abstract: Dominant discourses of health and fitness perpetuate particular ideologies of what it means to be “healthy” and “fit,” often conflating the two terms through conceptualizing the appearance of physical fitness as health. The discourse of healthism, a concept rooted in the economic concept of neoliberalism, fosters health as an individual and moral imperative to perform responsible citizenship, making the appearance of the “fit” body a valued representation of both health and self-discipline. This perspective neglects the social determinants of health and ignores the natural variation of the human body in shape, size, and ability, assuming that health can be seen visually on the body. Through a case study of one particular location of a popular commercial gym chain in an urban city of the Southwestern United States, this study employs a critical discourse analysis of the gym space itself including a collection of advertisements, photographs, and signs, in addition to participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with diverse women who exercise at this gym to explore how women resist and/or (re)produce discourses of healthism related to health, fitness, and body image. Ultimately, critical analysis shows that the gym itself produces and reifies the discourse of healthism through narratives of simultaneous empowerment and obligation. Though women in the gym reproduced this dominant narrative throughout their interviews, internal contradictions and nuggets of resistance emerged. These nuggets of resistance create fractures in the dominant discourse, shining light into areas that can be explored further for resistance practices through sense-making, necessitating a language of resistance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2019

Colleges and universities use language (i.e., talk and text) to represent diversity and inclusion in community engagement. Diversity refers to individual and social or group differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, national origin, social class, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability), while inclusion is the intentional and ongoing engagement with difference. Community engagement involves collaborations between institutions of higher education and their local, regional, national, and global communities. The language used to describe diversity and inclusion in community engagement is socially constructed and situated in complex power relations. The purpose of the study was to describe how three universities use language to represent diversity and inclusion in community engagement. The primary research question asked: In what ways do colleges and universities use language to represent diversity and inclusion in community engagement? The study employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) using a multiple case study approach to examine language-in-use (i.e., discourse) about the connections between diversity, inclusion, and community engagement. As a theory and method, CDA offered a means to investigate how language constitutes reality, or in other words, is shaped by power relations and social struggles. Data analysis occurred in a three stage recursive process: description of text and its linguistic features, interpretation of messages underpinning patterns in language, and explanation of the relationship between texts and society. Language for the study stemmed from applications for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s elective Community Engagement Classification; individual interviews with two engagement actors per campus, or faculty and staff with dedicated responsibilities in community engagement efforts; and text from community engagement office web pages. The three participating universities received the 2105 first-time Community Engagement Classification, thus providing relevant text to examine language about diversity and inclusion in community engagement. Collected data included 312 pages of text across three cases and data collection methods. Study findings emerged from the three stages of analysis (descriptive, interpretative, and explanatory). At the descriptive stage, patterns in language use pointed to linguistic features of text relevant to the connections between diversity, inclusion, and community engagement (e.g., euphemisms to conceal negative action, “diverse” as a descriptor of groups or places, and “the” community as a singular entity). Findings at the interpretative stage focused on representations of diversity and inclusion revealed in patterns of language use. Representations depicted diversity as: a seamless “other,” a commodity, and a proxy. Representations also suggested inclusion as: correction, honoring, and a skillset. Moreover, explanatory level findings indicated four emergent discourse types underpinning the language of diversity and inclusion in community engagement, including managerial, promotional, oppositional, and specialist discourses. The four discourses also reflected ideologies, or taken for granted assumptions, of neoliberalism and White supremacy in higher education. The study offered implications for community engagement practice and opportunities for more transformational educational environments. The study also suggested future studies and applications of CDA as a reflective and action-oriented tool to interrogate language-in-use towards more just outcomes. Advancing research on the language of diversity and inclusion in community engagement is integral to creating institutions of higher education that better enable all people to thrive and engage meaningfully in public life.

First generation college students, defined as students whose parents did not attend or complete education after high school, currently make up about one in three college undergraduates. First generation students often face difficulties adapting to the college environment and find their identities challenged in efforts to find success. Much research about first generation students positions students as having “risk factors” due to their backgrounds rather than the institution as inadequate to meet their needs. In order to explore how a four-year institution was and was not meeting the needs of some first generation students, I conducted an analysis of White and Latinx-identifying students’ experience of mattering and marginality using Critical Discourse Analysis as my method. The purpose of this study is to understand how first generation student represent their sense of belonging through language use. Based on qualitative analyses of focus group comments, students described mattering and marginality as occurring within multiple areas of the college experience. Throughout these areas, or “spheres,” participants described the roles of interpersonal and institutional communication that positioned them to feel a sense of belonging or marginality. Students reported experiencing marginality because of 1) issues of money, 2) not knowing things they might be expected to know, and 3) others not understanding their experiences and identities. Students experienced mattering with 1) community and 2) administrators. They also described feeling mattering and marginality simultaneously in some situations. Furthermore, students experienced campus differently based on their racial and ethnoracial identities. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed to better serve the needs of first generation students.

