SARAH ADJEKUM B.A., B.S.W. A Research Project Submitted to the School of Social Work in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Social Work McMaster University 2016 / As observed with the ongoing migrant crises, media coverage of refugee and asylum seekers connects the concepts of mental health and trauma to their experiences. The resulting discourse around refugees pathologizes the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse incorporates discourses of mental health, it also legitimizes nation state’s practice social control towards these populations through detention. As the utilization of technologies of securitization is normalized, detention has become increasingly accepted as a response to humanitarian crises. Past research on detention has consistently demonstrated the harmful effects it has on children, adults, and especially individuals with symptoms of mental illness. In particular, research drawing on trauma and mental health discourse has been effective in bringing attention to the counterproductive outcomes of detention. This paper is concerned with the employment of discourses of mental health and trauma by mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. It explores the media’s role in the re(creation) of refugee discourse and purveyors of racial ideology that problematizes people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. Using critical discourse analysis, it contrasted mainstream media coverage of four major publications on detention. This study finds prevalent use of mental health discourse and little mention of violence in several online publications. It also finds that recommendations made in the articles emphasized micro and mezzo focused changes that are unable to challenge federal policy that enables securitization. Nor is it capable of addressing the forms of violence inherent to the mental health system. As such, this paper makes recommendations for a critical examination of refugee and immigration policy that takes into account the states’ participation in the creation of refugee crises. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetoric and subsequent media framing of President George W. Bush during the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how such frames have been able to generate and sustain a national moral panic. While a number of scholars have explored the effect of presidential rhetoric in generating panic (53; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hawdon 2001; Kappeler and Kappeler 2004), none have evaluated the effect of media framing on such rhetoric. This study will use three major sources of data: (1) National Public Opinion Data from Gallup Poll, (2) daily USA Today news articles, and (3) rates of international terrorism from the U.S. State Department. Employing a content analysis of USA Today articles pertaining to terrorism, I will evaluate the relevant themes used by the corporate media to frame the Bush administration's rhetoric, and further analyze the relationship between such rhetoric and the collective conscience across the eight years of the Bush presidency, while controlling for rates of international terrorism. / Master of Science

This research uses moral panic theory to investigate the ways in which print media coverage influences the association of mental illness with acts of mass violence in schools. I explore the relationship between the rhetoric of moral entrepreneurs (such as victims' friends and family members, law enforcement agencies, criminal justice and mental health professionals, gun rights activists, mayors, members of Congress, and presidents), the construction of a moral panic, and the identification of a folk devil (a person or population deemed responsible for the evils of a society; to be feared and controlled in order to minimize threat). Perpetrators of school shootings are often discussed in terms of their consumption of violent media (such as movies, music, and video games), their access to firearms, their social standing among their peers (socially isolated, ostracized, or bullied at school), and their mental health status. I hypothesize that mental illness has become a common frame in which school shooters are discussed by the media, despite the fact that mentally ill persons are less likely than non-disordered individuals to commit acts of violence. Therefore, this characterization of the mentally ill as violent and dangerous is disproportionate to the actual level of threat. I conduct a quantitative frame analysis of print newspaper articles published in the New York Times and one local newspaper during the month following each mass school shooting between 1991 and 2015, coding for the type of moral entrepreneur (grassroots, interest-group, or elite), the folk devil identified (violent media, firearms, social alienation, and/or mental illness), and whether the folk devil was being affirmed or denied. Results reveal that guns are affirmed as the folk devil more often than mental illness, but are also denied most often; whereas mental illness is affirmed nearly as often as guns, and is less frequently denied as the folk devil — leading to the conclusion that mental illness is the most frequently accepted folk devil associated with school shootings. This serves as a cautionary warning against the conflation of mental illness with mass shootings, because it intensifies the stigma attached to mental illness — a known deterrent to seeking treatment. / Ph. D.

This study analyzes the reporting and editorializing in several major American newspapers during the height of the Citizen Genêt Affair in July and August, 1793. A hybrid form of sociological moral panic theory, focused predominantly on the "iteration" of moral panics and the language used to communicate them, is used to understand the dynamics of the information landscape of 1793. Specific attention is paid to the effects of time and space, personal and political bias, and incendiary historical rhetoric on reporting of and reactions to Genêt's actions. In doing so, this study highlights possible flaws or blind spots in both moral panic theory and historiography, and brings new understanding to the media environment in which America's political traditions gestated. Brief connections are drawn between this historical information landscape and series of events and contemporary concerns with regards to social media and incendiary political rhetoric. / Master of Arts

This thesis considers why some crimes persist beyond the moment of newsworthiness and how they are able to transcend this period of intense reporting to become a feature of popular memory. The central argument is that the popular memory of a crime is built up over time through a synthesis of public discourses, which are predominantly developed in news reporting, people s everyday experience and the normative social frameworks of everyday life. A temporally sensitive analysis of two case studies, the murder of James Bulger and the murder of Sarah Payne, tests this hypothesis by exploring the connections and disconnections between the ongoing reporting of these crimes and the remembering of them. The study finds that the personal past and public discourse intertwine in remembered accounts of these crimes and considers that this is evidence of the ways audiences utilise crime news as an imaginative resource for understanding crime and criminality more broadly. It can thus be said that audiences use the news to frame, but not define their understandings of the world around us.

