Oscillando tra sinofobia e sinofilia: un’analisi del discorso mediatico sui cinesi in Italia ai tempi del Covid

This article introduces a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 48 articles, gathered from Italian newspapers (n = 24) and newspapers and/or web portals addressed to Chinese expatriates residing in Italy (n = 24). The main topic of the analysis concerns the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of Chinese expatriates and people of Chinese descent in Italy. The methodological framework brings together Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006) and Qualitative Content Analysis (Ji & Eun, 2014), using the multidimensional software Nvivo 11, a methodological instrument which has so far been mainly applied in sociology, psychology, and ethnography (Pacifico & Coppola, 2010). Additionally, a further methodological perspective, Chinese Discourse Studies (Shi-xu, 2014), has been taken into consideration in the labeling of conceptual nodes coded through Nvivo. The results contribute to a deeper understanding, from multiple perspectives, of how Covid-19 impacted on the lives of Chinese people and people of Chinese descent in Italy.