CSD Seminar: Compassion or Threat? Media Narratives on Migration in Turkey

This study examines how Turkish media portray refugees, striking a balance between compassion and perceived threat. Refugees are often depicted as passive objects - either recipients of mercy or security risks - while their own voices remain largely unheard. The research highlights the role of digital media in both spreading hate speech and fostering counter-narratives, and examines how gender, class, and ethnicity intersect in these representations. The findings call for ethical journalism that amplifies the voices of refugees and encourages more nuanced, empathetic reporting.

Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu is professor of Communication and a member of the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen and of the American Biography Institute. Yasemin was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (1994) and at the Salzburg Seminar (2003), at New Delhi University Media Studies Center (2014), at EUI-European University Institute (2017) at Birkbeck, University of London (2020-2021) and London School of Economics, Media and Communication Department (2022-2025). She took place in many projects and has published several books: The Persuasion Process in Communications: With Some Examples of the Political Campaigns (1997); Media and Society, Women in the Media and Women Journalists (2002); International Media (2004); A Guide to Media and Children (2008); Text Analysis (2009); Women and their Body in the Spiral of Femininity, Sexuality and Violence (2010), Hate Speech and Hate Crimes (2012) Minorities, The Other and Media (2014), Internet and Street (2015) News Readings (2016), Journalism ‘a Peacekeeping Agent’ at the Time of Conflict (2018), LGBTI+ Individiuals and Media ( 2019 ) Covid Diaries ( 2021) Pandemics, Neoliberalism and Media (2021), Media, Populism and Hate Speech (Brill-2025). Her areas of studies are media criticism, hate speech. She conducts courses such as Alternative Media and Journalism Rights, Communication Ethics, Theories and Models of Communication and Media Criticisim.

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