The starting point of this thesis is the debate surrounding the two referenda’s in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005, regarding the proposal of a European constitution. The aim of this study is to analyse how democratic legitimacy and the role of the citizens portrays within the democratic discourse of the European Union. The empirical material is based upon both speeches from the European Commission and news articles from the French newspaper Libération and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Discourse analysis is used as a theoretical frame of reference combined with models of democracy. The results of the study is that democracy is still defined by it’s traditional values but have also shifted into being a concept combined with effectivity. This has effects on the citizens and their role in the EU has been stripped down to only legitimize the decisions, the people should simply ”say yes to yes”.

The purpose of this essay is to examine sfi (Swedish for immigrants), which is an ingrational-political tool with objective of teaching immigrants to read and write in Swedish. With the use of critical discourse analysis we examine the discursive practices within sfi. We also examine our methodological and theoretical approaches, and our application of them. Our research questions are as follows: • How are the discursive usage of “person centered” and “society centered” expressions being used? • How well does our methodological and theoretical resources work? In our theoretical viewpoint we use “post colonial theory”, which is a perspective concerned with global power relations seen from a historical perspective. Colonialism, in this view, still continues to determine the course of the world and cultural identity formation even after it has formally ended. According to our second theoretical viewpoint, “Governmentality”, the focus of analysis concerns differing forms of control. The shift from the state to the individual is of special interest. The results of the analysis show that the integrational-political discourse order within sfi seems to be fragile. We also find that “person centered” expressions are more frequent than “society centered” ones. The results also show that our theoretical and methodological resources are bound with certain difficulties. Firstly, critical discourse analysis has been found to be inadequate with regard to our empirical material. It was first when we applied Ulrich Becks theory regarding individualization that the discursive practice became comprehensible in a larger context. Secondly, our results showed that governmentality was problematic in the context in which it was used.

The subject of this thesis is how a suspected criminal has been described in written swedish media. The topic of the articles is the investigation of a man suspected for murder and for dismembering the victim during the winter of 2011. The purpose of this thesis is to try to answer the question of what the newspapers actually write to describe a suspect before he or she has been trialed in court. For the analyse of the articles, published in four of Swedens largest newspapers, critical discourse analysis has been used. The results have been compared with other analyses made on other cases and have been discussed with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of action. Results of the thesis show that there are similarities beetween this study and others, in a number of ways. The descriptions of the suspect are influenced by wich agent is allowed to speak in the text, by the words that are used in the articles and if the agents in the texts are known to the reader or not.

Through six months of ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observation and ten individual semi-structured interviews, I sought to determine how dominant discourses in dance, especially those pertaining to professionalism, ability, validity, and legitimacy, are circulated in and through training, and how we as dancers responded to these discourses. Following the stand alone thesis format, this thesis is comprised of two publishable papers. The first is an ethnography of one integrated dance company’s members’ experience with negotiating space for alternative forms of dance in contemporary dance. The second is an autoethnographic piece of writing where I show the challenges of resisting dominant discourses of validity and legitimacy in both qualitative research as well as contemporary dance. Together, these papers form a thesis that strengthens our scholarly understanding of the discourses and associated tensions at work in participating in and writing about integrated dance.

This thesis examines the relationship between worker identity and workplace practices from the perspectives of white and Aboriginal women working in a multinational forest company in the northern prairies. Over the course of three manuscripts I demonstrate the salience of ascribed and constructed identities of women to their experiences and representations of forest employment and corporate discourse. Setting the context for the remainder of the thesis, the first manuscript presents an analysis of employment segregation by gender and Aboriginal identity in Canadas forest sector in 2001 using segregation indices. Results demonstrate that forest employment was vertically segregated by both gender and Aboriginal ancestry in the forest sector in 2001. Men and women of First Nations ancestry were over represented in less-stable and lower paying occupations in woods based forest industries, and both white and First Nations women were over represented in forest services and clerical occupations. To explore womens perceptions of company practices of diversity management and restructuring, I then analysed interviews with women working in forest processing using critical discourse analysis. In my second manuscript, I demonstrated how womens representations of diversity management practices were linked to their social identities in terms of Aboriginal identity and class. Yet, as a whole, these representations prompted a questioning of the meaning of difference within diversity management, and of diversity managements ability to further the interests of marginalised workers. My third manuscript examining representations of restructuring, argues that there is a two way relationship between womens identities as workers and their representations of restructuring. Whether women reproduced or resisted restructuring was linked to their presented work identities and restructuring and practices in turn were helping to shape womens worker subjectivities. Results from this thesis demonstrated that how women represent themselves and workplace practices is related to their different experiences in the specific set of social relations of forestry work in the northern prairies.

