published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

Discourses surrounding U.S. immigration reform and border security are embedded with instances of the new racism (subtle and covert forms of racism in spoken and written language). One anti-immigrant organization in particular, the Minuteman Project, has gained widespread attention of the political establishment and mainstream press through its rapid expansion, physical involvement on the U.S.-Mexican border, and outspoken views on current U.S. immigration policy. There is a need to examine critically the discourse of growing citizen groups such as this one, who draw on web media resources to maintain and reproduce negative depictions of minority groups by masking and legitimating racist discourse.The data set consists of textual selections from the Minuteman Project website. Print text data includes the organization's mission statement and a context-specific article and email response related to immigration protests, as well as 'disclaimers' or statements of tolerance toward immigrants and elected officials that assist in the Minuteman Project's positive representation of self. A critical discourse analysis approach with an emphasis on metaphor is employed to determine how lexical, semantic, and syntactic choices are employed in creation of 'us' and 'them' participant roles. This analysis includes examination of visual images in proximity to print postings as well as images employed on Minuteman Project merchandise such as T-shirts and hats. The images are analyzed in relation to their contextual role in supporting or subverting the Minuteman Project's rhetorical strategies. The pervasive role of metaphor in this verbal and visual context is examined in relation to self and other representation, identity construction, and in-group membership.The analysis reveals contradictory and shifting self and other representations. Extensive use of patriotic and war tropes located in participant roles assist the Minuteman Project in masking underlying racist ideologies while overtly distancing itself from self-identified nationalist and white supremacist groups. Disclaimers, statements of tolerance, and metaphors assist the organization in successfully forging public connections with members of the political establishment. This study has implications for critical analysis of web-based texts, for multimodal analysis, and for the relation between circulatory web discourses and public policy in general.

Globalization has, within academic, political and business circles alike, become a prominent buzzword of the past decade, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. The literature devoted to the issue of globalization is both vast in scope and diverse in nature, becoming increasingly prominent not only in academics and politics, but in the popular press, as well. The goal of this dissertation is to provide the reader with a map of themes, narratives, and characterizations related to globalization circulating in the United States in order to demonstrate the potential ways that individual thought on the issue is shaped by public discourse. A secondary goal is to critically examine specific texts to identify areas where their arguments overlap, conflict, or may be misconstrued due to weak or inaccurate evidence. By better understanding the map of rhetorical formations in widely-read texts regarding globalization, it may be possible for people to be better able to understand the concerns and intentions of those voicing various and often competing viewpoints.

This case study investigated the polyphonic discourse in a beginning secondary school mathematics classroom in Trinidad. It relates how classroom and research interview ‘talk’ contributed to students’, their teacher’s and the researcher’s developing conceptions of mathematics, themselves and each other. The study is approached from dialogical and socio-constructivist orientations. Students and their teacher professed a diverse set of prior conceptions of mathematics which included viewing mathematics as rule based with a problem solving orientation and emphasizing attention to the teacher. Several cases are reported that describe the authoritative elements which included a well defined structure to lessons mirroring the textbook, ‘cloze’ questions, and a reliance on rules and absent historical referents as justifications for mathematical activities and substitution for mathematical reasoning. Student and teacher questions and their desire to understand, however, served to interrupt the monological discourse. What was internally persuasive for students was the relational competency of their teacher as well as the communicative acts of their peers. Students’ responses to pedagogy were internally persuasive for the teacher and precipitated ideological assessment. Both discourse types contributed to the formation of individual as well as social identities. Student and teacher utterances were internally persuasive for the researcher. I recommend that research needs to attend more meaningfully to what is internally persuasive for students and teachers in mathematics teaching and learning. In addition I theorize on the need for a dialogical relationship between dialogue and pedagogy that is attentive to the ambiguities in communication.

