First reader’s comments
You have finished the course as you started it, with great aplomb and an excellent summative piece of work. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this dissertation. It is well presented, has clarity of structure and expression, the methodology is appropriate and one finds in this work all the bits one would expect to find in a dissertation.
What I particularly like about this work is how methodically it is structured. The introduction builds a picture step by step of the context, the need for the study and what to expect in the dissertation. The conversation about immigration in Switzerland is fascinating, and you rightly highlight how the statistics of foreigners in a country are, evidently, based on how a country defines who is a foreigner. I like how you logically set out the terms of engagement and explain how you narrowed what is a really broad field down to a manageable bite for the purposes of this study.
The one thing that was not entirely convincing was your explanation for the choice of press media, as opposed to other media. While you do say on page 5-6 that 92.4% of the respondents of one study mention that they read at least one newspaper a day more or less regularly, it would have helped to know also, for instance, what percentage said they watch TV daily, or listen to the radio daily. Only then can the choice of the press come out strongly, if you want to justify it on the grounds of its special place in Swiss life.
Your discussion of the theoretical framework is engaging. Social constructivism is not an easy framework to explain and work with but you manage it well. And your literature review is an eye-opener, I never knew there were so many studies of Swiss media! Your discussion of frames on page 15 was specially interesting.
I thought sometimes that the way you approached the literature review could have been more critical. As it stands, it is competently descriptive but does not move further than that. For instance, when summarizing the Gianni et al. study on page 15 you say that this study is about media discourse as a proxy for public discourse. While interesting conceptually, this begs the question whether it can really be such a proxy. The media can be said to speak from a very particular position and from a specific place in the power structures of a country. Which does not necessarily allow us to equate it with public discourse.
In your methodology section, while your discussion of content analysis and semiotics is good, I would have liked to see a broader opening section where you set these two methods into the frame of your dissertation. As it stands, they both exist in a sort of abstract state and therefore reading your discussion of them is not as productive as it should be. Your ‘research design’ section however is thorough and grounded.
There are lots of interesting data that emerge in the data analysis sections. A note on presentation — I think the graphs are great, but it would have been better to see them embedded in the discussion itself, so that the argument flowed with some visual help from the graphs. To segregate the discussion and the graphs does not work so well. Also, I am not sure it adds much value to have the graphs as well as the tables. They could easily have been merged and this would have been tidier.
Your reading of the images is good. I liked the reading of the picture on page 101, I found it nuanced and insightful.
I felt your conclusion captured all of the key highlights of the study. And your referencing and bibliography are up to their usual standards.
On the whole I would not hesitate to say that this is an excellent work for a MA dissertation. Well done. A very successful end to a good course on your part!
Second reader’s comments
This dissertation examines the representation of foreign communities in the Swiss media. The initial discussions do a good job of explaining why questions about the representations of minority communities are generally significant, but also of particular pertinence to the Swiss context. The initial sections also present relevant theoretical discussions about concepts of representation and their applicability to the questions of national identity and race.
The empirical component is based on a combination of content analysis and semiotic methods. The methodological section is well informed about the strengths and weaknesses of both methods, drawing impressively on the methodological literature.
The statistical results from the content analysis are thoroughly and clearly presented, and there is a cogent and clear discussion of the implications of these broad trends. However, more analytical commentary would have aided their interpretation. After a while one does start to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of graphs and tables.
The semiotic case studies are well chosen, and it was good to see the application of semiotic concepts in a clear and systematic way.
Overall, this is a most impressive dissertation. It is methodologically sophisticated and although the concluding comments could have been developed a bit more extensively, the study produces a nuanced and insightful analysis of the treatment of different ‘foreign’ communities in the Swiss press. A very creditable piece of work.
Grade awarded: 81% A
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