This thesis examines how national identities are discursively constructed in online discussions around immigration in Finland. The discursive construction of Finnish national identities is analyzed both in the light of the construction of ‘sameness’ and of ‘otherness’, drawing upon critical discourse analysis and the notion of a nation as an imagined community. The analyzed data is from a Finnish discussion forum, Suomi24. The discussions analyzed generally construct an exclusionary identity: Finnishness is often represented as something inherent and impossible to combine with, for example, Islam or Russianness. Elite discourses as well as discourses previously identified in Hommaforum, a Finnish ‘immigration critical’ forum, were reproduced in the discussions, implying that online discussions, in addition to reproducing elite discourses, can also foster them. The prevalence of exclusionary discourses and stereotypical representations in a moderated discussion forum speaks for the normalization of such ways of talking about immigration, ‘us’ and ‘others’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-149918 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Sinersaari, Inna |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, REMESO - Institutet för forskning om migration, etnicitet och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| 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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