Master of Science - Agricultural Education and Communication / Department of Communications and Agricultural Education / Jason D. Ellis / The general public is more generationally and geographically removed from agricultural production today than ever before, yet as influential as ever with regards to its ability to impact the operating conditions of the animal agriculture industry. To date, the agriculture industry has focused research and extension on how to educate and persuade the public in order to gain support for its practices and policies. Little work has investigated how the language choices of those communicating about agriculture may be functioning to position themselves and other participants with regards to authority and credibility, and how this affects their communication and the industry as a whole. This study sought to develop an understanding as to how three key groups in the animal agriculture conversation (experts, professional communicators, and agricultural advocates) use discourse and language to position themselves and other participants, their explanations of opposition to animal agriculture, and their ideas about how to best present and justify their arguments to the wider public. In addition to this, the study also sought to understand what power structures and dynamics exist within the conversation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data for a critical discourse analysis. The discursive practices of the participants functioned to ultimately undermine and delegitimize the role of the public and individuals and groups opposed to animal agriculture, as well as position the industry and its constituents as the only authoritative and credible voices in the animal agriculture conversation. This is likely to be prohibitive to achieving the goals of agricultural communication activities. Those communicating on behalf of the animal agriculture industry should become more aware of how their beliefs, values, and ideologies impact the discourse from which they are operating, as well as how their communication is functioning. This research was undertaken from a critical inquiry perspective, shedding light on some of the power structures inherent between the animal agriculture industry and the general public. Others undertaking agricultural sociology and related research should consider doing so integrating a similar theoretical perspective to continually challenge the assumptions and conditions under which the industry operates.

In this study I investigate the Iranian Green Movement supporters' use of slogans as political discourse on the Persian-language opposition website www.kaleme.com. Data was collected from the website's Kaleme section in the form of 22 articles and 3,500 user comments. A coding scheme was constructed to measure the presence of categories and themes in the site's comments section. Findings support the propositions of narrative theorists (e.g. Franzosi, 1998; Benford, 1993) that frequent use of slogans in the comments may reflect a unique cultural element of Persian-language political discourse and reinforce the Green Movement's narrative of opposition to the government.

The topic of this diploma work is about the reflections on biological and cultural determination of female beauty. By research of these two fields, this work is concerned with the inquiry of their correlative relation in the aesthetic ideal of the female beauty in nowadays, primarily in the expressions of the highest aesthetization nearly of its artificiality of body. This work examines to what extent the biological determination of the body interacts in the aesthetization process. First, the work outlines the biologically determinated preferences of the female physical attraction through the evolutionary process of sexual selection and it supports their relevance by the Darwinian theory about the existing taste in animal world. This work introduces the cultural determination on female beauty on the platform of society designated expressions of the aesthetization of female body, fully expanded from nineteenth century, and the reflection on correlative relation of these two inseparable fields is discussed on the background of the highest aesthetization process of female body in the context of its aesthetic ideal of nowadays. KEY WORDS body and corporeality, female beauty, biological determination, cultural determination, aesthetization, artificiality

La Société dite de l’information est fortement galvaudée par les médias et dans les discours de certaines organisations comme les institutions internationales qui évoluent dans le domaine des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication. Pour autant, si elle existe, sa compréhension change parfois selon les attentes des uns et des autres. Au Sénégal, par exemple, les acteurs qui gravitent autour du réseau des Technologies de l’Information et de la communication n’ont pas la même vision de cette société. Le pouvoir public tente de définir des politiques qui, majoritairement, reprennent les recommandations des sommets mondiaux sur la société de l’information.Dans ce contexte, les populations locales mettent en place des stratégies avec des usages qui restent dictés par la situation économique et sociale et non pas les textes. Les problèmes de ces usages, des recompositions organisationnelles, d’écriture sont analysés ici avec des outils qui prennent en compte les facteurs sociaux / The so-called Information Society is highly tarnished by the media and in the speeches of some organizations such as international institutions which operate in the field of Information Technology and Communication. However, if it exists, its understanding sometimes changes according to the expectations of each other. In Senegal, for instance, actors who revolve around the Information Technology and Communication network do not have the same vision of the company. The public authority’s attempts to define policies mainly reflect the recommendations of the World Summits on the Information Society.In this perspective, the local population set up strategies with practices that are more dictated by the economic and social situation than official texts. The consequences of these uses, of organizational reconfigurations and writings, are analyzed here with tools that will take into account social factors

