Migration Discourses in Times of Crisis

As a wide-reaching and shared experience, a crisis may have different shapes and affect different aspects and members of society. During a crisis, norms are suspended, and the current system of rules is modified such in a way that normality is not anymore normal: everything is open to reconsideration under a new, different light. However, what constitutes a crisis, what is addressed as a crisis, is not an ideologically neutral question. Crises are both directly experienced and discursively constructed phenomena. The papers in this special issue came out of the Approaches to Migration, Language and Identity conference hosted at the University of Sussex, UK, in 2021. As the conference took place online under the restrictions of Covid-19, crisis was foregrounded throughout. Over the past twenty years, even from a limited European perspective, we have experienced several major political, economic and environmental crises. Starting with the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent European debt crisis; the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, which played a major role in the political upheaval of Brexit in the UK and in the resurgence of populist parties across Europe; the Covid-19 pandemic crisis; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; in addition to a greater focus on the climate crisis (to which the awareness campaigns of movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Friday for Futures have given great resonance), it has become commonplace to say that we are going through an acute period of crisis. Some of these events were shared across the globe while other events which have shaken some countries and even continents have barely registered outside those confines. (Indeed, in a very small-scale sign of this, two of the papers submitted for this special issue, documenting crisis responses outside the European sphere, could not be concluded). Within this context, this special issue emerges from the urgency of reflecting on the impact of different kinds of crisis on migration discourses. The main objective is to contextualize the study of migration discourses within the general crisis discourse framework. Particularly, the focus is to study the language used in crisis and highlight the ways in which specific groups of people or social classes become instrumentalized in crisis discourse to fulfil political or other strategic aims.