The article looks at the media representation of the diaspora in the context of the presidential elections in Romania, in 2014. In a voting situation, how are the discoursive construals of the diaspora reconfigured and how is the public problem of intra-EU migration redefined? Within the frame of a critical discourse analysis, the study examines the media representation of the diaspora and of the public from the perspective of discursive strategies specific to identity construction in the contexts of action at a distance: distance-proximity strategies and, correspondingly, inclusion/exclusion strategies, as well as the configuration of particular forms of commitment. The corpus consists predominantly of political talk shows on two television channels specialized in news broadcasting and political commentary, but different in terms of practices of mediation of the political sphere. The study shows that certain representations of migrants, which have been naturalized over the years, continue to be reproduced in the political and media sphere, but, in an electoral context, they are differently constituted, especially as regards the migrants’ agency.

Keywords: migration, diaspora, public space, discourse, media representation, active public.

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