The outbreak of ebola 2014 and the outbreak of covid-19 2019 affected our societies in a lot of ways, and some of the consequences were more unexpected than others. One of these consequences is the appearance of stigmatization and racism against ethnic groups. The purpose of this thesis is to describe how the swedish news media (Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet) construct and maintain the image of the ebolavirus and the coronavirus. Our goal is to explain how the media can have the power to influence society’s general perception on the ethnic groups that live in the geographic areas where the virus outbreaks occurred. We will explain how general perceptions based on the construction of discourses can lead to racism and racialization, which will be explained by the field of political ecology. Our critical discourse analysis applied on the news media, concluded that the media mainly follows a discourse that tend to create a distinction between “us” in the west and “them” in the Third World (Africa and Asia) by blaming them and their ways of living as a cause of the viruses. This, together with a general way of creating fear and speculation, make prejudice and racialization occur. By applying the theory of political ecology which lay focus on the social injustice based on geographical location; we could draw the conclusion that virus outbreaks occur due to human exploitation of the nature. The exploitation leads to changes in the nature’s metabolism, which take form in crises such as virus outbreaks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-166526 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Österberg, Anna, Smeds, Olivia |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Statsvetenskap, Linköpings universitet, Statsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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