Collective and Personal Representations of the Crimean Tatars in the Ukrainian Media Discourse: Ideological Implications and Power Relations

This study analyzes the Ukrainian national and Crimean media’s collective and individual representations of the Crimean Tatar people during 2010–2012. It demonstrates that this media’s discourse was a sensitive milieu that reflected the unequal power relations between Crimea’s ethnic groups — the Crimean Tatar minority and the Slavic majority — and informed the way individuals constructed their identities and social roles within Crimean society. The discursive mechanisms of the media’s representations of the Crimean Tatars often included indirect and subtle forms of social exclusion. They also used references to common sense and ethnic markers to juxtapose the positive “Self”-image and the negative image of the “Other.” To portray the Crimean Tatars as a group that potentially threatens the social order, the media built a discourse of “the unsatisfied” around the group and its individual representatives