Browsing by Subject "pakolaiset"

The aim of the thesis is to analyze the discussion on refugees and asylum seekers in the newspapers of Helsingin Sanomat and Lapin Kansa in September 2015. The rising amount of refugees and asylum seekers coming to Finland formed a constant topic in the newspapers troughout the fall. Newspapers referred repeatedly to a phenomenon called ”refugee crisis” but this consept was not defined in any detail. This attracted interest in exploring the background and goals of using the concept. The ambiguity and power relations of the phenomenon led to analyze it with a discursive approach. This thesis is based on a theory of foucauldian analytics of government that examine the typical way for modern societies to perceive reality and its phenomena through the theme of governance. The governance includes different rationalities, i.e. thought-systems underlying governance, as well as techniques that are the tools to put the governance into action. Governance focuses on the population, and hence governance analytics provide an interesting theoretical framework for the news coverage of refugees and asylum seekers, who are paradoxically defined outside the population but still arrive within the boundaries of the country. The research material is the newspapers of Helsingin Sanomat and Lapin Kansa in September 2015. The research questions examine the governance rationalities and technologies of governance in the newspapers on refugees and asylum seekers. The research results show that governance operates in newspapers through a neo-liberal rationality, in which refugees and asylum seekers are perceived in terms of their economic productivity. The governance techniques, in turn, produce refugees and asylum seekers as problems with discourses of uncontrollability, crisis and numerical definition. Besides this, surveillance and takeover by the authorities forms it’s own technique of governance. The thesis shows how neo-liberal discourse produces refugees and asylum seekers to be social burdens who need to be governed with different techniques.