Discursive psychology was used to analyze constructions of Canadian Muslim identities in the Canadian mainstream daily press. News and opinion discourse from a six-month period (November 1, 2008 - April 30, 2009) was examined. Whereas previous research has typically focused on negative news coverage, I examined the full range of identity portrayals of Canadian Muslims available in the daily press. Not unexpectedly, the most overtly negative identity constructions of Canadian Muslims were found in coverage of terrorism trials. In that coverage, the accused were typically worked up as endorsing an extreme interpretation of Islam. These extreme descriptions of the accused may suggest a particularized and therefore non-representative Muslim identity. Negative identity was also constructed in articles that reported on Canadian Muslims’ interactions with the legal and immigration systems: the behaviours of some Canadian Muslims (e.g., polygamy) were formulated as a threat to mainstream Canadian social values. The coverage also dealt with the issue of discrimination against Canadian Muslims. The case for discrimination was accomplished via comparison (e.g., government treatment of Muslim versus non-Muslim Canadians). However, in some coverage, Canadian Muslims were indirectly and subtly portrayed as possibly deserving of discriminatory treatment. Canadian Muslims were favourably portrayed when they: 1) upheld mainstream Canadian social values, 2) had a sense of humour about their Muslim identity, and 3) educated non-Muslim Canadians about Islam. However, favourable identity constructions of Canadian Muslims were often accompanied by background information that negatively portrayed Muslims in general. This juxtaposition of positive representations of individual Canadian Muslims with negative general information about Muslims and Islam may have subtly suggested that good Muslims are an exception rather than the norm. Overall, it was found that Canadian press coverage offers a fuller picture of Canadian Muslim identity than elsewhere (e.g., the U.S. and the U.K.). However, Sampson’s (1993) distinction between accommodative and transformative voice suggests that this picture is still incomplete. Several possibilities for improvement are suggested; for example, the press’s reliance on ready-made news (e.g., staged events) may provide opportunities to increase favourable identity portrayals of Canadian Muslims.

Media construction of major terrorist attacks has received much attention ever since the 1970s in the field of Communication Sciences. Recently, investigations of media participation in the framing process of terrorist attacks have highlighted media’s role in the meaning-making of the attacks and the construction of identity, opposition and confrontation after the attack, indicating the relations of media to the attacked country, the authorities, the readership and terrorism. This thesis tries to analyze a specific discursive phenomenon “country-bashing” in a relational way with other discourses in terms of identity construction and value conflicts in media construction of the terrorist attacks in London (2005) and Paris (November 2015). The aim is to investigate how country-bashing is related to the core idea of media framing of the terrorist attacks. We start from identifying the emphasized frames with quantitative thematic analysis and cluster analysis on four British national daily newspapers, and the case studies of two terrorist attacks are conducted with a discursive approach of framing analysis.In this thesis, eight emphasized frames are identified, which consist a schematic model of media construction of terrorist attacks. The case study on London attacks reveals that country-bashing is focused on political actors and religious minority (suspected community), which facilitates the problem definition and responsibility attribution and finally promote the framing of “war provokes revenge”. In the case of the Paris attacks, France-bashing is a dynamic discursive system which contains an interplay of different types of bashing, shifting with the interpretative framework of event construction (from local context to European context).The thesis concluds that the phenomenon of “country-bashing” is a dynamic (re)construction of relations among the people, the country and the “other”. We summarize 4 types bashing within this discursive system, which are actor country- bashing, policy-bashing, negative branding (places) and systematic bashing. While the first two types of bashing can lead to a complete causality to terror attacks, the latter two provides a fragmented reading and open to further meaning-making. The results of the schematic model of media construction and the types of country-bashing can be used as an aid for further empirical investigation. / Doctorat en Information et communication / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study underscores the importance of press discourse as means of production and circulation of representations regarding land and people. Considering the press has a strong influence on the construction of social imaginaries, this study explores how textual images in The (London) Times and The New York Times shaped public opinion about Patagonia and Patagonians and how those images relate to the United States and British national and international political agendas and to the historical/cultural context. In other words, this study proposes to analyze the relationship between media and agency. The time period under study is the second half of the nineteenth century the era during which Argentina focused on the need for exercising sovereignty over Patagonia as a way of expanding the state's frontier, incorporating new commercially productive lands to respond to the demands of the international market, contesting in this way the Chilean interests in the area, and responding to the demands of the aspirations of a ruling class "landed aristocrats" who wanted to attract Europeans. The analysis of this research draws on a total number of 669 articles which have been coded with the purpose of assessing the differences between the United States and British imaging of Patagonia and Patagonians, taking into consideration that England was directly linked through financial investment to Argentina while the United States had chosen a military policy to expand its control of western lands (1865-1890), similar to the Argentine policy for controlling northern and southern lands. / Master of Arts

Through their coverage in the mass media transgender people and the trans rights movement have only recently stepped into the public eye. Because this emergence is so recent, it has not been widely studied within the field of linguistics. This thesis aims to explore the representation of transgender people in newspapers using an approach informed by corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Using collocation and concordance line analysis it identifies and discusses what semantic prosodies exist surrounding transgender people in The Daily Mail and The Guardian during 2015–2017. Many different semantic prosodies were found, and most of them were neither clearly negative nor positive towards transgender people. The prosodies were found to sometimes overlap and reinforce each other, and dominant news stories surrounding transgender people seemed to have great staying power. The overall conclusion is that transgender language in newspapers is still in its formative years and that additional research in this field is necessary. / <p>2018-08-21</p>

The national day of Australia, officially referred to as Australia Day, can be seen as a celebration of Australian culture or as a symbol of colonialism. Previous research shows that how newspapers frame events can impact the readers’ understanding of how reality is represented (Baker et al., 2013). Therefore, this thesis investigates how Australia Day is framed in Australian news articles and whether the framing of Australia Day differs in left- and right-leaning newspapers. The data consists of two corpora of news articles about Australia Day published in left- and right-leaning newspapers between 2018 and 2022. These corpora were analysed from a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) perspective. The results indicate that the national day is framed as a controversial day in both right- and left-leaning newspapers, most saliently referred to as Australia Day or Invasion Day. In right-leaning newspapers, Australia Day celebrations are framed as positive, while anti-Australia Day protests and the use of the term Invasion Day are portrayed as negative. Furthermore, in right-leaning newspapers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples are reported to have more important priorities than changing the date for Australia Day. In contrast, the left-leaning newspapers are more prone to frame the national day as disrespectful towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples and signal that a potential future change of date is positive. Overall, this study suggests that the political orientation of the newspaper can impact how the national day is framed.