Narratives of European Integration

Seminar

Narratives of European Integration

January 19, 2023, 2:30 pm

Keynes Room, UC School of Economics

Presentation

Dissemination of the preliminary results of the Mediatized EU - Mediatized Discourses on Europeanization and Their Representations in Public Perceptions project, funded by the H2020 program of the European Commission, by Maria Raquel Freire.

Discussion: Carla Luís, João Rodrigues, Sílvia Ferreira and Vanda Amaro Dias (FEUC/CES)

The Mediatized EU - Mediatized Discourses on Europeanization and Their Representations in Public Perceptions project, funded by the H2020 program of the European Commission, aims to analyze how the media discourse is constructed in relation to the European project, and how this is perceived by the public, focusing on the elite triangle public-media-policy. The project analyzes the media representation of the European integration process in five main dimensions, namely the enlargements of the European Union (EU), the economic and financial crises, the refugee and migrant crisis, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. The way in which media representations shape the public and elites' perception of this process is also informed by interactions between the media, the political elite and the public, hence the triangulation that is at the heart of this analysis aimed at deconstructing dynamics of control, manipulation, replication , (in)dependence, among others. The project does content analysis and critical discourse analysis of current media discourses on these issues, interviews with political and media elites, and focus groups with relevant audiences.

The project involves seven partners, and the study will focus on the media study of each of these – Belgium, Spain, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland and Portugal, EU member states, and Georgia, which is part of the Eastern Partnership and signed an Association Agreement with the EU – providing a comparative analysis, and further developing recommendations. In the case of Portugal, which the team of researchers at CES leads (Maria Raquel Freire, Sofia José Santos, Moara Crivelente and Luíza Bezerra), we selected three newspapers and three news programs for analysis, in a time period contained between September 2021 and March 2022 At this event we will present the preliminary conclusions of the study that we are developing, as a starting point for a broader discussion of the research carried out in the context of the Line of Research Capitalism (semi)peripheral: Crises and alternatives, allowing the identification of points of convergence and different dialogues.