Abstract
The article examines media representations of Ukrainian women refugees in the Romanian public sphere, focusing on their discursive construction from the perspective of audience engagement. Relying on a theoretical framework centred on performative media discourse and the discursive construction of representations, the article explores a heterogeneous corpus comprised of televised news stories, broadcast at different times during the Russo-Ukrainian war. It identifies two modes of engagement, related to various coexisting ways of mediating a relationship of proximity-distance between us (the public) and them (the refugees). The study makes a contribution to (1) the analysis of the (dis)empowerment of women refugees in media discourse in correlation to different ways of exercising individual agency; (2) existing research on the media representation of social actors (and in particular of migrants/refugees) in connection to research on audience engagement through public discourse.