Through analysis of written texts produced by school districts and high schools with predominantly Mexican American populations, beliefs about Mexican American students that mediate attitudes and expectations can be exposed. In this work, I conduct comparative critical discourse analyses (CDA) of school district and high school mission statements from a total of 35 schools and 20 school districts in the Southwestern United States and Chicago, Illinois. The sites were selected because of their large to predominantly Mexican American students populations. Of the 35 school mission statements I researched, 19 were from predominantly Mexican American high schools and 16 were from predominantly White high schools. Of the 20 school district mission statements I collected, 11 were from largely to predominantly Mexican American school districts and 9 were from largely to predominantly White school districts.Analyses conducted in this study of the mission statements utilizing several `tools' of CDA revealed ideologies, or ideological discursive formations (IDFs), of low expectations and negative attitudes for Mexican American students when compared to White students. These IDFs materialize by way of frames and signs that are (re)created in the district and school mission statements. The IDFs serve to mediate the discourses that are utilized to describe Mexican American students and the districts and schools they attend. These discourses serve to mediate beliefs about Mexican American students that in turn reinforce the IDFs already in place.Understanding the types of discourses that (re)produce low expectations for and negative attitudes about Mexican American students is a first step in changing these schooling discourses that ultimately contribute to low academic achievement.

Canada’s public immigration discourse is usually racialized in using an ideological framework to evaluate, select and make judgements of immigrants on whether they are culturally, socially, or economically desirable to Canada. Some social and economic affairs may present a discursive context for debates over immigration and the value of immigrants to Canada. By using a critical discourse analysis of news articles on immigration in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail in four historical phases after the end of the Second World War, this study examines how the contents of “desirable immigrants” were changed throughout history. This study questions whether some social political affairs in a country or an extreme economic situation such as high unemployment can change the social boundaries of exclusion for immigrants of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds and allow more direct and exclusionary racial messages to be expressed in the discourse. The findings indicate that during economic recessions, it is more acceptable for the media and the public to express more directly racist messages about non-white immigrants, and some political factors and major social events may also influence how different ethnic groups of immigrants can be socially constructed. While a liberal democratic country like Canada may not accept overt racial discrimination, I argue that a social crisis or economic recession can change the social boundaries of exclusion for immigrants of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds and justify using more blatant racial messages in discussing immigrants.

The aim with this thesis was to investigate how the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet construct and reproduce imaginations of gender and gender order. An important premise for our work is the agenda theory, which states that media has great impact on what is on their audience mind. We chose to investigate how Aftonbladet wrote about two Swedish footballers, Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, during a European championship with each players national team. By using a method of critical discourse analysis based on Teun van Dijks idea and with gender glasses, we analysed eight articles and two chronicles regarding each player. Our results show that Aftonbladet construct and reproduce gender and gender order by its different ways of portraying Lotta Schelin and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Articles regarding Lotta Schelin tend to be more audience oriented, focus more on her and her teammates emotions and more often focus on things outside her profession as a footballer. On a contrary, articles regarding Zlatan Ibrahimovic tend to upgrade masculinity, power and more often highlights his performances on the pitch. He is also portrayed as a person of much greater status than Lotta Schelin.

A new approach to oceans and coastal governance – influenced by ecosystem-based management and resilience thinking, by spatial approaches to management and by decentralized or participatory governance – a policy of integrated management was defined in the years following the Oceans Act (1986). The motivation for this study arose from the resistance of project partners in the Coastal CURA (a five-year, SSHRC-funded, multi-partner research project designed to support coastal community engagement in resource governance) to the thinking and practice of government-supported “integrated management”. In response, I developed a conceptual framework for examining integrated management from a critical, community-based perspective, drawing on political ecology, geography and policy studies. I apply this framework to a study of policy discourses in the Canadian Maritime Provinces to examine: i) their role in framing what options, participants, and knowledges are included in fisheries and coastal policy, regulation and institutions; ii) how power relationships are enacted and how access to resources are altered through integrated management approaches to coastal resource governance; iii) community resistance through alternative discourses and models. Within this study, I use governmentality and critical policy analysis as tools for analyzing the retreat of the state on the one hand (through decentralized and participatory governance), and the application of new technologies of governance on the other, and for examining the effects these movements have on coastal citizens. By naturalising the state as the appropriate scale and competent party for managing coastal problems, coastal communities are framed out of governing the commons. However, this study demonstrates how counter-discourses can re-imagine communities, and their practices and knowledges, in a discursive policy struggle. This thesis situates these puzzles in three case studies, one of regional policy discourses and two community case studies in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin and Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick.

