Moving across borders: the social representations of the “Vegetative State” in British, Indian and Italian news.

The vegetative state is a clinical condition in which a patient is wakeful without being aware (RCP, 2013). By creating a liminal state between life and death (Kaufman & Morgan 2005), this condition brings about ontological, medical and ethical dilemmas, such as the understanding of an ambiguous reality by both experts and lay-people (Nettleton, Kitzinger, & Kitzinger, 2014), the formulation of a clear diagnosis (Schnakers et al., 2009) and the end-of-life decision-making (Giacino et al., 2002). To address such dilemmas, it is crucial to investigate the different socio-cultural milieus in which representations of boundaries between life/death or health/illness are constructed, maintained and challenged through communication processes (Bauer & Gaskell, 1999; Jovchelovitch & Gervais, 1999). The research aims to explore the social representations of the vegetative state in the news across different cultural (India, Italy and the UK) and social milieus (left-leaning, right-leaning and religious/tabloid newspapers). Both qualitative and quantitative content analyses were conducted on articles’ headlines and texts taken from Indian (n=300), Italian (n=300) and British (n=300) newspapers published between January 1990 and June 2019. Our results show that the vegetative state is represented through eight frames that vary across both cultural contexts and social milieus. This analysis identifies the political and religious discursive resources used to deconstruct and reconstruct the borders between life and death.