Floating Signifiers, Transnational Affect Flows: Climate-induced Migrants in Australian News Discourse

While news reporting follows a well-established tradition, which claims to be ‘objective, ‘neutral’ and ‘impartial’ and which often obscures the subjective role of the journalistic author in constructing the text, the report clearly activates a negative assessment of climate-induced migrants through affect and the exaggerated suggestion of “hundreds of millions” of refugees as an impending threat (Thomson and White 2008, 3). Besides providing background and explanatory information on Gore’s opinions, the reporter intervenes on morale (Anderson 2010; Baker 2006; Massumi 2009; Thomson and White 2008; Wodak 2008). It may be claimed that the report’s culture of alarm has constituted a defining aspect of the Australian media coverage of climate-induced migrants from neighbouring South Asian countries, the Maldives and Pacific Islands, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati. In this light, media discourse may be regarded as a central aspect of ‘cosmopolitics’, as it is a potential trigger of xenophobia and racism or encounter, connectivity and conviviality. The central part played by climate change during the Australian election campaigns of the last twenty years and of fossil fuel for the Australian economy has resulted in heated and contested accounts in media coverage. Yet, in response to climate change skepticism, environmentalists and journalists have found in severely affected countries a sensationalist “proof” to “concretize climate science’s statistical abstractions” and have often amplified the dimension of climate-induced migration (Farbotko 2010, 58). At other times, climate-induced migrants have been represented as helpless and powerless victims of climate change, or as climate ‘refugees’ requiring salvation. The latter representations have been particularly contested by representatives of climate-induced migrants as they prefer to be represented as active agents of change (i.e. developing mitigation and adaptation strategies such as mangrove planting and solar power), and are concerned by the loss of sovereignty, agency and self-determination related to forced migration and refugee status (Dreher and Voyer 2014). The contestation is particularly important in political and legal terms since as Bridget Lewis notes, “the international law principle of good neighbourliness may have application in case of climate displacement and might impose obligations on states like Australia… [If] migration is undertaken willingly it can be an effective strategy and can assist those who remain behind but where it is involuntary it can be have significant harmful impacts…. It is essential that migration strategies are planned” (2015, 86-87). However news reporters often engage in dialogue with prior reports in the same sphere (i.e. with those who have previously taken a stand with respect to an issue) and continue to draw upon familiar images and language patterns to construct a discursive framework of alignment and rapport through which readers may be ‘affected’ and engaged (Martin and White 2005). As Teun van Dijk argued in his popular work on news and social cognition, people rely heavily on media accounts for their knowledge, beliefs and opinions, which in turn form socially shared knowledge and limited interpretative repertoires (1988; 1996). Such limited “repertoires” may condition the social apprehension and response to climate-induced migration, hindering the possibility of transnational solidarity (Blommaert 2012, 12). Based on the premise that the power of media discourse lies in the the repetition and incremental effect of images and language patterns, which may be closely examined to reveal presuppositions, cultural stereotypes and ideological inferences in discourse (Stubbs 2001), this chapter closely enquires into the circulation of familiar and seemingly new discourses across transnational borders. The chapter draws on findings in Corpus and Critical Discourse Analysis in order to draw to some conclusions on the representation of climate-induced migration in a corpus of Australian news reports.