Racist rhetoric, recycled: What does the treatment of refugees tell us about contemporary politics of ‘othering’?

Our paper focuses upon the rhetoric of ‘othering’ used by the media, in conjunction with the political, cultural and economic landscape (The Sun and The Daily Mirror between April to May 2015, September 2015 and April to May 2016). We place that rhetoric in juxtaposition with examples of British colonial/imperial rhetoric concerning the ‘other’ applied in the past. For example, accounts of cross-cultural encounters articulated via the politically
approved ‘master narrative’ of British history, Marshall’s (1905) Our Island Story (republished in 2005). Our interpretations of ‘othering’ as racist rhetoric, recycled from the past and used in the present by the media arrives through the findings of our recently completed research where the theory of ‘othering’ was applied to examine and to analyse past and present White-British assumptions of ethnic and cultural groups that are different to their own. In this paper, we bring attention to the impact of media influences through the rhetoric of ‘othering’ on KS2 trainee-teachers’ historical thinking ethnic and cultural groups that are different to their own.