My project here is to look at how uncovering those unconscious and phantasmatic identifications in the social field can lead to the possibility of altering subjectivity or, at the very least, tracing how subjects are formed through structure and how they are psychically linked to ideological structure. This thesis suggests that subjection is never total or complete and that when viewed from an awry or skewed perspective, particular discourses and modes of subjection are revealed to be neither permanent, true nor necessary—we can always open up new spaces of subjectivity and discourse and through the practice of ‘tracing’ structure we can discern how we are determined and at which points structure constrains or enables us. My work is an effort to supplement theories of discourse analysis/ideology critique with psychoanalytic concepts, and more specifically, the psychoanalytic category of fantasy to discuss the ways in which discourses are provided with coherence and how subjects are tethered/binded to discursive fields. In my discussion of the non-discursive, I will be drawing from the Freudian concept of unheimlich, or the uncanny, to discuss the ways in which discursive fields become disrupted by repressed or “foreign” elements. I contend that the subject always exceeds structure, and for this reason, there is always room for resistance within discursive fields. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2008-01-30 10:31:51.525

Many cognitive processes influence how we encode, store, and retrieve what we read. Two processes are considered to affect retrieval from memory: recollection and familiarity. Recollection is the explicit retrieval of the context; whereas familiarity is a vaguer feeling of remembering without knowing the exact context. Many factors influence how both recollection and familiarity function. In my M.A. thesis, participants read two-sentence passages, in which the second sentence either stated an action or implied it, and the first sentence either supported or contradicted the event of the second sentence. The participants received one of three types on instructions and made recognition judgments about test sentences in the context of the prior passages. Stating an action, and moreover making it distinct due to contradiction, would lead to more accurate recall of the same test sentence due to a high influence of recollection. Implying an action would result in inference generation of the stated action. This would indicate a high influence of familiarity on recognition judgments. A multinomial model was implemented in order to estimate the relative contributions of these distinct memory processes.

Since the naming of the Chinese Fifth Generation in the 1980s, generational study became an important methodology in Chinese film studies. The Chinese directors up to the mid-1980s are categorised into five generations. However, the directors emerging after the Fifth Generation do not so far have a certain generational name. Thus, the identification of this “nameless” group, which is called the post-fifth generation in this thesis, is an interesting issue reflecting the political, economical and cultural discourse in contemporary China. This thesis focuses on these directors’ films narrated with female protagonists, probes the reason why they chose female-centred narratives, and examines how they portrayed women and women’s stories in their filmic representation. In the light of Foucault’s theories of discourse and power, I examine the films as a kind of representation which is generated within discursive formation, and through which the directors identify themselves. The conclusion reached by the discussion is that both the female and the male directors studied in this thesis present very feminine discourse in their films. While the female directors are emphasising, even advertising their identity as women, their male counterparts are trying very hard to simulate and perform a feminine identification. This finding exactly answers the question in the thesis title. Since femininity is something that can be chosen, simulated, used, and played, the word “feminist” can also become a cultural brand from which the directors can benefit.

The thesis examines the responses, as articulated in language, of the trade union movement in the UK (especially, the TUC) to changes in labour legislation introduced by the Conservative Government between 1979 and 1990. The research attempts to identify and interpret key words, themes and repertoires within union discourse by analysis of TUC pamphlets, 'campaign' literature, policy documents and speeches at the annual Congress, supplemented by information obtained from informal interviews with several union figures involved in constructing a response to the legislation. The nature and extent of changes in patterns of union language are explored through consideration of the materials over two distinct time periods - 1979-1983 and 1986-1990 - thus allowing examination of the rhetorical responses of the TUC/unions throughout the duration of the Thatcher Government. In order to place such responses in context, and to examine the extent to which the vocabulary of the unions was both shared with and shaped by other participants in the policy process, consideration has also been given to the language of Government in documents such as Green Papers and in Parliamentary debates, in addition to that of 'New Right' commentators who may have influenced the making of policy on labour legislation. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the characterisation of union immunities from legal liability as 'privileges' shaped the linguistic response of the unions and their strategy towards the presence of law in industrial relations. Union language during the period 1979-1990 is found to exhibit characteristics both of change and continuity. Those alterations which occured are considered in the light of theories of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project and in the context of wider changes in the discourse of the Left. The problem of isolating causative factors is also addressed.

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