Preferred refugees: Revisiting stereotypes of Muslim refugees and new depictions of Ukrainian displaced people from gender and racial perspectives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how Western global news agencies portray Syrian and Ukrainian refugees differently, focusing on how photographic attributes contribute to the construction of ‘the Others’ rooted in the enduring colonial logic of othering non-Western refugees. Drawing on postcolonial theory and intersectionality, this study uses visual framing and content analysis of 1,619 news photographs from Reuters and AFP to identify racialized and gendered biases in refugee representation. The results show that Syrian refugees are often depicted from a distance and confined to camp settings, reinforcing colonial stereotypes of victimhood or threat, while Ukrainian refugees are framed as culturally proximate individuals with agency through symbolic markers. These visual patterns reflect a reconfiguration of colonial othering dynamics, in which the ‘us/them’ binary is reproduced through the interplay of photographic representation and Western hegemonic discourse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it