Discourses of adolescence/ts that reduce teenagers to impulsive, hormonal, incomplete adults are pervasive, and affect the way that adolescence/ts is regarded in institutional spaces like schools. However, scholars in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) reject these determinations in favor of a vision of adolescence as a social construct; a construct that has changed throughout time and does not accurately reflect the lived experiences of diverse youth. This study considers the way in which these discourses are mobilized and circulating in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and, specifically, through the study of literature. Grounded in empirical scholarship that approaches classroom literature pedagogy and response through a sociocultural lens, and in theoretical scholarship in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the purpose of this qualitative inquiry is to observe student response to young adult literature (YAL) in one ELA classroom in order to locate discourses of adolescence that are mobilized and circulating as students comprehend, analyze and interpret texts.

The purpose of this study is to understand how colleges and universities use language to represent themselves on their institutional websites (official websites of higher education institutions). Organizations, like colleges and universities, seek to create and maintain a distinctive identity in an effort to build legitimacy (i.e., status) and attract students (i.e., tuition dollars). Institutional websites are increasingly important to the admissions and marketing practices of colleges and universities due to their ability to rapidly communicate a significant amount of content to a vast audience. Colleges and universities use language, whether textual (i.e., written) or visual (i.e., images), to position and differentiate themselves from other institutions and promote their efforts. This study utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the language on the institutional websites of 12 colleges and universities across a number of characteristics (e.g., control, type, geographic region, admissions selectivity) in the United States. Theoretically, CDA provides the means to examine everyday language in an effort to raise awareness about issues of inequality, such as access to education. Methodologically, Fairclough's approach to CDA has three dimensions of analysis. The first dimension is descriptive analysis where the intent is to describe the properties of the textual and visual elements. The second dimension involves interpretive analysis where the goal is to examine the contents of language and its functional parts to understand and interpret the connections between the role of language and the greater social structures it reflects and supports. Societal analysis, the third dimension, focuses on explanations of larger cultural, historical, and social discourses surrounding interpretations of the data. The analyses from this study suggest that colleges and universities utilize a common promotional discourse en masse to market rather systematic representations of "higher education" despite the fact that they vary widely by a number of institutional characteristics. Specifically, analyses reveal that institutions use language to repeatedly establish prestige and relevancy by touting the accomplishments of their institutional actors. The institutions attempt to engage the viewer with relational language, present numerous co-curricular experiences along with numerous images related to generic institutional characteristics (e.g., architecture, campus scenery), and multiple layers of navigation. The scholarly commitment associated with higher education plays a reduced role while the intangibles available to the prospective student are at the forefront of representations in the sample. Institutions also poorly represent other social goods (e.g., class, sexual orientation). Of the 453 images in the study, 98 feature a non-white actor (21%) and 146 feature a female actor (32%). Representations of diverse actors often appear in the form of caricatures (e.g., Native American in tribal dress). Given the mission and rhetoric stemming from many postsecondary institutions, including the institutions in this sample, to increase access to education for underrepresented individuals and enhance diversity in all its forms, the language utilized on the websites does not align with such statements. By deploying similar promotional discourse, the institutions choose what to present, emphasize, and exclude. Hence, institutions retain a great amount of control over information the viewer has access to on the institutional website. The language in use reveals that the institutions retain significant control over its actors with strategic placement of obligational discourse and, in most cases, complete silence on issues. Such discourse constructs an unrealistic portrayal of higher education while simultaneously reducing the role higher education has as a social institution committed to teaching, research, and service.

Abstract not available

This research study takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, using critical discourse theory, transactional communication theory and cross-cultural theory to contribute insight into the experiences of alternative entry students as they strive to access and participate in higher education. The study seeks to determine how these students learn to persevere: how they construct their means of succeeding in the university culture. The methodological structure of the research comprises a collective case study design, encompassing critical ethnography, action research and reflexive approaches to guide a deeper understanding of the experiences of studying at a regional Australian university. The reflexive nature of the research facilitated the development of an original theoretical construct, the ‘deficit-discourse’ shift, which challenges higher education policy and practice, in particular, in relation to academics’ roles in making their discourses explicit and in collaborating with students to facilitate students’ perseverance and success. The research has also generated two models: the Framework for Student Engagement and Mastery and the Model for Student Success at University. The Framework re-conceptualises the university as a dynamic culture made up of a multiplicity of sub-cultures, each with its own literacy or discourse. The Framework recasts the first year experience as a journey, with students’ transition re-conceptualised as the processes of gaining familiarity with and negotiating these new literacies and discourses whereas perseverance is viewed as the processes of mastering and demonstrating them. The Model provides a three step practical strategy (incorporating reflective practice, socio-cultural practice and critical practice) for achieving this engagement: for empowering students to negotiate, master and demonstrate their mastery of the university culture’s multiple discourses. Together, the two models provide students with a means of succeeding in the new university culture.

