Talk Radio and the Mediation of Xenophobic Violence in South Africa

This study seeks to provide insight into the ways audiences of Radio 702, an urban commercial South African radio station, talk about and engage with issues of xenophobia and immigrants, with a particular focus on how the host of the show navigates the debates. This study contributes to the existing body of research on mediated forms of xenophobia. Theoretically, the notions of the public sphere and the imagined community inform the chapter. Of interest is how the callers and the host, by using the deixis of ‘we/us/our’ or ‘them/they/their’, construct multiple imagined communities and narratives of exclusion or inclusion. Methodologically, a combination of thematic and discourse analysis is employed to analyse selected experts from the talk show data sets.