My dissertation is a speculative analysis of the historical contexts of a social protest, based on the notion of "articulation" advanced in the field of cultural studies. Focusing on the 2008 candlelight protest against U.S. beef in South Korea, my goal is to explore the historical contexts of the protest, which formulate the identity of the protest. Since the U.S. beef deal was approved by the Korean government as a precondition for the Free Trade Agreement between Korea and the United States, the protest has been considered (notably by leftists in Korea) as a resistance against post-colonial overtones and fascist eco-political principle in the era of neoliberal globalization. Instead of understanding the protest from such an essentialist perspective, my research makes a commitment to exploring the exterior factors that drove the possibility of the protest. The notion of articulation, a mode of explanation that moves beyond any linear sort of causality, provides a framework to view the protest not as a unity, but as a linkage of multi-dimensional (political, economic, social, and cultural) elements of historical contexts. Based on my journal entries written during my participation in the protest, and the journal articles about the 2008 protest written by the scholars in Korea, I explored the main characteristics of the protest in comparison with the conventional social movements in Korea, and discovered that the 2008 candlelight protest had featured the "food safety issue," "participants with heterogeneous desires," "carnivalesque modality," and an "ambiguous goal." From these main features, I inferred four salient axes of historical vectors (and their forces) including "political democratization and depoliticization," "food industrialization and wellbeing fever," "market liberalization and job insecurity," and "advanced communication technology and carnivalesque culture." My research findings present that the 2008 candlelight protest is not a definite insurgent element calling for any deep change in the dominant political and economic paradigm, but exists as a paradoxical event at the cusp between subordination to and resistance against neoliberal globalization. The main contribution of my research project entails (1) pushing the boundaries of communication studies on social resistance by including the notion of articulation which situates the 2008 candlelight protest within its historical contexts, (2) developing speculative analysis as a critical and cultural studies method for exploring structural forces operating in deep layers of our experiences, (3) delineating the new modalities of contemporary social movements by examining the concrete textures and hues of the 2008 candlelight protest, and (4) offering new ways of (re)thinking the principles of efficiency and economic growth by interrogating a case of food industrialization and global exchange.

This thesis is a critical examination of newspaper coverage of Canadian-born cases of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) discovered between May 2003 and December 2005. Data for the thesis has been compiled from three newspapers: the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, and the Globe & Mail. The Alberta newspapers were chosen for their proximity to the BSE discoveries, and the Globe & Mail was chosen for the national focus of its coverage. Using Fairclough’s method of ordering discourses, I examine three discourses prominently featured in the coverage: the political discourse, the science discourse, and the socio-cultural discourse. I analyse the three discourses independently, incorporating relevant theory to further explicate the discourses. The primary focus of the thesis is on the newspaper coverage of the first Canadian-born BSE case, but newspaper coverage of additional discoveries are included to examine how the BSE media package changed over time.

There is no known cure for the family of diseases known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies. These include the infamous Mad Cow disease-technically known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)--as well as its human form, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Although BSE was initially diagnosed in Britain in 1986, the first U.S. regulation to prevent BSE was not enacted until three years later. This delayed reaction proved to be a trend amongst the regulatory agencies responsible for keeping the U.S. food supply safe and BSE-free. The focus of this study is to delineate the degree of U.S. government liability in the event of a BSE outbreak. This study takes into account the various aspects of administrative law as it relates to liability, along with the numerous medical and scientific documents from domestic as well as international authorities, to determine governmental liability. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that the U.S. regulatory agencies concerned with food safety have created legislation consistently favoring industry concerns over those of public health. The legal system of a truly civilized society should be derived from ethical principles, which are then applied to institutions like the economy. When the process is reversed, when laws are based on industrial or economic concerns, ethics becomes an after-thought. This thesis sheds light on the government's handling of the threat of BSE: its shortcomings, competence, failures and successes. - ---