This bachelor thesis aims to conduct a textual and visual discourse analysis on British newspapers The Sun and The Daily Express negative portrayal of Syrian refugees during the 2015 refugee crisis. The aim of the thesis is to explore whether these negative depictions constitute dehumanization in accordance with Haslam’s dual model of dehumanization, who describes dehumanization as denying an individual or a group their ‘humanness.’ Haslam proposes two forms of dehumanization that involve denying others of 2 distinct senses of humanness: characteristics that are uniquely human by representing them as animal-like and characteristics that constitute human nature by representing others as inanimate objects. The aim of this thesis is to review the articles and images published in mentioned newspapers between the periods July 2015 to May 2016 and analyze how the two newspapers dehumanize refugees. The purpose of this thesis is to gain better understanding of inner workings of media’s representational practices and how they work to facilitate the exclusion of out-groups such as refugees and may potentially promote negative attitudes, ill-treatment, discrimination, and intolerance of marginal groups in society.  

The analysis and results showed that both the negative depictions of Syrian refugees in The Sun and The Daily Expressconstitute dehumanization through their use of a set of linguistic tools such as metaphors to liken refugees to natural disasters. But also, results show that carefully thought of wordings in headlines and articles were used to depict refugees as immoral and security threatening. The visual depictions of Syrian refugees also constituted dehumanization in accordance with Haslam’s module as visually, refugees are usually depicted as a larger group of faceless mass that “invades.” Results also show that common narratives in British media of refugees also include depictions of them behind fences or during conflict or portray the illegality of their arrival.