Browsing by Subject "Critical Discourse Analysis"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Casual Encounters: Constructing Sexual Deviance on Craigslist.org
    (2017-05) Reynolds, Chelsea
    Despite the prevalence of dating websites and hookup applications, mass communication scholars have largely ignored news coverage of sex in the digital age. Research about online sexuality has built on early theories of cyber identity, in which the Internet was conceptualized as a great emancipator. Online, it was argued, people could explore “disembodied” sexualities with little interference from offline reality. This dissertation builds a research line that investigates journalistic discourse about online sexuality using more than a decade of coverage of Craigslist sex forums as a case study. It also examines user activity on Craigslist sex forums, testing dominant theories of online identity. For journalists, Internet-mediated sexuality represents a compound moral threat. Since 2003, national U.S. newspapers have consistently identified the classified ads website Craigslist as a hotbed for sexual deviants — people whose sexual interests mainstream culture deems immoral or even illegal. Newspaper journalists call on police and government sources to frame Craigslist users as prostitutes, violent criminals, and cheating politicians. By relying on elite sources, news media surveil social deviance for the public. This is an outcome of normative reporting practices. Representational scholars have argued that media made by marginalized groups will provide more nuanced narratives than the mainstream press. But in stories about Craigslist sex forums, alternative media reproduce stigma about online sexuality. Popular LGBTQ and feminist online magazines describe Craigslist sex forums as catalysts for illegal and immoral activity. They sometimes privilege sex workers’ voices and cover the experiences of sexual minorities, but they contribute to the same deviance-defining discourse about Craigslist sex forums as does the mainstream press. Media across the ideological spectrum police social deviance and reinforce cultural norms — online and off. Mass media surveillance of online sexuality encourages people to surveil their own behavior online. Ads on Craigslist sex forums reflect dominant cultural norms about sex despite posters’ attempts to explore their “unusual” fantasies. The Craigslist Casual Encounters forum provides a productive outlet for people to fantasize about kink, non-monogamy, race, and sexuality. But it also reflects the politics of its white male user base. Sexism, homophobia, and gendered logics saturate the forums. Offline stigmas about sexuality bleed into online sexual expression. This dissertation theorizes the role of normalizing judgment in determining media representations of online sexuality. It offers perspectives from journalism sociology and cultural studies to help explain why media paint Craigslist sex forums as spaces that foster illegal and immoral sex. The dissertation concludes that online sexuality must be added to definitions of deviance in news. It problematizes theories of representations of sexuality by alternative media, and it demonstrates that online sexuality is deeply intertwined with offline identity.
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    Organizational Learning for Student Success: Exploring the roles of institutional actors
    (2016-06) Taylor, Leonard
    Calls for institutional onus in efforts to increase student success, and the increasingly data-centered culture in higher education institutions, make it especially important to understand the roles that administrators, staff, and faculty play. This study explores institutional actors’ roles in supporting student success, particularly in their consumption and application of research knowledge, institutional data, and best-practice to inform institutional efforts. This multi-site case study conducted at three public, research universities; included semi-structured interviews and document analysis to generate emergent themes, and critical discourse analysis to further interrogate those themes. Findings suggest that institutional structure, culture, and politics present explicit and implicit barriers to enhancing student success. Student success efforts are largely predicated on institutional data, with little discussion of research knowledge to guide practice. Additionally, discourses that emerged from interview narratives reveal how institutional actors’ own dispositions and paradigms sometimes impede their student success work. Continuing to understand how institutional actors and factors inform student success efforts helps expand institutions’ capacity to improve student success efforts and subsequent educational outcomes for students.
