Browsing by Subject "critical discourse analysis"

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    The Construction of Suicide on Campus: A Critical Analysis of University and Student Suicide Discourses
    (2021-08) Kaler, Lisa
    Since the turn of the century, college student suicide has represented an important issue in higher education. While suicide rates have been slowly declining among the college student population, the prevalence of suicidal ideation has risen precipitously. This rise in the prevalence of suicidal ideation has accompanied an increase in the prevalence of mental health issues and diagnosed mental illness among college students. Students and their families often expect a high level of care from colleges and universities while also exercising their constitutionally protected rights. Institutions are left to design suicide prevention and intervention programs in a complicated environment. These suicide prevention and intervention programs adhere to a dominant paradigm about suicide, referred to as contemporary suicidology, in which suicide is considered a pathological and individual concern. Traditionally, suicide has been studied through this single, clinically focused lens. In this study, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed as a methodology to examine the language that a university (Midwest U) and its students use to discuss suicide. The theoretical lens of critical suicidology, an emerging field of study, illuminated the dominance of contemporary suicidology in the institutional discourse about suicide. In university documents and practitioner interviews, suicide was constructed as a crisis or a secret, with the only appropriate response to a student with suicidal thoughts being referring them to a mental health professional or to call 911. This construction was problematized through the lens of critical suicidology. The goal of using critical suicidology was to show that contemporary suicidology’s hegemony prevents a construction of suicide as a multidimensional, paradoxical state with different meanings to different people. Analysis of students’ own discourses about suicide illuminated how they both conform to and rebel against the dominant construction of suicide by constructing suicide as a public trouble. Findings in this study demonstrated how the dominant suicide paradigm pervades campus suicide discourses and its effect on suicide prevention and intervention. Implications for suicide prevention through a critical lens are discussed, with an emphasis on liberating campus suicide prevention by refocusing on social justice.
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    Fear and Reconciliation: The U.S.-Dakota War in White Public Pedagogy
    (2015-06) Lybeck, Rick
    This study examines closely related public discourses like balance, neutrality, objectivity, and fairness, analyzing the collective barrier they pose to social-justice education. Taking the recent sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as a case in point, this study gives an overview of the public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) that prevailed in southern Minnesota in 2012, encouraging educators to present perspectives on the war in ways commonly considered "balanced," "neutral," etc., all while urging citizen-scholars to commemorate sacrifices made by the Dakota people and white settlers equally. As I argue, this public pedagogy mediates justice as fairness (Rawls, 1993; Steele, 2005; Seth, 2010), a sense of justice that has a long colonial history in America, promoting the suspension of social contingencies like race so that the historically empowered may make sense and derive comfort from the violently unequal past. To better understand justice-as-fairness discourses as antithetical to critical social-justice education (McLaren, 1995; Grande, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Waziyatawin, 2008), this study proceeds to explore relationships between classroom pedagogy and 2012's larger public pedagogy. Analyzing data collected from fieldnotes, informal conversational interviews, and classroom artifacts, I look carefully into dilemmas these conflicting senses of justice presented to a group of 15 college students and two instructors as they co-authored a successful traveling museum exhibit on the U.S.-Dakota War. Conducting their work at a private, liberal-arts institution located near where the fighting once took place, I investigate various ways students and instructors resisted, negotiated, and reproduced justice-as-fairness discourses that have long encouraged local citizens to suspend moral judgment about how their communities were made. What emerges is a portrait of educators and student knowledge workers setting aside critical prior knowledge about colonialism and racial oppression in order to accommodate the creation of a museum exhibit that would safely mediate a common sense of justice for them and their implied white audience. The study concludes by theorizing pedagogical support for a critical museum-exhibit project on the U.S.-Dakota War that would advocate for regional social change, an exhibit variously envisioned by students but one that ultimately went unwritten for deference to local ideological demands.