Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-151). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss&rft%5Fval%5Ffmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss:MQ99343

Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2006. / "Submitted to Department of English and Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-263)

This research paper aims to show how racism, power, social representations and identity are created and reproduced through the media. The research paper will analyse newspaper articles presented about Cronulla riot in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, CDA, as a theory and method. The research paper aims to demonstrate how inequality in the Australian society is reproduced by the media through the use stereotypes and certain social representations and how knowledge and awareness about this is relevant to social work of today.

The interest of this thesis is how the information society will be expressed in some public texts. The focus is especially on how such concepts as learning, knowledge, identity and IT as a tool will be constructed discursively. In a social constructionist meaning the future will be created through communication and interaction between people. Some Swedish Government Official Reports (SGOR) and journals have been analyzed with critical discourse analysis. On a wide level four strong discourses will constitute the discourse order of the information society. These four are the discourses of the market economy, the discourse of globalisation, the discourse of individualisation and the discourse of IT. Further IT has been the cause to a “new” dynamic society that is “in advance”, under “change” and “refinement”. This society is at the same time global and local, which means “glocal”. It is populated by the “new” human who is a “nomad” who will have a great own responsibility to adapt to the “loose structures” of the new society. The individual will be held before the collective. IT will “deliver” and reinforce the human abilities. Knowledge has been a commodity, which can be bought and sold worldwide. Knowledge will grow old very fast and because of that we need access to “fast knowledge” “just-in-time”. To describe the qualities of IT the analysed texts use metaphors. The metaphor “ghost” will fulfil our wishes in an unexplained way, the metaphor “wings” is about freedom and the metaphor “lever” explains that our abilities will be enhanced, in this specific case our cognitive abilities. The analysed texts both confirm earlier pictures of the information society and develop them further. Three positions can be distinguished. The first of them is that the IT will be expressed as ”force of nature” which as a revolution will change our society. The second one is how the force in IT is expressed almost like science fiction stories. The texts tell about the future as it already was here. The third position says that the new society is full of paradoxes. The problems in the world, even those that have been caused by the technology, can and should be solved, not only with more technology, but with the same technology which have caused the problems. The discursive paradoxes, which will be highlighted in the results, make the development of IT to an unavoidable part of the social practice of the future. There are no choices or alternatives.

Abstract Carlsson, Lena (2006). ). Medborgarskap som demokratins praktiska uttryck i skolan. Diskursiva konstruktioner av gymnasieelever som medborgare. Citizenship as the practical expression of democracy at school. Discursive constructions of upper secondary pupils as citizens. School and education have a specific status owing to their task to educate young citizens and further their development. It is thus possible to regard schools as a type of public sphere, where individual and private matters are transcended. According to the curriculum for the secondary school system, the professional school staff´s task is two-fold insofar as they should mediate both knowledge and democracy. In this doctoral thesis the focus is placed on how and by what means education can contribute to young members of society finding their place and coping with their roles as citizens in a democratic society. The overall aim of this thesis is to present a deeper interpretation of the meanings and consequences of teachers´ speech concerning upper secondary pupils as citizens. More specifically, the aim is to empirically problematise and theoretically reconstruct pedagogical discourses on citizenship as practical expressions of demoracy in the context of education. Two central terms, which are thus highlighted are democracy and citizenship. Both Durkheim and Dewey provide significant theoretical points of departure, which are drawn upon in this thesis. Bourdieu contributes with perspectives on the ideological role, which institutions of education play in legitimising already existing societal orders. Foucault poses questions about power and knowledge. Habermas’ emphasis is placed on the discursive rationality expressed in verbal communication, which serves as an overall perspective for this thesis. Thus, in terms of methodology language constitutes the most central tool. Analyses are made in three stages. Reforms and policy are supposed to have been created within a central discursive framework and are therefore examined by way of analytical perusal of a) post-war education policy texts and b) current national policy documents concerning the Business and Administration Programme in upper secondary education. The third stage involves analysis of c) eight conversations from the professional school staff’s discursive practice by applying critical discourse analysis as a methodological tool. Four separate discourses have evolved, each pointing to different perspectives on human beings, knowledge and society: a discursive perception which is directed towards traditional values, a second perception which has communication and democracy as its superior ideal, and yet another discourse is directed towards trade and industry while, finally, one more discourse which is mainly characterised by a protective attitude towards pupils. Finally, how these contradictory as well as concordant discourses dictate the conditions and frameworks for the sort of citizenship which is constructed and constituted in the pedagogical practice is discussed, and thus how school as a public sphere may be understood in a more profound way. Key words: democracy, citizenship, critical discourse analysis, discursive constructions, reforms, policy, communication.

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.