OPPORTUNITIES: the first year
OPPORTUNITIES didn't miss its start. In the first year three concrete products were delivered, the glossary, the handbook and a first report. These can be found on the website.
A glossary
Successful collaboration begins with a shared language, hence the need for a glossary. Therefore, Team Pink led by Wuppertal University produced this first product: https://www.opportunitiesproject.eu/resources/glossary
This joint effort of contributors from several teams ensures, on the one hand, terminological and conceptual coherence across our theoretical approaches as well as the qualitative case studies and quantitative research conducted in OPPORTUNITIES. On the other hand, our glossary facilitates communication between the academic side of the project and the fieldwork conducted by NGOs, uniting our teams working from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, and Senegal.
While the terms and definitions provided here establish common ground across disciplines, the cross-references create a conceptual geometry which challenges traditional boundaries between theory and practice, the social sciences and the humanities, research and field work. In doing so, it launches the fruitful dialogue we seek to initiate on local, national, and transnational levels.
The glossary includes key terms from discourses on migration, integration, narrative, and media representation that will be used frequently in OPPORTUNITIES. In addition to these thematic areas, it provides relevant terminology from corpus linguistics, quantitative media studies, and narrative theory. This wide semantic field gives shape to our two core concepts, the Cross Talks and the Level Telling Field. The glossary not only provides definitions of these terms, but also discusses their origins and briefly sketches their historical development, citing the relevant literature and sources. It thus also functions as a cross-disciplinary literature survey, making scientific and scholarly knowledge available in an easily accessible format. A complete list of references to narrative theory, cultural studies, migration and mobility studies, quantitative media studies and corpus linguistics can be found in the select bibliography, which is a foundation for our work in OPPORTUNITIES.
A manual
Successful participatory action field work starts with a manual. In preparation for our Cross Talks that will start in Spring 2022 in nine countries, Beweging vzw, as coordinator, produced an online manual: https://www.opportunitiesproject.eu/resources/manual.
The Cross Talks are an innovative methodology that provides the framework for public cross-cultural encounters between migrants, citizens, and stakeholders. It introduces a set of rules and procedures that seeks to ensure a fair dialogue between all conversation partners, thus establishing a level telling field on a local level. A level telling field is the basis for a fair dialogue, a fair conversation about building a community together. It guarantees that everyone is heard, that everyone can speak. It is based on principles such as multi-perspectivity, polyphony, perspective taking, and an ethics of listening. The Cross-Talks methodology is built on principles of mutual understanding: it requires the willingness to listen to each other, to take the perspective of others, and to change. online manual helps you to understand the Cross-Talks methodology and how to implement this methodology.
A first report: Cross-country comparison of media selection and attitudes towards narratives on migration
One of OPPORTUNTIES first products is across-country comparison of news media consumption patterns and anti-immigrant, refugee, and Muslim sentiments in four European countries: Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy: “Which kind of media do people read in the four countries and what can we say about media consumptions and people’ attitudes towards migrants ?”
KULeuven collected data among adults aged 25 to 65 through an online survey fielded during three weeks in May and June 2021. The findings show that there are notable differences, but also various similarities, in news media consumption patterns: newspaper and digital news consumption is clearly lower than television or radio consumption, in all countries. German, Austrian, and Italian respondents hold relatively similar television and radio news consumption patterns (high public service media exposure, lower commercial), but this is quite different among Hungarians. They consume more news on commercial outlets. As for newspaper and digital news, Germans and Italians mostly consume quality (or broadsheet) newspapers or digital news, while Austrians and Hungarians report higher consumption of popular (or tabloid) newspapers or digital news. Linking the effects of this media consumption to attitudes, results show that exposure to news on public service networks, local television networks, quality newspapers, and quality digital news outlets is linked to positive attitudes towards outgroups. Based on earlier findings regarding the rather neutral narratives on migration on several of these media outlets, this was in line with the study expectations. However, exposure to popular newspapers and digital news was also found to be related to more positive attitudes among German, Hungarian, and Italian respondents. Among Austrians, there is a clear difference in the relationship depending on the out-let: exposure to quality or (to a lesser extent) moderate outlets is related to positive attitudes, while exposure to popular outlets is associated with negative sentiments. These findings provide new insights into the complicated association between news media consumption (and their respective narratives on migration) and attitudes in the four countries under study. This signals the need for a continued fine-grained analysis of news media effects on outgroup attitudes.