Coverage for the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) has been low since the publication of Wakefield’s 1998 study associating MMR with the onset of autism. As a part of a larger project on risk communication, this study examined the medical discourse on parental decision-making for childhood immunizations to gain insight on why risk communication efforts have not been successful at improving uptake. The Public Understanding of Science (PUS) was used as a theoretical lens to guide Critical Discourse Analysis of texts from medical, pediatric, and public health journals, from which the analytic themes of Risk and Trust emerged. MMR uptake was framed mainly in terms of risk, indicating the dominance of the Deficit Model of PUS in the discourse. Future research and risk communication need to expand beyond current notions of risk; the Contextual Model of PUS can help highlight other factors that impact parental decision-making about MMR.

Coverage for the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) has been low since the publication of Wakefield’s 1998 study associating MMR with the onset of autism. As a part of a larger project on risk communication, this study examined the medical discourse on parental decision-making for childhood immunizations to gain insight on why risk communication efforts have not been successful at improving uptake. The Public Understanding of Science (PUS) was used as a theoretical lens to guide Critical Discourse Analysis of texts from medical, pediatric, and public health journals, from which the analytic themes of Risk and Trust emerged. MMR uptake was framed mainly in terms of risk, indicating the dominance of the Deficit Model of PUS in the discourse. Future research and risk communication need to expand beyond current notions of risk; the Contextual Model of PUS can help highlight other factors that impact parental decision-making about MMR.

This study uses discourse analysis to investigate and compare the coverage of America in two Chinese official newspapers, the Chinese language People’s Daily and the English language China Daily in January in 1989, 1999, and 2009. This study compares the two newspapers in four aspects of the texts: topic selection, headline design, writing tactics, and visual components use, to find any differences in reporting tactics according to their different readerships. People’s Daily employed a constant editorial preference for political content and a provocative reporting tactics. Meanwhile, China Daily used a more global editorial approach. Its content and its reports were increasingly consistent with Western journalism criteria: accurate, brief, and clear.

This thesis uses the discourse analysis methods developed by T. Van Dijk and J. P. Gee to examine public debate over the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001 as it arose in testimony before the U. S. House of Representatives and related news articles published in the New York Times and Washington Post. In analyzing the language used in the congressional hearings and news articles printed between January 2001 and December 2004, Van Dijk‘s categories and related questions were methodologically combined with Gee‘s approach to provide a framework and method for analyzing the underlying discourse. While debate participants expressed strong beliefs in complex social ideals, many see America‘s social problems as intractable in nature, where key decisions about distributions of funds are based on political considerations, as opposed to merit or need.

Many Latin American countries have during the past decades experienced an increase in violence (Howard et al 2007:716). The expansion of youth gangs and drug cartels in many countries of the region, and the states policy to fight these groups with a strong fist, has created a situation bearing the characteristics of an un-proclaimed civil war, that has come to affect all social classes (ibid:719). This expansion of the problem of violence, and the notion of insecurity it brings, has resulted in an increase in talk about the matter. As a way of trying to grasp control over a seemingly out of control issue, people automatically try to pin down characteristics of the potential perpetrators. Already socially excluded people and minorities on the bottom of the social hierarchy are the ones that have to suffer the stigmatization of criminality as they are seen as more prone to assort to crime and violence due to their economical desperate and unjust living situations (Caldeira 2000:92). These people that are the most exposed and vulnerable to the effects of economic development become personified with the problems that social exclusion and economic inequality creates, such as crime and violence (Howard et al 2007:716). As these groups of people become criminalized, the question of solving these issues becomes not a question of solving the root causes such as the economic inequalities, but the government’s ability to keep these social groups at bay (Caldeira 2000:90). An increase in violence and crime is therefore not perceived as a result of inequality in income and opportunity, but rather as the result of a weak state (ibid). This aim of this research is to analyze how media discourses in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, contributes to the personification of the residents of the Favelas as violent and criminal. This paper will follow the lines of critical discourse analysis theories, which argue that media discourses justify unequal power relations in society and enforces inequality and the social exclusion of minorities (Van Dijk 1988:25). It will also be argued that it is this stereotypical view of the residents of the Favela as inheritably criminal and violent which lead to dehumanization of them and the justification of the killings of civilians in these neighborhoods (Caldeira 2000:20; Goldstein 2003:205; Perlman 2010:172).