This book sheds light on how the public engage with, make sense of, and discursively evaluate news media constructions of people from asylum seeking backgrounds. As a case study, the author discusses her recent research combining Critical Discourse Analysis with a cultural studies Audience Reception framework to examine the perspectives of 24 Western Australians who took part in semi-structured interviews. During their interviews, participants were asked open-ended questions about: their general views on people seeking asylum, including Australia’s policy responses, their media engagement habits and preferences, and their views concerning how the Australian media represents people seeking asylum. The author compares and contrasts this research with broader interdisciplinary discussion, and the book will therefore appeal to students and scholars of migration, political communication, sociology, audience reception, critical media studies and sociolinguistics.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ..." How has Australia risen to Emma Lazarus' great challenge? This overview of the historical, social and political contexts that have shaped Australia's recent treatment of asylum seekers offers a clear-eyed view of the many dimensions of the asylum seeker predicament, including its psychological and humanitarian consequences, and lays out an agenda for change in policy. Sir Gustav Nossal, the Rt Hon. Malcolm Fraser, Senator Lyn Allison, Phillip Adams, Professor Stuart MacIntyre, and Lindsay Tanner MP introduce the six sections. Julian Burnside QC, Dr Carmen Lawrence, Peter Mares, Pamela Curr, Michael Clyne, Linda Briskman, Derrick Silove, Michael Gordon, Arnold Zable and David Manne are among the contributors to the 20 chapters. Yearning to Breathe Free is a passionate but informed work that is multi-faceted, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful. All royalties for this book go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

"Few issues have captured media headlines over the past two decades like Islam and Muslims, and much of what the Australian public knows about Islam and its followers is gleaned from the mass media. Islam and the Australian News Media tackles head-on the Australian news media's treatment of Islam and Muslims. This incisive collection brings together the research and insights of academics, editors and journalists on the representation of Islam and its impact on social relations, the newsworthiness of Muslim issues and the complexities of covering Islam. Importantly, Islam and the Australian News Media also explores how Muslim communities in Australia are responding to their image in the Australian news media. This book is a must-read for all those interested in the relationship between media and society."--Publisher description.

This book focuses on the resistance practices digitally enacted by a group of refugees in the context of the Australian detention policy. Drawing on critical-, multimodal- and ethnographic-discursive analytical research, the author brings to the fore the digitally mediated lived experiences of detained refugees as articulated from Australia-run offshore and onshore detention facilities. The book unveils how refugees’ self-representation and counter-discursive practices on social media aim to dismantle the dehumanizing, exclusionary, and obliterating anti-refugee rhetoric that pervades political and media landscapes in contemporary Australia. It will be of interest to academics and students in fields including Digital Migration Studies, Refugee Studies, Digital Media Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies, including Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, and Discourse Ethnography.

Combining theoretical and practical information, this book presents a holistic overview of refugee settlement in Australia. It focuses on numerous critical aspects of refugee settlement which play a vital role in refugee integration into Australia. Starting with an overview of immigration history in Australia, the book then places an emphasis on 21st-century settlement of refugees. The chapters explore a gamut of topics including how culture is transmitted in refugee families, how media portrays refugees, and how to work with refugee communities in various contexts, without focusing on one specific refugee cohort/country group. This interdisciplinary angle is presented via the inclusion of voices from interviews with key refugee settlement providers, educators, former refugees, researchers, and second-generation youth from refugee backgrounds. It covers current Australia political debate and politicisation of refugees, digital technologies, the role of language in enabling successful settlement, education trajectories, social cohesion, the fractured diasporic family, and the impact of media coverage, which underpin the settlement of refugees in Australia. This is an ideal resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of refugee settlement in the disciplines of communication, media, politics and international relations, social work, education, and demographic studies, as well as government entities, policy makers, service providers, and NGOs looking to gain an understanding of the factors impacting refugee settlement in Australia.

Media Framing of the Muslim World examines and explains how news about Islam and the Muslim world is produced and consumed, and how it impacts on relations between Islam and the West. The authors cover key issues in this relationship including the reporting on war and conflict, terrorism, asylum seekers and the Arab Spring.

This book analyses social work through the concept of 'xenoracism' to challenge the outdated concepts of racism that still pervade social work. It illustrates how, through their discursive practices, social workers are able to counteract the dominant anti asylum seeking discourses.

Refuge beyond Reach shows how rich democracies deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Media pundits, politicians, and the public are often skeptical or ambivalent about granting asylum. They fear that asylum-seekers will impose economic and cultural costs and pose security threats to nationals. Consequently, governments of rich, democratic countries attempt to limit who can approach their borders, which often leads to refugees breaking immigration laws. In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods--first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis--that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of "remote control." While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, Fitzgerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone. Refuge beyond Reach addresses one of the world's most pressing challenges--how to manage flows of refugees and other types of migrants--and helps to identify the conditions under which individuals can access the protection of their universal rights.

This engaging and timely volume contributes new knowledge to the rapidly emerging field of globalisation and social work. The volume brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship from countries such as Australia, Finland, Japan, South Africa, the Philippines and Sweden. It proposes ‘glocalisation’ as a useful concept for re-framing conditions, methodologies and practices for social work in a world perspective. Part I of the volume, 'The Glocalisation of Social Issues', deals with major environmental, social and cultural issues – migration and human rights, environmental problems and gendered violence. Part II, 'Methodological Re-Shaping and Spatial Transgression in Glocalised Social Work', develops an epistemology of situated knowledge and methodologies inspired by art, creative writing and cultural geography, focusing on physical, material and emotional spatial dimensions of relevance to social work. Part III, 'Responses from Social Work as a Glocalised Profession', examines how social work has responded to specific social problems, crises and vulnerabilities in a glocalised world.

Investigates how binary oppositions are constructed discursively and how they are used in news reports in the British press.