Islamic feminism in Iran is defined as the radical rethinking of religious and sacred texts from a feminist perspective. The purpose of this research is to show how an Islamic feminist discourse developed in Iran, and to outline the differences between the reformist and traditionalist epistemological foundations of women’s rights discourse in Iran.This study, using documentary research methods, demonstrates that central to the development of Islamic feminism is the development of the reformist movement in Iran. Moreover, it is shown that the main impedance to women’s equality in Iran is the traditionalist epistemology in religious law. While reformists believe that employing justice in Islamic law requires absolute equality regarding both men and women’s rights, traditionalists present a different interpretation of the notion of justice. According to the traditionalist discourse, since men and women have natural and inborn differences, two separate kinds of law are needed to regulate their lives.

CDA is a multi-disciplinary approach to discourse which study the relationship between discourse, power and ideology. This makes the application of it on political discourse very suitable since it can be applied to analyse the specific structures of language and ideologies used by politicians to influence the recipient’s mind and hence their actions. This paper, based on a CDA’s framework, investigates the connection between the discursive strategies and the ideological strategies used by Donald Trump to represent immigrants during the 2016 presidential campaign. In so doing this study utilizes Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (2001) of doing CDA and Van Dijk’s ideological Square (2006,2011) to analyse Trump’s speech on immigration delivered in Phoenix, Arizona during the elections of 2016. The results have shown that when talking about immigrants Trump represents them only negatively by describing them as being a threat, economic burden and deviant.This is done by exploiting the strategies of actor description, polarization, victimization, empathy, topos, number game, illustrations, lexicalization, syntax, predicational strategies, comparison, evidentiality, local coherence, implication and generalization. This led to the conclusion that by choosing to emphasize the bad actions of immigrants and ignoring their positive actions, Trump was addressing and appealing to the White Americans only.

abstract: This study tests the hypothesis and assumption of much critical scholarship that the discourse of mass media news transmits prejudicial ideologies to news consumers, influencing the way they think about social justice issues and non-dominant groups in American society, including immigrants, women, and African-Americans. Taking off from the motivations and premises of Critical Discourse Analysis concerning language, power, and ideology, this study aims to extend that paradigm in several ways by applying the analytic techniques of cognitive and critical linguistics to uncover implicit representations in biased discourse. This study also goes beyond previous work by examining the reader comments on media texts to understand how the media’s discourse was received and interpreted, with a focus on the covert transmission of ideological messages. The results reveal how ideologies of prejudice are communicated implicitly through media discourse and how readers’ own ideologies influence that process, as evidenced by their comments. As a study in Critical Discourse Analysis, this study uncovers abuses of power impacting social justice – in this case, the power of writing for the mass media to mold American minds, and therefore influence Americans’ behavior, including elections. Specific news articles from the American networks CNN and Fox were chosen on each of two topics for their relevance to current sociopolitical issues of prejudice and social justice: the US Supreme Court June 2018 decision to uphold the Trump administration “travel ban” and the January 2019 Gillette advertisement, considered controversial for its seemingly feminist criticism of male behavior. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

This study examines teacher questioning with the purpose of identifying what types of mathematical questions are being modeled by the teacher. Teacher questioning is important because it is the major source of mathematical questioning discourse from which students can learn and copy. Teacher mathematical questioning discourse in a conceptually-oriented classroom is important to study because it is helpful to promote student understanding and may be useful for students to adopt in their own mathematical questioning discourse. This study focuses on the types of questions that comprise the mathematical questioning discourse of a university teacher in a conceptually-oriented mathematics classroom for preservice elementary teachers. I present a categorization of the types of questions, an explanation of the different categories and subcategories of questions, and an analysis and count of the teacher's use of the questions. This list of question types can be used (1) by conceptually-oriented teachers to explicitly teach the important mathematical questions students should be asking during mathematical activity, (2) by teachers who wish to change their instruction to be more conceptually-oriented, and (3) by researchers to understand and improve teachers' and students' mathematical questioning.