<p>Revoicing Sámi narratives investigates the relationship between storytellers, contexts and collective tradition, based on an analysis of North Sámi narratives published in the early 1900s. This dissertation “revoices” narratives by highlighting the coexistence of different voices or socio-ideological languages in repertoires and by considering Sámi narratives as utterances by storytellers rather than autonomous products of tradition. Thus, this study serves as an act of “revoicing,” of recovering voices that had been silenced by the scientific discourse which enveloped their passage into print.</p><p>Narrators considered “tradition bearers” were interviewed or wrote down folk narratives that were interpreted as representative of a static, dying culture. The approach chosen in this thesis highlights the dynamic and conscious choices of narrative strategies made by these storytellers and the implications of the discourses expressed in narration. By taking into account the intense context of social change going on in Sápmi at the time the narratives emerged, as well as the context that includes narrators, ethnographers and tradition, the analysis demonstrates that storytelling is an elaboration that takes place in negotiation with tradition, genres and individual preferences.</p><p>The repertoires of four storytellers are studied according to a methodological framework consisting in critical discourse analysis from a folkloristic perspective. The analysis underscores the polyphony of the narratives by Johan Turi, who related with skillfulness of tradition by taking position as a conscious social actor. This study also investigates the repertoires of storytellers Ellen Utsi, Per Bær and Isak Eira who were interviewed by the</p><p>Norwegian “lappologist” Just K. Qvigstad. Their contributions to his extensive collection of Sámi narratives express their relation to tradition and to the heteroglossia that surrounded them. Based on a receptionalist approach, this dissertation investigates the implications of these narratives for the North Sámi community at the turn of the twentieth century.</p><p>Storytelling appears to have had a set of functions for community members, from the normative as regards socialization, information and warning against dangers to the defensive with the elaboration of a discourse about solidarity, identity and empowerment.</p>

<p>Namibia is one of the most unequal countries in the world and has high rates of poverty. In the thesis the proposal for a basic income grant as a strategy for poverty alleviation in Namibia is analyzed. The study is based on six interviews with the Basic Income Grant Coalition in Namibia and their four publications. The theoretical and methodological framework is Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis and social theory of discourse. Conceptions about the economical and political situation of Namibia in relation to inequality are discussed, as well as the image of the desired citizen in neo-liberal societies. Poverty is conceptualized as a trap where the BIG is regarded as a way out from poverty to a situation of confidence, engagement and economic activity. Contemporary classifications and means testing for social grants are problematized as inefficient and discriminative. The BIG is regarded as right in the context of the big inequalities in Namibia. It is suggested that the BIG Coalition with the proposal for the grant also offers alternative conceptions about Namibia and about the possibilities for change in the situation of poverty.</p>

<p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>A textbook is a key component in the arsenal of a teacher of English. For this reason, it is of importance that textbooksused in Swedish schools are compliant with the fundamental values of equality, provided in the LPO 94. I will attempt to discover the extent to which English textbooks present males and females in non-stereotyped ways and as equal. I want to provide an overview to show how they deal with gender issues. In addition, I aim at establish whether there are any connection between learning and gender, and whether it hinders the pupil’s language learning.</p><p>My analysis will draw on previous research  and theories presented by prominent figures in the field, such as, Butler (1990), Mills (1995), Renner (1997), Ravitch (2004) and Jones, Kitetu & Jane Sunderland (1997)among others. Thereafter, these theories, and my own research will be compared, to and contrasted with the guidelines from the Swedish National Agency of Education.</p><p>This dissertation comprises a qualitative critical discourse analysis of two randomly selected textbooks that have been, or are being used, in Swedish secondary schools. For my study, I have chosen <em>Team 8</em> (1984) and <em>Wings 8</em> (2000).</p><p>In my analyses, a number of different aspects will be taken into consideration, such as the   gender distribution of narrators, main characters and sub characters, as well as the   description of gender/gender roles, and the representation of gender in illustrations. Further, I will study what kind of language is used: the extent to which it is gendered or de-gendered language.  These aspects will be collected quantitatively.</p><p>The findings from the analysis show that the language in <em>Wings 8</em> gives a broad and non-stereotypic view of gender roles, which is in accordance with the fundamental values of LPO 94. However, the illustrations tend to portray males and females in what can be considered as quite stereotypical.</p><p><em>Team 8</em>, on the other hand, contains gendered language and male dominance; women were placed in the background or left out completely.  Therefore, <em>Team 8 </em>would not be deemed to be compliant with<em> the </em>requirements set by the Swedish National Agency of Education today.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Key words:</strong> Education, teaching material, Wings, Team 8, gender, critical discourse analysis.</p>