Browsing by Subject "authority"

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    “Does That Make Me the Police?”: Studying Toward Abolitionist Teacher Praxis
    (2023-06) Jefferson, Noah
    In their scholarship on the connections between schools and prisons, education researchers have recently taken up the theoretical frameworks of abolition and abolitionist teaching, but have yet to conduct studies with abolitionist teachers. Drawing inspiration from praxis-oriented, critical ethnographic, and participatory research, as well as the long tradition of study groups in grassroots revolutionary struggles, this qualitative research takes up abolitionist teacher praxis, utilizing a study group with K-12 teachers to explore how they engage with abolitionist theory and how abolitionist theory informs their thinking and practice.The question driving this research is, how do abolitionist teachers think about abolition as it relates to their work as teachers? I recruited three teachers who were self-described abolitionists working in K-12 public schools in the Twin Cities area to participate in a study group focused on police and prison abolition. During eight group study sessions and two interviews with each participant, we discussed shared readings and talked about how abolitionist ideas informed our thinking about schools and our practice as teachers. I find that participants wanted to create a culture of community in their schools and classrooms, but felt unsure of how they could teach without replicating policing. To make sense of this dilemma, I take up abolitionist theorizing on policing. An understanding of policing as a form of power aimed at the fabrication of capitalist social order helps explain why policing and community are antithetical and why schools are contradictory spaces. I argue that when teachers work to build a communal social order, they are not doing the work of policing. I also find that participants felt a tension between teacher authority and classroom community. I argue that when teachers draw on competent rather than coercive authority, and when they emphasize relationships over rules, they help build, rather than contradict, classroom community.
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    Gawker, BuzzFeed, and Journalism: Case Studies in Boundaries, News Aggregation, and Journalistic Authority
    (2016-05) Toropin, Konstantin
    The study of boundary work in journalism generally has involved examining legacy news organizations and their efforts to expel deviant actors and otherwise patrol the boundaries around appropriate professional practice. This thesis extends this body of research by analyzing the interrelationships among newer, digitally centric actors: namely, Gawker and BuzzFeed. Using textual analysis, this research examines two case studies: a feud between BuzzFeed and Gawker over journalistic norms, and Gawker’s outing of a Condé Nast executive. By blending the existing frameworks of boundary work with concepts such as authority, as well as findings from research on blogging and news aggregation, this study offers a comprehensive examination of these emerging journalistic actors. In the first case, Gawker engaged BuzzFeed over what it believed to be failures of journalistic norms in deleting articles at the behest of advertisers. In the second, Gawker wrestled with the consequences of its own failure to exercise acceptable editorial judgment in the outing of a gay magazine executive. The resulting findings suggest that, as these cases unfolded, BuzzFeed and Gawker both readily adopted some of the traditional values of journalism in an effort to be accepted by the professional community. However, in other ways, these actors continued to distance themselves from legacy news media and refused to conform to certain journalistic norms, instead remaining more closely aligned with the values they brought from their own histories as digital upstarts. These findings suggest a need for further research into the boundary behaviors of born-digital actors and a deeper examination of the discourse between new and old media entities.