This dissertation brings two recent strands of research together and attempts to contribute to two areas of study: (1) apocalyptic Paul studies and (2) the discipline of intertextuality. When apocalyptic Paul is concerned, many works utilize comparative literature approaches. The present study, however, is different in two respects. First, this study sees intertextuality and apocalyptic as a cultural semiotic that is a meaning potential in culture. Whereas many intertextual studies focus on how later texts employ earlier texts for literary and theological purposes, the present study views culture as a matrix of intertextuality. In addition, this study deems apocalyptic as a cultural discourse that society and culture share to understand transcendent phenomena and events. The second distinctiveness of this study is its analytic method. Instead of word-to-word comparison, we investigate whether Paul’s letters present similar patterns of semantic relations between apocalyptic thematic items. After identifying recurrent thematic formations throughout multiple texts, this study explores Paul’s heteroglossia (different voices) in the thematic formations. As such, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic can be construed, when we scrutinize, first, how the apocalyptic languages or themes are used in culture, and second, how Paul differently employs them from others. To paraphrase, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic language can be vivid when the same apocalyptic thematic formations in Paul’s letters present different linguistic features from other writings. Through this procedure, the present study argues that though Paul shares similar thematic formations with other texts in the Greco-Roman world, the apostle’s apocalyptic thought is significantly distinctive from others. In Paul’s apocalyptic discourse, Jesus is the primary participant that interacts with other thematic items. Also, the apostle’s peculiar linguistic features in the shared apocalyptic formations converge around one figure that is Christ. In other words, Christ takes the central role in his apocalyptic discourse. Christ, therefore, is the apocalyptic lens for Paul to shape his understandings of transcendent phenomena (i.e., otherworldly journey, resurrection, sin and evil, and the two-age apocalyptic eschatology) through Christ.

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The present dissertation examines social stratification, as well as social inequality and its reproduction through government textual representations in a community in the outskirts of Mexico City: Ciudad Satélite. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach and interdisciplinary methodological tools, this study defines the type(s) and salient features of discourse used in government written communication in Cd. Satélite, as well as how some discursive strategies operate. The objective of the analysis is to illuminate how citizens interpret government communication in the subject community, and to illustrate how the Plain Language campaign has impacted such community. Chapter I demarcates the analytical background and guidelines, and it reviews several studies that focus on oral and written discourse in order to establish the basis of the communicative relationship between citizen and government. It also explains the relation of the subject community to the structure of the Mexican government. Chapter II provides a detailed description of Ciudad Satélite, the corpus and the surveyed citizens, and it also establishes the relation to the analytical guidelines. It also explains the methods used for the collection of linguistic and graphic data, and it demarcates how data was sorted and coded. The data analyses are in Chapters III and IV. Chapter III broaches linguistic accessibility of government written communication through a quantitative analysis of readability indexes as a way to shed light on accessibility of government documents. It explains the terminology, significant markers of readability and how they relate to each other. It then explores readability levels of documents, tasks, and government offices, and how and which particular social groups interact with texts using variables such as gender, age, education, occupation and identity. Chapter IV takes a multimodal approach of salient identified modes through qualitative and quantitative approaches. It considers citizens’ reaction to semiotic data and incorporates their responses in the analysis, which aim to describe the political representations in the linguistic landscape of the subject community and how citizens perceive such representations. This chapter also explores the type of persuasion used by government in the subject community through specific graphic images. Chapter V provides a discussion of all relevant data that aims towards explaining how certain meanings are perceived and thus created and maintained in the government-citizen text interaction. It explores accessibility of government linguistic resources considering readability indexes, modal representations and symbolic power, in order to show the unequal access to institutionally controlled linguistic resources. / Spanish