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.

Through an analysis of History Geography and Social Science subject matter in the elementary level curriculum in Chile, this thesis highlights the role of official education in constructing a notion of human being that gravitates toward Whiteness. The law of education and the curriculum are analyzed to examine the way in which official curriculum operates as a mechanism for oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. It is argued that through the curriculum, a national ideology that incorporates a hegemonic notion of ideal human being and citizen is promoted. Using an anti-colonial, anti-racist discursive framework, and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, this work locates Chilean official education and curriculum as the culmination of colonial and racist notion of human and citizenship values supported by the neoliberal state. The researcher advocates for equity and justice in the education system that acknowledges Chile as a multicultural country where different ways of knowing coexist.

This thesis explores the potential for ethico-politically committed cultural critique in investigating lived experiences of gender in the hegemonic global north, where the neo/liberal rhetoric of sexual equality tends to portray issues of gender as already sufficiently addressed. It argues that the ideological roots of dominant gender discourses can be productively explored through the interrelated histories of Christianities and neo/liberalisms that have powerfully shaped mainstream Canadian society. Supported by an extensive body of literature bringing religious studies, feminist, and queer theory to bear on sociological and political questions, this rhetoric is investigated by applying critical discourse analysis to transcripts of interviews conducted over a year of participant observation with the members of a local United Church women’s discussion group. Findings suggest a complex set of attachments, rejections, and ambivalent attitudes toward those elements of feminism that have entered into the social, cultural, political and economic discourses that have become dominant in Canada. The discussion of results considers the forces which produced respondents’ general complacency with the status quo of gender equality along with their hesitancy to make judgments about the validity of competing claims regarding gender ethics. Analysis concludes by examining the implication of these attitudes for the prospects of gender justice movements, especially those conceived in terms of allyship and coalition-building at the intersection of different axes of identity and practice. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-14 13:34:43.664

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This study is an attempt to construct a theoretical and descriptive framework for the analysis of lexicogrammatical, semantic and semiotic cohesion, called the Extended Systemic Cohesive Model. This model is an extension of the Halliday-Hasan model (1976) whose descriptive range is limited to lexicogrammatical cohesion. The classical hypothesis that cohesion is realized through the lexicogrammatical system is proved to be inadequate. An alternative thesis is proposed and justified: that cohesion is captured at lexicogrammatical, semantic and semiotic levels. As a result, a linguistic framework is constructed which explicitly accounts for the properties that make a text hang together at these three particular levels, and its applicability is tested against given empirical data. The discussion is focused on how and why the above three types of cohesion contribute to the unity of a text plus a critical review of previous relevant work.

This study seeks to confront the ontological crises of the subject. Through an examination of twentieth century texts (including fiction, autobiography and Freudian case studies), I demonstrate the effects of subjective compliance with disembodied discourses. Using psychoanalytic theory, I ask: What are the ethical limits of interpretation within the psychoanalysis and literary criticism? And what alternative strategies of intersubjective exchange could we employ that would aspire to avoid instances of such hermeneutic tyranny? / Further, what evidence is there that the subject, in the face of overwhelming discursive compliance, continues attempting to realize its ontological status? My hypothesis is that while theory (i.e. discourse) may prove beneficial to the subject, it should not endeavour to prevent the subject itself from Being. Taking subjective ontology, and not liberation or self-representation, as the primary goal of interpretation, I explore means by which we may provide "good enough facilitating environments" for the subject.