Caring for others who look just like us
The representation of Ukrainian refugees on Dutch television
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6442016 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrea Meuzelaar (0009-0004-9633-5127, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1093-1110 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-25 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Media Culture & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-4437 • E-ISSN: 1460-3675 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/01634437251328201 |
| OpenAlex | W4408817173 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 25 |
This article presents an analysis of Dutch television coverage of Ukrainian refugees, and shows how television has crafted affects of care and solidarity through a politics of representation that celebrated proximity and sameness of “us” and “them.” The research is based on an analysis of Dutch news, talk-shows and current affairs programs over the time-span of 1 year, collected from the archive of Sound and Vision. The article shows how television has produced and circulated affects of care and solidarity for Ukrainian refugees, and has contributed to the affective economy of migration that makes possible and capitalizes upon the distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants. Through its imaginations of Ukrainian refugees as white, family-oriented, caring, economically beneficial, and morally legitimate, television has transformed Ukrainian refugees into objects of collective care and solidarity. However, the article argues, this care and solidarity has proven to be both narcissist and self-centered, and conditional and discriminatory. Television has rendered the Dutch nation as caring, hospitable, and morally untainted, but has simultaneously reproduced racial hierarchies and perpetuated the myth of a white Europe and the neoliberal discourse of deservingness
Advertising · Business · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Representation (politics · Sociology · Ukrainian · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration
Casualties of Care
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
“It Could Have Been Us”
Ukrainian refugees in Polish press
The Origins of White Care
Radical Care
Once a refugee
The evolving (re)categorisations of refugees throughout the “refugee/migrant crisis”
The Sociological and Geographical Imaginations
The deserving and the undeserving? Refugees, asylum seekers and welfare in Britain
Hierarchies of deservingness and the limits of hospitality in the ‘refugee crisis’
Refugees versus ‘refugees’
Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’
Shifting the refugee narrative? An automated frame analysis of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis
Media templates
Media Solidarities
From the human to the planetary
Purity and Exile
Figures of Crisis
Representing the "European refugee crisis" in Germany and beyond
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |