The social representation of migrants during the Covid-19 pandemic. An Italian case study on hostile narratives and visual political communication

The present research investigates the social categorisation and construction of immigrants in Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic. For this purpose, hostile political narratives deployed on Twitter by three monitored Italian political forces (Matteo Salvini - La Lega party - Giorgia Meloni - Fratelli d’Italia - and the neofascist movement Casa Pound) and their visual representation of migration and migrants were analysed. Following a defined theoretical framework on the phenomena of othering, moral panic, processes of social exclusion and the role the “new” digital media play in such processes - especially in terms of negative and emotional political communication - the analysis deconstructs and identifies the founding elements of the political narratives on migrants, focusing on their visual component. The review of the sociological literature on the construction and representation of diversity and otherness introduces the empirical case study of the digital and visual communication monitoring performed from March 2020 to December 2021. Through the qualitative analysis of the visual content retrieved from the tweets collected, recurrent themes and communication strategies were investigated, determining the identification of four macro-categories upon which the construction and representation of immigrants and migration were carried out in the chosen context.