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Since the onset of the Greek crisis, thousands of mainly young highly educated and skilled Greeks have chosen or/and have been forced to migrate in search of better career prospects and living standards. This neomigratory wave is broadly known with the neologism ‘brain drain’. The present study focuses on the ways in which selected Greek neomigrants present in their discourse their incentives to leave Greece as well as the ways in which they use social media projecting specific migrant identities (micro-level). It also examines the ways in which brain drain is discussed and constructed as discourse in infotainment media (macro-level). Drawing on insights from discourse-centred online ethnography, the Foucauldian perspective on discourse and Systemic Functional Linguistics, we present and discuss ethnographic data (interviews and social media posts) from selected Greek neomigrants settled in the UK and Germany, and media data from well-known infotainment websites. Our analysis demonstrates that the micro- and the macro-level are intertwined. Moreover, it indicates that the construction of brain drain amalgamates features of economic migration with features of lifestyle migration. In so doing, it sheds light on the broader socio-cultural and psychological impact of brain drain on neomigrants themselves and the Greek society.
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In-Text Citation: (Georgalou, Saltidou, & Griva, 2019)
To Cite this Article: Georgalou, M., Saltidou, T. P., & Griva, E. (2019). Young people in crisis: Constructions of Brain Drain in the discourse of Greek neomigrants and the Media. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 7(1), 77–96. (in Greek)
Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s)
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