Constructing the Heimat: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Disability and Forced Displacement in the German Press (1990-2015).

This thesis examines representations of disabled and forcibly displaced people in the German press between 1990 and 2015 from a social constructionist perspective. It analyses the discourse surrounding these two groups, often portrayed as either included or excluded, vulnerable or threatening, and investigates how these dichotomies shape the German concept of national belonging via the historically and socially significant idea of Heimat.Rather than a comparative study, the research analyses the portrayal of these two groups according to a specific German notion of belonging to understand how discourses of vulnerability and threat contribute to the nation-building function of this concept.The analysis reveals how Heimat functions as a means of limiting agency and self-determination for both groups, constructing them, sometimes interchangeably, as either one discourse or the other.Grounded in corpus-assisted (critical) discourse studies (CADS), and complemented by the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the thesis employs corpus linguistic tools and van Leeuwen's sociosemantic inventory of social actors (2008). Accordingly, it interrogates news articles that appeared in three ideologically divergent newspapers (Bild, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung) between 1990 and 2015. This methodology enables a critical investigation of the ideological function of language, revealing hidden structures via the interrogation of discursive strategies like presuppositions, metaphors, topoi, and collocations deployed in the German press.Approached from a Foucauldian perspective, this thesis, therefore, contributes to literature that conceives of Heimat as a discourse, that is, an ideological mechanism of control in the service of a distinctly German form of belonging. As a hegemonic discourse, the notion of Heimat constructs polarised oppositions such as threatening/vulnerable, which reveals the lens through which power operates in the German press. The research concludes that potent identity and nation-building infrastructure deploys at times seemingly-conflicting categories that ultimately serve the singular purpose of reinforcing the dominance of Heimat.