This week I embarked on my Laidlaw research project journey. The purpose of this first week was more about opening questions rather than answering them. With this as my goal, I can consider this week’s work a success.
I began by grounding myself in research that already exists. As I learned from Andrew Singleton, our Laidlaw administrator, throughout our leadership intensive, it is so important to recognize and utilize all of our resources. Independent research is never truly independent. I used JumboSearch, Tufts’ library catalog, to find popular scholarly work on the interplay of migration and media. I read various chapters and case studies from Lorella Viola’s and Andreas Musolff’s, Migration and Media, gaining some perspective on areas for future research and learning the popular vocabulary in the subject. Most valuably, I learned about a plethora of research methodologies, from argumentation and metaphor analysis, to gendered language studies and corpus-assisted semantics and pragmatics. Moreover, I got to see these methodologies in practice in various case studies presented by the authors.
My resources and network were not limited to the library catalog. Again, as I learned in the leadership intensive, I reached out to people who might be able to help. When I was stumped as to how I could access deep archives of popular media sites, getting behind pay walls and in one case, where federal funding cuts had halted management of a US citizenship and immigration services website, retrieve unavailable information, I asked a Tufts Librarian for help. Thank you, Ms. Brownlie, for all your help.
Another resource that helped me this week was my friend, Lionel. As I am confident Andrew would appreciate, I was hanging out with friends when the topic of migration came up. So, I advertised myself a little, and spoke about the research I was doing on how media framing might affect migration policy. Lionel perked up – he had taken a class at Middlebury College last semester about something similar. He sent me his professor’s work, I read it, and I reached out to the professor. By being comfortable speaking up about the work I am doing, I quickly found connections that I am sure will help me throughout my research journey and beyond.
After gaining some perspective into the study of media and migration, I wrote down my own research methodology. Although it is subject to change, as it already has, and likely will continue to, I wrote it down as a working framework for my studies. First, I will look at all developments in U.S. migration policy since Trump entered office in January of 2017 until present day. Then, I will select a variety of policy cases, diverse in their policymakers and in those they effect, to create a timeline of their development across political environments and presidencies. Second, I will look at how a selection of popular media outlets covered these policies, leading up to their proposal and in the aftermath of their implementation. After coding how these media outlets frame the policies and migration environments, primarily utilizing Ruth Wodaks’s discourse-historical approach, I will analyze how, and whether, different framings correspond to different policy outcomes.
With these resources, and this methodology, I went through all 1,723 policy actions, including legislation, program termination, presidential proclamations, executive orders, and more from the last decade, and created a timeline of these policy actions. I grouped policy developments into 14 sections: Travel Bans & Entry Restrictions, DACA, Refugee Admissions & Resettlement, Southern Border Enforcement, MPP, and the Wall, Asylum Policy, Family Separation & Child Detention, ICE Interior Enforcement, Sanctuary Jurisdictions & Funding Threats, Visa Policy & Social Media Screening, Criminal Enforcement & Death Penalty, International Agreements, Title 42 & Covid-19 Related policy, Unaccompanied Children, Flores Agreement, & ORR, National Emergency Declarations & Emergency Deployment. As I gather media surrounding these policy actions, I will continue to narrow down this list so as to make a comprehensive but palatable research paper by the end of the summer.
I have also selected a set of media outlets to analyze. In order to maintain a consistent analysis, I want to rely heavily on the same selection of outlets across different policy actions. Tentatively, I have selected two left leaning outlets – CNN and The Washington Post – two primary news wire services – The Associated Press and Reuters – and two right leaning outlets – Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. However, given a lot of the migration policy pertains to the Southern border and Spanish-speaking migrants, I think it would be valuable to include local news (Texas Tribune etc.) and Spanish-speaking outlets (Telemundo, Univision, etc.) where applicable.
In just one week, I feel like I have learned more about migration than I have learned in the other 19 odd years of my life. With every extra article I read, I find out how much deeper the rabbit hole goes and how many other rabbit holes there are to dive down. The more I learn the further away I feel from being an expert. However, I will continue, steadfast for the rest of my research, reassured that nobody begins as an expert. Moreover, I will remain confident that no one becomes an expert except by daring to engage with these rabbit holes and not being deterred or defeated by their depth.