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Safe Waters: Non-Orientalist Watery Representations of Russo-Ukrainian War's Refugees by Spanish News Outlets
Thu, September 4, 9:30 to 10:45am, Communications Building (CN), CN 2102Abstract
On February 24, 2022, Russia scaled up its aggression against Ukraine. In addition to a staggering death toll, the Russo-Ukrainian War has made about 6,906,500 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as of January 16, 2025. In the early days, U.K. ITV News’s Lucy Watson declared: “Now, the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing third world nation, this is Europe!” Since February 24, 2022, research on how the media has been portraying Russo-Ukrainian War’s refuges progressed towards their three biggest destinations (i.e., the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland) Further away, however, Spain appears as the next biggest destination for Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees across the EU (UNHCR 2025). Like any other coloniser, Spain has unparalleled experience with othering and dehumanising the “Other”. Its news media demonstrably did the same with the Syrian Civil War’s refugees (Alcaraz-Mármol and Soto-Almela 2019; 2020; Porto 2020). Conceptually, this paper draws on the lenses of Water Metaphors (Porto 20220) and Orientalism (Said 1978) to analyze how the Spanish news media has been portraying Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees. In LexisNexis, we collected 216 texts that were by published by the two leading Spanish newspapers – El Mundo (n= 97 Texts) and El País (n= 119 Texts) – between February 24, 2022, and March 15, 2022. We demonstrate that even though El Mundo and El País textually used Water Metaphors that tend to mean dangerousness (e.g., "Avalanche" or “Deluge") when permeated by Orientalism as these were to describe racialized Syrian Civil War’s refugees, the photographs they used constructed non-racialized Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees as waters that should be welcome.