Discursive Configurations of Whiteness in Lithuanian Media: Peripheral Whiteness and the Reproduction of Global Racial Hierarchies

This paper investigates the discursive expressions of whiteness in media narratives about Lithuanian migrants. For nearly two decades, emigration has been a central concern in the public discourse, initially driven by fears of losing the ‘best and brightest’. Over time, media depictions have gradually acknowledged the diversity of migration trajectories, trends of return migration and increasing attractiveness of Lithuania as a country of immigration. Yet these depictions remain largely structured by class and gender hierarchies. The Covid-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions highlighted this further, with some returning Lithuanian nationals being portrayed as ‘vile migrants’ in the context of the pandemic.

Drawing on a postdoctoral research project funded by the Lithuanian Research Council (2021–2023), this paper analyses portrayals of various groups of Lithuanian migrants in leading internet news media between 2013 and 2022. It focuses on how both embodied and disembodied markers of whiteness are invoked in media narratives, particularly in the context of East-West European migration.

The findings reveal that Lithuanian migrants are represented as both beneficiaries of EU mobility and as subjects of marginalisation, often categorised as ‘not quite White’ in Western contexts. Although some individual migration stories resist stereotypical portrayals, they also occasionally engage in the racialization of other groups to assert Lithuanian migrants’ claims to hegemonic whiteness.

The paper argues that these shifting representations are shaped by intersecting markers of difference and complex geographies, histories, and socio-cultural contexts that reflect broader global racial dynamics. The media portrayals underscore Lithuania’s peripheral position within European hierarchies of difference, where certain groups are discursively excluded from dominant forms of whiteness. Simultaneously, Lithuanian media often reproduces these exclusionary dynamic rather than challenging them. By failing to question the (subtle) ways in which whiteness is discursively maintained, media discourse ultimately contributes to the reproduction of global racial hierarchies.