The Visibility of Ukrainian Women Refugees in the Romanian Public Sphere. Representations and Modes of Engagement

Abstract The article examines media representations of Ukrainian women refugees in the Romanian public sphere, focusing on their discursive construction from the perspective of audience engagement. Relying on a theoretical framework centred on performative media discourse and the discursive construction of representations, the article explores a heterogeneous corpus comprised of televised news stories, broadcast at different times during the Russo-Ukrainian war. It identifies two modes of engagement, related to various coexisting ways of mediating a relationship of proximity-distance between us (the public) and them (the refugees). The study makes a contribution to (1) the analysis of the (dis)empowerment of women refugees in media discourse in correlation to different ways of exercising individual agency; (2) existing research on the media representation of social actors (and in particular of migrants/refugees) in connection to research on audience engagement through public discourse.