Emotions in the deliberative process of sensitive issues: a study on deliberation about migratory conflicts in Portugal

Abstract

In the trajectory of studies in media and deliberation, the media are responsible for providing information that contributes to well-founded arguments and justifications among subjects. The breaking of the idea of rationality, from authors who take into account emotions and discursive strategies of emotional bias such as personal stories, rhetoric, humor, activism in the sphere, made necessary to consider new reflections on the relations between media and deliberation, that take into account the emotional issues in this process and the new arenas and possibilities arising from the digital universe and intensified during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand these relationships from a new perspective, we turn to studies in deliberation on related issues in deeply divided social contexts and to studies that link online deliberation and media. Our hypothesis is that the media content found on issues related to contexts has the potential to generate emotions that facilitate mutual respect, reciprocity and the responsibilities necessary to resolve conflicts. We propose an empirical study to understand the media's potential for the deliberative process on relevant issues and to find out if they are able to contribute to raising the level of deliberation, in addition to investigating how remote arenas of deliberation interfere in the dynamics of these environments. As an empirical scenario, we opted for the context of Portuguese-speaking immigration in Portugal, where, recently, xenophobia and intolerance reached worrying levels. The first methodological axis consists of the selection and analysis of media content with an emotional appeal on Portuguese-speaking immigration in Portugal; the second is the creation of a Remote Focus Group between immigrants and people against immigration and the use of quantitative questionnaires to assess positions and opinions that contribute to the proposed analysis.