9th Conference European Sociological Association

RS09 Research Methods in Ethnic and Migration Studies

Discursive exclusion of migrants - towards a new concept of social exclusion

• Herzog, Benno

  Sociology and Social Antropology University of Valencia Valencia, Spain

Migrants in Europe often are victims of processes of social exclusion and marginalization. Sociological research about this issue often is hampered by the fact that there are few sociological theories of social exclusion responding to the questions. What is social exclusion? Who or what is excluded in relation to what? How is exclusion produced? In social research, there is the additional problem of identifying migrants as a target group of social exclusion as traditional categories of nationality or ethnicity become blurred and therefore hinder the identification of the marginalized in terms of social groups.
The aim of this contribution is to show sociological discourse analysis models as helpful instruments for investigating migrants´ social exclusion and to develop a new model of discursive exclusion.
The author´s research results using discourse analysis of popular discourses and discourses in free daily newspapers are compared with other findings on that field. With Foucault, these discourses were presented as internal dislocation thus facilitating the development of new models of discursive exclusion.
It can be shown, how migrants are considered irrelevant in the hegemonic construction of their own identity, i.e. migrants as physical persons are excluded from the production of their social self. The concept of collective identity itself as a mechanism of social power and control has to be criticized as it is used to sustain hegemonic exclusion.