This study does research on the Swedish media's portraying of an extraordinary crime event in Sweden - the grenades in Malmö 2015. The study focuses on how the media portrays three major participants in the media image: the public, the politicians and the police. The question examined was: How does the media portray the public and the authorities during the grenades in Malmö 2015? I made a framing analysis of 30 news articles from the summer of 2015. The result showed that the public received the role as the victim, where the media image emphasizes on fear from the public. The police received two different images - the safe image where the media emphasizes on the work the police does on preventing crime. The other image was the critical image, where the media emphasized on how the public criticized the police success rate during these incidents. The politicians received a neutral image, where a small amount of critic was portrayed. The results of the analysis diverged from previous studies and theories in the field when it came to the police and the politicians.

Between 1971 and 1999, ParticipACTION, Canada’s Health Promotion agency, reached into Canadian homes, schools, and places of work to “educate, motivate, and mobilize” the public about the perceived need to become physically fit. This dissertation discusses how the agency employed a variety of professional marketing approaches to create compelling prescriptive literature concerning physical fitness to advance a nation-building agenda based in the state directive of individual accountability for the Canadian body. As a result of ParticipACTION's sustained and pervasive influence, Canadians not only remember this prolific brand, but its underlying messaging has become a part of how Canadians view physical fitness and citizenship. ParticipACTION was a project of healthism fostered in an environment of anxiety. The threat of the Cold War, the constructed menace of the Obesity Crisis, and the fear of Quebec Separatism were all used to bolster the message at this semi-public agency over its thirty years of national social marketing. How individual Canadians experienced ParticipACTION varied significantly based on their body type, socio-economic status, gender, language, ethnicity, and region. Through the use of Historical GIS mapping, oral interviews, and archival records, this dissertation offers a history from creation to closure of this national agency and its place in Canada’s social history.

Student Number : 9208006A - PhD thesis - School of Social Sciences - Faculty of Humanities / The term ‘ducktail’ was originally used to denote a hairstyle. In the Post World War Two period, ‘Ducktail’ became associated with a rebellious white youth gang subculture, which rose to prominence in the major urban centres throughout South Africa. Societal responses to the subculture’s identity resulted in the generation of a moral panic which demonised the movement branding it as – amongst other things – the ‘eendstert euwel’ [ducktail evil]. The major aim of this thesis is to account for the way in which members of the subculture constructed and practised their class, racial, ethnic, gendered and generational identities whilst highlighting how society responded to them. The relationship of conformity, conflict and control that emerged between the ducktails and more conventional members of society such as the authorities and academics is plotted. This relationship sets the context for the final part of the dissertation, which explores the moral guardians and rule creators that became involved in the designing of youth policies. Particular attention will be given to how the ‘problem of youth’ brought religion, working mothers, morality, the state of the nation and the preservation of white supremacy under question. In this process, the National Party government formulated policies to monitor, shape and construct an appropriate form of South African whiteness.

<p>Syftet med den här studien har varit att belysa hur fångars situation, med avseende på deras anpassning i samhället, uttrycks i massmedia samt hur de uttryckta föreställningarna om anpassning kan relateras till lagtexten. Studien är kvalitativ och den empiri som använts är debattartiklar i Dagens Nyheter och Svenska Dagbladet. Till dessa artiklar har följande frågeställningar ställts:</p><p>-Vilka förhållanden anses som problem i massmediala diskussioner beträffande fångarnas situation? Hur beskrivs dessa och vilka förslag till lösningar diskuteras? </p><p>-Hur kan sådana förhållanden relateras till fångarnas anpassning i samhället och hur kan den i sin tur kopplas till lagens intentioner? </p><p>Resultatet av den första frågeställningen har analyserats utifrån ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv och med hjälp av begreppen ”claims- maker”, ”socialt problem” och ”moralisk panik”. Den andra frågeställningen har analyserats med lagtext som utgångspunkt. Resultatet har även jämförts med tidigare forskning på området. Viktiga slutsatser har varit att de fångar som är mest isolerade från samhället också löper den största risken att inte bli föremål för återanpassningsinriktade åtgärder. Hög säkerhet och fångars anpassning i samhället kan även sägas stå i ett motsatsförhållande till varandra. </p>

Syftet med den här studien har varit att belysa hur fångars situation, med avseende på deras anpassning i samhället, uttrycks i massmedia samt hur de uttryckta föreställningarna om anpassning kan relateras till lagtexten. Studien är kvalitativ och den empiri som använts är debattartiklar i Dagens Nyheter och Svenska Dagbladet. Till dessa artiklar har följande frågeställningar ställts: -Vilka förhållanden anses som problem i massmediala diskussioner beträffande fångarnas situation? Hur beskrivs dessa och vilka förslag till lösningar diskuteras? -Hur kan sådana förhållanden relateras till fångarnas anpassning i samhället och hur kan den i sin tur kopplas till lagens intentioner? Resultatet av den första frågeställningen har analyserats utifrån ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv och med hjälp av begreppen ”claims- maker”, ”socialt problem” och ”moralisk panik”. Den andra frågeställningen har analyserats med lagtext som utgångspunkt. Resultatet har även jämförts med tidigare forskning på området. Viktiga slutsatser har varit att de fångar som är mest isolerade från samhället också löper den största risken att inte bli föremål för återanpassningsinriktade åtgärder. Hög säkerhet och fångars anpassning i samhället kan även sägas stå i ett motsatsförhållande till varandra.