The online discursive construction of migrant otherness in times of crises: The case of Kuwait

During a crisis, such as the global rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, changing news narratives and anxiety-inducing news alerts trigger concerns of unpredictable and possibly detrimental disruption to society, least of which are intergroup relations. Drawing on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) and deviating from the plethora of studies on institutional discourse, this study explores the discursive construction of migrants in user generated comments on popular Arabic Kuwaiti Instagram news outlets during the COVID-19 crisis. The data exhibited common anti-migrant exclusionary discourses utilising scapegoating strategies, themes of migrant burden and threat, as well as a recurring sympathetic stance towards the migrant victim Other/Self. Socio-cultural regional and religious contextual peculiarities added nuanced manifestations of these exclusionary discourses leaning on contextually tailored exclusionary migrant referential strategies, and mirroring ingroup/outgroup representations of a superior Self, while favour-casting the Other. Findings also illuminated the top-down/bottom-up discursive interplay of meaning making on digital platforms, reasserting the significance of analysing the discursive digital context, that is, digital affordances, surrounding the data examined.