This study set out to explore the ways in which non-STEM academics, working within UK universities that had positioned themselves publicly as ‘entrepreneurial’ institutions, interpret and negotiate the related concepts of the entrepreneurial academic and university. The entrepreneurial university concept has become a ubiquitous theme in higher education and policy literatures in recent decades, having been described variously as an ‘idea for its time’ (Shattock, 2010) and the ‘end-point of the evolution of the idea of the university’ (Barnett, 2010, p.i). This research set out to interrogate some of the key ways in which this institutional form, and the corresponding concept of the entrepreneurial academic, have been discursively constructed by advocates in the UK and beyond. Further to this, the study aimed to collect narratives of experience from non-STEM academics employed by self-described ‘entrepreneurial’ universities, both to enquire into how they interpreted the ‘entrepreneurial paradigm’, and to invite them to report on how they felt that their university’s assumption of an enterprise mission had, or had not, influenced its organisational ‘culture’ and their subjectively experienced academic work-lives. The researcher’s interest in the relationship between enterprise discourse and the organisational ‘culture’ of universities stemmed from the apparent consensus within the scholarly and policy literature about the need for universities to develop an integrated ‘entrepreneurial culture’ (Clark, 1998, p.7)(Gibb, 2006b, p.2)(Rae, Gee and Moon, 2009) by pursuing a policy of ‘organisational culture change’, with culture here denoting ‘the realm of ideas, beliefs, and asserted values’ (Kwiek, 2008, p.115) which inhere within institutions. To this end, a series of semi-structured, interpretive interviews were carried out with participants from a range of non-STEM disciplines, working in a variety of university types in the UK. The researcher then employed a discourse-analytic method to delineate some of the ‘discursive repertoires’ that participants used to account for their professional practices, and report on their experiences in - and understandings of - the entrepreneurial university. What emerged from this analysis was a complex picture of ‘enterprise discourse’ within the contemporary university setting, as well as a general tendency amongst participants to adopt a position of ontological scepticism where the issue of ‘university culture’ was concerned. Further to this, it was determined that the ‘inclusive’ interpretation of entrepreneurialism typically employed by advocates for the paradigm had not generally been taken up by participants, for whom it was, for the most part, a phenomenon associated variously with ‘managerialism’, ‘market values’, ‘the business agenda’, ‘income generation’, ‘money making’, and the figure of the ‘individual, lone, romantic, heroic capitalist’. Additionally, where subjects were conversant in broader, more ‘social’ conceptions of academic entrepreneurialism, they typically reported that it was rarely articulated in the internal communications of their respective universities.