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Corruption as a concept is viewed differently by various disciplines, but there seems to be consensus that it relates to the misuse of public office for private gain. Studies in the social sciences, mainly political science, economics, sociology and law, have provided valuable insights into the subject, for example, its causes, manifestations and consequences. In a country such as Nigeria, corruption is said to have cost the country up to $20 trillion between 1960 and 2005, and it could cost up to 37% of its GDP by 2030 if the situation is not urgently addressed. The paradox, however, is that although all successive leaders of the country have consistently articulated their anti-corruption posture in national speeches, they get accused by their successors of not being tough on corruption both in word and in deed. Regrettably, there have been relatively few close textual analyses of presidential speeches carried out within analytical frameworks in linguistics that have the potential of revealing how presidents can simultaneously talk tough and soft on corruption, a contradiction that could well explain the putative anti-corruption posture of the country’s leaders and the ever deepening corruption in the land. It is against this backdrop that this study draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in order to examine language choices related to the theme of corruption in speeches made by Nigerian presidents from 1957 to 2015. The objectives of the study are to (1) provide an overview of how the discourse on corruption has evolved in Nigerian presidential speeches from 1957-2015; (2) determine specific facets of the construal of corruption from the dominant choices made from the system of transitivity (process, participants, circumstance) in speeches by different presidents and at different time points in their tenure in office; (3) analyse how the interpersonal metafunction of language is enacted in the speeches by the presidents through the system of appraisal for a strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation; (4) interrogate from a critical discourse analysis standpoint the interest, ideological, partisan or other bases for the choices made in the speeches from the systems associated with the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions of language; and (5) to evaluate the different presidents in terms of how the above analyses position them in relation to combating corruption.

Magister Artium - MA / Disability, as a topic of investigation, is considerably overlooked in the discipline of sociolinguistics. This thesis aims to bridge the gap between disability and sociolinguistics studies, as I critically explore the role language and multilingualism plays in the way we understand and construct the discourses of disability. Based on a year-long ethnographic study at what is defined as a “special needs school”, I offer a first-hand description of being a researcher with a disability through personal anecdotes. In these anecdotes, I account for my own positionality to highlight the importance of reflectivity and positionality when doing ethnographic fieldwork. Aside from these personal anecdotes, I also capture everyday interactions among young disabled people. In order to analyse these disabled youth multilingual interactions, I applied the notions of stylization, enregisterment and embodied intersectionality. In these examinations, we are able to see how multilingualism is used to negotiate a position of being seen as disabled. By looking at these personal anecdotes and everyday interactions as whole, the study provides a more comprehensive view of the way we talk and represent disability. I conclude this thesis by offering a new direction for disability and youth multilingualism studies, a direction that emphasises the importance of positionality when doing research on the agency of disabled people.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Multi-paradigmatically qualitative, and largely in the fashion of the critical theory, this study seeks to explore how a selection of Kenyans construct, manipulate and negotiate ethnic categories in a discussion of national politics on two Facebook sites over a period of fourteen and a half months, at the time of the 2013 national elections. Kenya has at least 42 ethnic communities, and has been described as a hotbed of ethnic polarisation. The study is interested in how the participants use language to position themselves and others in relation to ethnicity, as well as to draw on or make reference to notions of Kenyan nationalism. The data for this study is drawn from Facebook discussions on two different groups: one ‘open’ and one ‘closed’. The data also includes participants from different ethnic groups and political leanings. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Engagement and Face-work are used as theoretical frameworks to explore how participants draw on different discourses to construct their ethnicities and position themselves as Kenyan nationals. The analysis also explores how informants expand and contract the dialogic space, as well as how they perform face-work during these interactions. CDA is important since the study examines ways in which participants participate in societal struggles through discourse, as either effectively supporting, sustaining, reproducing or challenging the status quo or power imbalances, especially as members of particular ethnic groups. The theory of Engagement is also important for the study since it helps explain how participants source their value positions and align each other as they open up or close down the dialogic space in their arguments or discussions. The notion of Face-work is used as an important complement to Engagement to further explore the nature of interaction between participants. The data has been analysed in two main ways: linguistically and thematically. The linguistic analysis generally reveals that the participants in the closed group paid much more attention to face-work, and used both expansive and contractive resources of Engagement almost in equal measure, while their open group counterparts tended more towards contractive resources and paid less attention to face-work. The interactions of both groups, however, point to the existing ethno-political mobilisation and polarisation in the country. The study also teases out several extra discursive strategies which it proposes for consideration as possible add-ons to the Engagement framework. Lastly, the thematic analysis reveals new important ways through which participants conceive ethnicity, especially as constituting interethnic relations.

