Media Analysis of News Coverage on Refugees in Indonesia

Studies on texts and images used in news coverage on refugees and asylum seekers, mostly situated in the Global North, often point to the reproduction of binary frames alternating between refugees as victims and refugees as intruders.

Using a narrative analysis, this seminar will illustrate how news coverage on refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia do not only place them within these common frames, but also speak to the positioning of Indonesia and Indonesians within narrations of refugee reception.

Based on a narrative analysis of 228 articles from one national and two local newspapers, Mahardhika Sjamsoeoed Sadjad will show how these narratives of the ‘Indonesian self’ and the ‘refugee other’ are mostly constructed through the representation of multiple spaces occupied by refugees and asylum seekers within the news; from local stories covering encounters between refugees and host community members, national news covering government responses towards their presence, and international news covering trends and changes in the global refugee regime.

She will argue that news coverage on refugees also plays a role in framing Indonesia and Indonesian communities as benevolent saviors and hospitable hosts to refugees.

These depictions are often gendered, influenced by preconceived ideas of race and religion, and can be in tension with the State’s insistence to maintain Indonesia’s position as only a ‘transit state’ despite declining resettlement opportunities for refugees.

About the speaker

Mahardhika Sjamsoeoed Sadjad is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Sheis currently at the final year of my PhD programme, through which she combines media and policy analysis with ethnographic research methods responses and reactions to the presence of refugees from abroad in the sub-districts of Cisarua and Kalideres. Her research illustrates how the discourse of refugee reception in Indonesia must be situated in broader discourses of the state, the citizens, and the constructed boundaries and connections between the citizen and the refugee 'other'. Her research interests include young people, identity discourses, movement, mobility and immobility.