I den här uppsatsen synliggörs tendenser i hur barns och ungas läsning framställs i rapporter från fyra nationella läsfrämjande insatser som utförs på regeringsuppdrag, och deras koppling till demokratiska ideal och underliggande politiska motivationer för läsfrämjande. Uppsatsen har kritisk diskursanalys som teoretisk och metodologisk utgångspunkt och Faircloughs tredimensionella analysmodell används för att synliggöra diskurser ur ett kritiskt perspektiv i fyra rapporter från Kulturrådet och Skolverket: Bokstart i Sverige (2020), Nuläge om barns och ungas läsning (2023), Med barn och unga i fokus (2024) samt Utvärdering av Läslyftet (2019). Motivet för uppsatsens ämne är baserat på en ökning av läsfrämjande insatser som ett resultat av bland annat rapporter om barns och ungas sjunkande läsförmåga och PISAresultat. I analysens resultat framkommer flera exempel på ideological struggle, då det uppstår ideologiska konflikter både inom och utanför skolan om målgruppen för läsfrämjande och behovet av långsiktig utvärdering av insatser. I analysen synliggörs även hur Kulturrådet och Skolverket tilldelas maktpositioner genom sina regeringsuppdrag som främjar deras centrala roll som samverkande och kunskapsdelande myndigheter, och i analysen används bland annat power in discourse och power behind discourse för att förklara hur dessa maktpositioner reproduceras genom rapporterna- och hur barn och unga som en konsekvens hamnar i en underordnad maktposition. Detta relateras till mer övergripande diskursordningar och sociala strukturer som är ett resultat av dominerande konventioner i utbildnings- och kulturpolitik. / The purpose of this thesis is to highlight trends in how children's and young people's reading is portrayed in reports from four national reading promotion initiatives carried out on behalf of the Swedish government, and their connection to democratic ideals and underlying political motivations for reading promotion. The thesis has critical discourse analysis as its theoretical and methodological starting point, and Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis model is used to analyze discourse practices from a critical perspective in four reports from the Swedish Arts Council and the Swedish National Agency for Education: Bokstart i Sverige (2020), Nuläge om barns och ungas läsning (2023), Med barn och unga i fokus (2024) and Utvärdering av Läslyftet (2019). The motive for this essay is based on an increase in reading promotion efforts as a result of, among other things, reports on children's and young people's declining reading ability and PISA results. The results of the analysis show several examples of ideological struggle, as ideological conflicts arise both within and outside the school about the target group for reading promotion and the need for long-term evaluation of efforts. The analysis also reveals how the Swedish Arts Council and the National Agency for Education are assigned positions of power through their government assigned projects that promote their central role as collaborating and knowledge-sharing authorities, and the analysis uses, among other terms, power in discourse and power behind discourse to explain how these positions of power are reproduced through the reports - and how children and young people as a consequence end up in a subordinate position of power. This is related to broader structures of orders of discourse and social structures that result from dominant conventions in educational and cultural policy.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Linguistics, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 210-223. / General introduction -- A multimodal analysis of the 2006 Mexican presidential campaign billboards -- Study 2: Discourses of obligation and prohibition within an institutional setting -- Study 3: Gatekeeping practices at the LEMO: a multimodal analysis -- General conculsions. / This is a thesis composed of three studies linked by a common critical multimodal approach to the analysis of the data. Fairclough's (1992, 1995) three-dimensional framework was drawn on in order to explore the social practice, discursive practice and text dimensions of the discourses in question. The first two studies focus on printed texts in Mexican Spanish, whereas the third study addresses spoken interaction in English with occasional code switching to Spanish. -- Study 1: A Multimodal Analysis of the 2006 Mexican Presidential Campaign Billboards - This is a joint study (with my colleague Michael Witten and approved by my supervisor and the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie) which analyzes the political discourse of the multimodal and multisemiotic texts that the three major political parties involved in the 2006 Mexican presidential elections produced and extensively distributed through the medium of public billboards. We investigate how these parties express their particular ideologies, construct and convey social identities and relationships, and construct relations of power between themselves and the readers/viewers of these texts, through the medium of billboards. As indicated in the preamble, the methodological framework addresses these issues drawing on Fairclough's (1992, 1995) three-dimensional model of analysis while employing a variety of qualitative techniques, tools, and approaches. -- Study 2: Discourses of obligation and prohibition within an institutional setting - Following the theme of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study examines the institutionalized discourses of obligation and prohibition at the Library of the Language Faculty (LEMO)*of a public university in Mexico. Six different texts pertaining to various genres ranging from a protocol to notices were examined. Multiple qualitative methodologies and tools such as those drawn from ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics are utilized in the analysis of the data. Power relations between the institution and the library users are examined as well as the conditions of text production and reception, the latter through an ethnographic component. An emphasis is placed on the linguistic text. -- Study 3: Gatekeeping practices at the LEMO - This study investigates one of the gatekeeping practices at the Language Faculty of a public university in Mexico (see above). The particular practice concerned consists of the professional examinations (vivas) that students have to take in order to obtain their degrees of 'Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas' (BEd in Modern Languages) in the English Teaching section of the university. This study focuses on the professional discourse(s) utilized by both candidates and examiners by means of analyzing the texts of four recorded professional examinations. This study chiefly draws on Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical concepts of 'frontstage' and 'backstage', where the analysis of the frontstage work addresses the Question-and-Answer section of the examinations, and the analysis of the backstage work addresses the subsequent deliberations among the examiners concerning the performance of the candidates. Multiple qualitative methodologies and tools are again drawn upon, such as ethnographic analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis. (* Facultad de Lenguas) / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / xii, 233 p. : ill. (some col.)