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    (Re) Constructing Identities: South African Domestic Workers, English Language Learning, and Power
    (2018-05) Kaiper, Anna
    Domestic workers have played an essential role in the history of South Africa; and yet, current research neither explores the educational experiences of these women nor examines the ways in which national discourses surrounding English language learning influence their educational motivations. This dissertation aims to ameliorate this dearth of research while simultaneously broadening global conceptions of adult language learners by focusing on the English language learning of older, Black, female, South African domestic workers. Utilizing Critical Ethnographic Narrative Analysis (CENA), in which I draw from the histories, narratives, and HERstories of 28 female domestic workers over three-year span, I explore the complex reasons and motivations for South African domestic workers to learn English in a multilingual linguascape. Framed in poststructural theories of language, identity, and power in connection with postcolonial theories of English language learning, I make three main arguments. First, I contend that the terms “education” and “literacy” have become metonyms for “English language education” and “English literacy” that undeniably affect these women’s educational and linguistic motivations. Second, I find that these women are living in a three-fold state of domination in which they incur symbolic violence from the neo-colonial importance placed on English leading to their linguistic vulnerability. Third, I find that despite metonymic discourses purporting the essential nature of English in post-apartheid South Africa, and notwithstanding the numerous forms of violence enacted upon these women in their past and present lives, South African domestic workers live within interstices in which they are showcasing aspects of agency and autonomy in their work, home, and educational spaces while concurrently remaining within the boundaries of metonymic discourse that binds them to these spaces.
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    Spanish-language print media in the United States: A critical social semiotic exploration of ideological representations
    (2013-05) Strom, Megan
    As of 2010, there were 50.5 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin in the United States (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas and Albert, 2011, p. 2). Although substantial work has been carried out on the linguistic aspects of Spanish spoken in the United States in some cities, there is still much left to be discovered, especially with regards to the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of print Spanish. Furthermore, the analysis of discourse about Latinos as a minoritized group is typically carried out on texts produced by majority groups (cf. de Beaugrande, 2008; Martín Rojo and Gómez Esteban, 2005; Martín Rojo and van Dijk, 1997). In other words, while critical discourse analysts know a great deal about the discursive construction of minoritized groups in discourse created by majority groups (e.g., how the United States mass media represent Latinos), it is not known how such groups create their own discourse (cf. Delbene, 2008; Strom, 2013). Finally, although a handful of multimodal analyses have addressed Spanish as a semiotic system (cf. Crespo Fernández and Martínez Lirola, 2012; Strom, 2013), almost nothing is known about the semiotic characteristics of Spanish-language media in this country. The current study consists of a critical multimodal social semiotic analysis of ideological representations in Spanish-language print media in the Midwest of the United States. The goal of this study is to shed light on how ideology is expressed visually, verbally, and across the visual and verbal modes in Spanish as a minoritized language, as well as the potential for these ideologies to challenge mainstream ideologies. The methodological framework consists of three stages of analysis. A critical discourse analysis based on Teun van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach (1998, 2008) and Norman Fairclough's dialectal-relational approach (2001) focused on the verbal expression of ideology. The data represent 24 local news articles from two local Spanish-language newspapers, La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota and La Conexión Latina, in the Midwest of the United States. A critical multimodal analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996, 2001) social semiotic approach focused on the visual expression of ideology. The data comprised 15 images that accompanied the news articles used in the verbal analysis. Lastly, an analysis of intersemiotic complementarity (Royce, 2007), or the comparison of ideologies across text and image, considered the representation of ideology across the verbal and visual modes in 15 text-image combinations. Verbally, the newspapers provide Latino immigrants an opportunity to learn necessary sociocultural information about the United States while maintaining their own epistemic community. The visual mode represents Latinos both as victims of maltreatment by the majority group and as agentive social actors who stand up to injustices committed against them. Although most text-image combinations analyzed challenge ideologies found in the mainstream English-language press, those text-image combinations with the greatest potential to lead to change are those that verbally underscore negative actions committed against Latino immigrants, but visually represent Latinos as standing up to and fighting against these injustices. These results underscore the potential for Spanish-language media to lead to positive changes for Latino immigrants in the United States.
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    Where are the Students in Student Voice? Challenging Dominant Epistemologies in Student Voice Discourses
    (2020-12) Brogan, Daniel
    The following master’s thesis explores how adult researchers and practitioners'defining, framing, and implementation of student voice may have contributed to the positioning of secondary school students in education policy and leadership. Key research questions addressed whether or not there is a disconnect in how researchers, practitioners, and students define student voice, as well as considering if the term, “student voice,” positions the role of students in educational decision making. The key themes that emerged from the content analysis include: Disconnect between student and adult stakeholders; aspirations of students within student voice; and students as spectacles. Findings suggest that the majority of student voice research literature frames student voice as a process that only occurs in a class and school setting. Student discourses, in contrast, understand student voice as a democratic process occurring in the state and federal policymaking arena, and view themselves as key decision makers.