V imenu javnega zdravja: razumevanje medijskih predstav marginaliziranih romskih karanten med pandemijo COVID-19 na Slovaškem

This thesis explores the framing of the Roma minority in media discourse during the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia, seeking to reveal what role the media played in the securitization of the minority and in the subsequent legitimation of the racialized quarantine measures taken by the Slovak authorities. Building on the framework of biopolitics as proposed by Foucault, the paper first examines the socioeconomic position of the Roma minority in the country, which had made the group an exemplary scapegoat in the context of a global health crisis. Guided by Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis, the thesis then analyses a corpus of 153 articles on the Roma minority selected from four Slovak daily newspapers with the largest readership. The findings suggest that the media largely legitimated the securitization of the Roma people through the employment of various othering, stigmatizing and dehumanizing strategies which contributed to the framing of the Roma as the dangerous biopolitical Other. By the same logic, the racialized lockdown measures imposed on the Roma communities were normalized as a necessary measure for the sake of public health, and the impacts they had on the persons affected by them were rarely presented as the breaking news that such severe violations of human rights in an EU country in the 21st century might be expected to be.