My FWO Post-doc project focusses on how grammatical morphology carries ideology in state-induced return discourse related to migration. This research is carried in French, Dutch, Spanish and English.

My main interest for my PhD (FRESH-FNRS) was the analysis of the evolution of meaning of the terms referring to people on the move. The words defining people’s migration (refugee, migrant, immigrant, asylum-seeker, illegal, displaced person, etc.) are not terms fixed in time, but they evolve according to events, contributing to constructing both the public issue and the image of the social actors involved. These representations may be observed in social discourses regarding the so-called “refugee crisis” and past events. The aim of this research is to understand, through a lexical discourse analysis, the evolution of the meanings of the terms mentioned above and the way they are used in Belgian national media in French and Dutch.

Valériane Mistiaen holds a PhD in Information and Communication (FRESH-FNRS; ULB-Université libre de Bruxelles) and in Communication and Media Studies (VUB). Her PhD research combines Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics to study how denominations used to name people on the move in Belgian French- and Dutch-language media build the public issue of migration differently in both linguistic communities of Belgium. Her current research focusses on how grammatical morphology carries ideology in state-induced return discourse related to migration. This research is carried in French, Dutch, Spanish and English.

She was also a researcher involved in the IM2MEDIATE project (funded by Belspo) studying the representation of migrants in Belgian and Swedish media. She is a member of the Centre for the study of Democracy, Signification and Resistance (DESIRE – VUB), the ECHO Media, Culture and Politics (VUB), the research centre in Migrations, Asylum & Multiculturality (MAM – ULB) and the Centre for Research in Information and Communication Sciences (ReSIC – ULB).