What does the other look like? A critical multimodal analysis of the representation of otherness in British television programmes about Ukrainian Displaced People

As of June 2023, 179,500 Ukrainian refugees had arrived in the UK on government visa schemes following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (UK Government, 2023). Unlike with previous, non-European conflicts, the UK government provided three different visa schemes which, although not completely unproblematic in their set up and implementation (Tomlinson, 2022; Miller et al., 2022), provided a more positive treatment of refugees by the UK government than it had been offered to other refugees up that point, for example Afghani ones (Bejan et al., 2023).

Amongst the reasons for the novel, positive institutional outlook to Ukrainian Displaced People (UDP), scholars have highlighted identitarian factors, i.e. a ‘closeness’ in ethnic, religious, cultural and national values between Western countries and UDP, as well as geopolitical justifications, i.e. the threat of Russian imperialism (Esposito, 2022; Parusel and Varfolomieieva, 2022; Ramji-Nogales, 2022). In the British media reports of the Ukrainian conflict, some television programmes focussed on UDP, their journeys through Europe and their lives once in the UK. Based on the factors highlighted in the literature cited, two others can be postulated to exist in the media-constructed relationship between the UK and the social actors in the Ukrainian conflict: the UDP as refugees and Russia as the invading force.

This paper aims to explore how these two others are constructed multimodally by analysing programmes broadcast on British television that focussed on the Ukrainian diaspora, and by exploring the discourses and narratives used to discuss the phenomenon. A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis lens (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Machin and Mayr, 2012) applied to documentary films (Castaldi, 2021, forthcoming), is employed for this purpose. Approaching UDP and Russia as social actors (van Leeuwen, 1996) the preliminary results of this on-going project suggest how, on the one hand, the UDP other is represented as akin to the in-group (i.e. the British) while, on the other hand, the Russian other is represented as alien to the in-group.

The aim of the analysis is not to highlight a difference in treatment between the representation of UDP and other refugees, but to show how the refugee/other can be multimodally constructed in a positive way. The goal of the project is, therefore, to support the design of a media semiotics blueprint for the positive representation of refugees and migrants more broadly.