namely: on behalf of the Romanian WP coordinator UDJG – Gabriela Iuliana Colipca, Ioana Ivan-Mohor, Michaela Praisler, Mariana Neagu, Gabriela Dima and Antoanela Marta Dumitrascu; on behalf of the Greek team from Panteion University UPSPS – Maria Paradeisi and Ioanna Vovou; and on behalf of the FYROM team EU-BAL – Jana Lozanoska. The activities subsumed to this workshop were aimed at attaining a double goal:
- on the one hand, they were meant to stimulate a fruitful exchange of ideas among the partner teams with a view to refining and developing the methodological framework to be applied for the selection and the subsequent analysis of the texts – films and newspaper articles – making up the national case studies;
- on the other hand, as they were organised within the framework of the international conference Identity, Alterity, Hybridity (Galati, May 14-16, 2009), they were open to participants from other universities as well and contributed to disseminating to a wider academic audience the research that the partners in the Ge.M.IC. project have carried out so far with regard to issues concerning gender, migration and intercultural interactions in the Mediterranean and South-East Europe (in general), and on their representations and impact on the sending/receiving societies’ sense of national identity (in particular). (See the conference programme)
Consequently, the workshop was structured as follows:
- working group session on the methodological framework(s) (selection criteria, amount of films making up the corpus for analysis, analysis grids) and brief case study presentations by representatives of the partner (Romanian and Greek) teams;
- working group session on the methodological framework(s) (selection criteria, amount of newspaper articles making up the corpus for analysis, analysis grids) and brief discussion of the case studies that representatives of the partner (Romanian, Greek and FYROM ) teams chose to focus upon;
- round-off discussion on methodological issues, means of harmonizing the case studies (with a view to the final synthesis report) and the steps to be further taken in carrying out research on WP4 (logistics and timeframes).
Presentations and discussions
The workshop started with a welcome address to the partner teams by Gabriela Iuliana Colipca, who then proceeded by briefly introducing the main objectives and research areas of the Ge.M.IC. project to the other participants from Romanian and foreign universities who took interest in the project and, hence, decided to join the partners for discussions.
The group session on representations of national identity in films continued by the partner (Romanian and Greek) teams bringing into discussion the criteria used in the selection of the corpus and briefly presenting the currently selected material. As far as the methodological approaches to be applied in the analysis of the filmic text were concerned, the partners reinforced their agreement upon using imagology as a relevant analytical tool for the investigation of the representations of gender and migration-related differences as well as of the ways in which they shape up national identity in the context of intercultural interactions.
Maria Paradeisi emphasised the importance of textual analysis, to be used next to imagology, in an attempt at better decoding the mechanisms that underlie a certain combination of cinematic codes in the representation of gender and migration-determined alterity in both documentaries and feature films. She also suggested that all partner teams should try to collect interviews with film directors, which could significantly enhance the understanding of the filmic representations of otherness as foregrounded in a certain historical, political, social and cultural context and which, if filmed, could make a valuable contribution to the documentary to be produced for dissemination purposes during the final stage of the project.
In order to illustrate in a convincing manner their choice of such methodological approaches as textual analysis and imagology in the investigation of the corpora, members of the two teams presented their preliminary assessment of some of the selected films. Thus, on behalf of the Greek team, Maria Paradeisi made a presentation of the documentary Sugar Town (2006), considered as representative for the impact of the gender and cultural differences on domestic relations in the context of migration in the receiving country. The case study presentation of the Romanian team was structured so as to reflect the two-fold perspective that the selected corpus should be relevant for, namely the sending (Romanian) and receiving (e.g. Italian, French) societies’ representations of gender and migration-related differences. Consequently, representations of the Romanian migrant other as seen through the eyes of the receiving community were commented upon by Ioana Ivan-Mohor, who referred, in imagological terms, to the French production Je vous trouve très beau (2005) (“Je vous trouve très beau: from Reception to Representation”), and by Michaela Praisler, who applied the same analytical grid to the Italian production Il Resto della Notte (2008) (“On Film and Film Language: Il Resto della Notte”). A different insight into the (woman) migrant’s identity construction was provided by the presentation of the documentary Stella(2006) made by Gabriela Iuliana Colipca (“Identity and Memory: Vanina Vignal’s Documentary Stella”).
The group session on representations of national identity in the written press discourse aimed, above all, at clarifying several methodological aspects related to data selection. The representatives of the three teams agreed upon several criteria of selection, namely that the articles to be analysed should be selected from national, quality press published between 2007 and 2009 and that they should refer to both moments of crisis (considered, of course, in a larger context – one month before and one month after the crisis in question) and the “ordinary” relationships that established between the dominant (sending/receiving) majority and the migrant minority. In this respect, each team was invited to briefly detail its national case study to see to what extent the already created databases of articles for analysis observed the criteria and how the available material could be further approached so as to both preserve the specificity of each national case and ensure, nonetheless, the coherence of the final synthesis report. Thus, the representative of the Greek team, Ioanna Vovou, briefly presented some of the preliminary findings of the research she conducted on a number of articles from two Greek national newspapers presenting the attack on the Bulgarian migrant worker and union leader Konstantina Kouneva in December 2008. The Romanian team, represented by Mariana Neagu and Gabriela Dima, developed upon the importance of considering not only discursive representations of crisis-engendering events (like the Mailat case), but also images of the Romanian migrants as perceived throughout ‘uneventful’ periods, which may provide equally rich ground for analysis by their reflecting the emergence of a new stereotype, i.e. the Romanian “strawberry picker.” On behalf of the FYROM team, Jana Lozanoska insisted on the specificity of the FYROM case given by the particular focus on trafficking in women and on migrants transiting this cultural space.
Suggestions were advanced by the Romanian team as to the possibility of considering both the receiving and the sending societies’ perspectives on gender and migration-related differences and their impact on identity construction and representation, but given the difficulties raised by the language barriers, the too large amount of material to analyse, the difficult access to and sometimes even the unavailability of archives in the case of foreign newspapers, the partner teams eventually agreed to stick mainly to national newspapers and, only if it be the case, to resort to international press for the study of intertextuality and its role in the shaping of power discourse.
Another methodological aspect that was very much debated upon referred to the relevance for this thematic work package of focus groups bringing together readers selected according to different criteria (sex, age, education, etc.) in order to comment on different representations of gender, migration and intercultural interactions at the level of the written press discourse. Though the participants acknowledged that, for a better understanding of the changes in representation, the reception process has to be considered as well, the final decision was, however, against using the focus group as a method of data collection since the researchers of all three teams would take interest, above all, in the production processes and in the analysis of ways in which social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text in a certain social and political context. Hence, the preference for critical discourse analysis applied to the corpus selected according to the mutually established criteria and for non-structured interviews with journalists and/or editors on policies which the media generally adopt in representing cross-cultural encounters, disseminating information on and raising (or not) awareness of the sensitive issues related to gender, migration and national identity.
The workshop was rounded off by an overview of the main decisions made by the partner teams with regard to the methodological approaches to be used in the processes of data collection and analysis, as well as by a brief discussion on the steps to be further taken in order to complete research and to draft the WP4 national reports. In this respect, the partners agreed to make no changes in the already established timeframe included in the WP4 Synthesis Research Design.
The workshop report is available in PDF or XML format
