The strangers that live among us

This thesis aims to investigate how local newspapers in Sweden frame newsstories involving asylumseekers and how the asylseekers in those stories are constructed from a postcolonial theoryperspective. Furthermore this thesis aims to analys and show the connection between the written word in the articles and a larger, social dimension where ideologies compete for cultural hegemony. To match the aims of this thesis we used a critical discourse analysis, more specificly one influenced by van Dijks socio-cognitive CDA and applied it to five articles from three different newspapers.Our analysis showed that the articles constructed the asylumseekers as Others, and created a dinstinct line between the asylumseekers and the other participants in the texts. This line, based on a constructed community including the article, the reader and some of the participants but excluding the asylumseekers, got significant meaning in the articles when the asylumseekers got identified as a homogenic social group. A perspecive coming from the constructed community and not from themselfes and therefor denying the asylsumseekers their right to define themselves