Keynote speakers > Argiris Archakis's conference

Conference title: "Racist discourses of discrimination and assimilation in a Greek antiracist corpus"

Racist views against refugees and migrants coming in Europe are not only disseminated via hate speech, which overtly demonizes the newly arrived ‘foreigners’, but also via antiracist discourse, which, albeit designed to fight racism, ends up reproducing inequalities. This ambiguity is captured in the concept of liquid racism, a ‘new’ and ambivalent form of racism, which may be difficult to trace and/or may yield multiple interpretations (Weaver 2016).

Ιn order to explore how racist views infiltrate public Greek antiracist discourse, we have compiled an antiracist corpus. The aim of our presentation is to show how this corpus was created and to explore how racist views infiltrate antiracist discourse. Specifically, we collected 830 texts (approximately 500,000 words) concerning migrant/refugee issues and published online in 2015-2020. Τhe data comes from three major sources of the Greek public/digital sphere: i) organizations which promote migrant/refugee issues, ii) news media, and iii) political discourse.

Drawing on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1994) and adopting a critical perspective, in the antiracist corpus we detected two main discourses connected to liquid racism: discrimination and assimilation. In the first case, antiracist texts seem to establish clearcut differences between ingroup and outgroup identities. In the case of assimilation, antiracist texts seem to promote migrants’ adoption of the Greek dominant norms and practices as a prerequisite for their integration. Hence, their linguocultural identities are devalued.

The quantitative analysis of the data under scrutiny reveals that the most frequent subcategories of racist expressions involve the passive Other, the distant Other,and (weak and/or strong) assimilation,while the subcategory of the Other as problem is less common, since antiracist texts are not normally expected to explicitly promote migrants’ denigration. We conclude by pointing out that most texts in the antiracist corpus seem to constitute instances of liquid racism, as they promote the image of the weak and distant migrant, acceptable only on the condition of their alignment with majority values and decisions.

About Αrgiris Archakis

Αrgiris Archakis is Professor of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics in the Department of Philology at the University of Patras in Greece, where he has been teaching since 1997. He has carried out research and published extensively on the analysis of various genres, such as migrant students’ essays, youth conversational narratives, parliamentary discourse and media discourse. His publications include articles in (among others) Ethnic and racial Studies, Pragmatics, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, Journal of Pragmatics, Narrative Inquiry, Discourse and Society, etc. He is co-author with V. Tsakona of the book The Narrative Construction of Identities in Critical Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor with V. Tsakona of the volume Exploring the Ambivalence of Liquid Racism: In between antiracist and racist discourse (J. Benjamins, 2024). He is the coordinator of the research project TRACE: “Tracing Racism to Anti-Racist Discourse: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (TRACE/HFRI-FM17-42, HFRI 2019-2022).  

Personal web-page: https://philology.upatras.gr/teachers/archakis-argiris/