'[P]aying back to the community and to the British people': Migration as transactional discourse in curated stories by UK charity organisations

Lampropoulou, Sofia ORCID: 0000-0001-9072-1394 and Johnson, Paige (2023) '[P]aying back to the community and to the British people': Migration as transactional discourse in curated stories by UK charity organisations. DISCOURSE & SOCIETY, 34 (5). pp. 598-616.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09579265231170974

Abstract

<jats:p> This study explores migrant identity construction in the curated stories of UK-based charity organisations. Drawing upon the paradigms of critical discourse analysis and narrative positioning, we demonstrate how the construction of migrant identities as successful, fulfilled, grateful and resilient reproduce a migration as transaction discourse. We problematise these representations as prerequisites to migrants’ acceptance, given that they not only speak to the neoliberal, neo-assimilatory paradigm of wider integration debates in UK public discourse, but also conflict with the overtly philanthropic aims of the charity organisations. The curated stories are, thus, transformed into sites of liquid racism in their entanglement of declared antiracist, covertly racist, positionings of migrants in the UK context. Our work contributes to the body of research that aims to scrutinise the largely unexamined work of institutionalised social actors who aim to ‘do the right thing’ by calling for greater reflexivity and the need for critical dialogue in order to unpack the embeddedness of antiracism in racism. </jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Curated stories, fulfilment identities, liquid racism, migrants, narrative positioning, UK charity organisations
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	11 May 2023 15:50
Last Modified:	28 Sep 2023 12:51
DOI:	10.1177/09579265231170974
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3170295