Thesis advisor: Patrick McQuillan / This case study examines the micropolitical strategies that a coach and seven teachers utilized to negotiate ideological and epistemological beliefs during required common planning time meetings for the period of one semester in an urban middle school. Theories of micropolitics and critical discourse analysis guided the development of the research questions that emphasized the political nature of the transactions and interactions between individuals within a school and how these negotiations were affected by the cultural and political climate of the district and the ideologies of individuals within that school about how students learn. The findings revealed how coaching as a reform strategy is highly influenced by the context of the school. The observations of mandated common planning time meetings, interviews with the coach and teachers, and other artifacts suggest that the power relationships between the members of the school community and political tensions of time, autonomy, ideological conflict, and trust influenced the discourse and interaction of the coach and teachers and influenced the implementation of the school's reform initiative. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Curriculum and Instruction.

A research report submitted to the Wits School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Applied English Language Studies by combination of coursework and research. Johannesburg, 2015 / This research project explores the linguistic experiences and the effects of these on the identities of two first-year ESL university students. Using a sociolinguistic framework, it explores the links between language and identity. The data for this study comes from examination essays written based on a first-year Sociolinguistics module in the English I course in the Wits School of Education and interviews conducted with two students. The analysis of this data reveals how these students’ linguistic identities, structured by their different backgrounds, facilitate and constrain the ways in which they adapt to university life. Both students focused on in this research shift in their identities as they attempt to adapt to the increasing number of different fields they encounter at university. Linguistic identity shifts are also evident as they re-enter the old fields in the communities in which they grew up. The two students must work to negotiate these differing identities both within and outside of the university. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field, guide this discussion and help to illustrate how students struggle to negotiate their identity. This study shows that owing to a conflict of capital and the fact that habitus is deeply entrenched layers of linguistic dispositions, linguistic identity is difficult to shift. Despite the fact that the University of the Witwatersrand is a super-diverse environment, with students bringing different kinds of linguistic capital to the various fields within this environment, this research projectargues that students struggle to find a place for themselves within this variety. It shows that the participants seek out affinity groups within which they feel they have sufficient linguistic capital. However, within these groups there is jostling for a linguistic identity as, in the face of policing and linguistic prejudice, they struggle to assert their sense of self in relation to their developing linguistic identities. KEYWORDS: linguistic identity, Discourse, field, habitus, capital, policing, prejudice, investment, voice.

Unearthing is a hybrid of nonfiction genres, and follows a narrator as she attempts to piece together past and present memories and meditations about family history, travel, and the idea of home. Using an orchid as a metaphor for someone who is searching for home, Unearthing attempts to expose in the author what might also be found in the reader, an exploration of what is meant by home. By following a trail of biography, personal narrative, and memoir, the reader is given every opportunity to identify with the narrator's struggle with the idea of rootlessness and rootedness, travel and home. / by Erin Hobbie. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.