Browsing by Subject "discourse analysis"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Careful and Creative Craftwork: How CNMs Legitimize Risk and Responsibility Talk with Pregnant People with a BMI of 30 or Higher: A Critical Discourse Analysis
    (2021-05) Martin, Katherine
    Background: Society has placed an enormous amount of the responsibility for reducing risk during pregnancy on the pregnant people themselves. This neoliberal view of individual responsibility especially has affected pregnant people with a BMI of 30 or higher. They have endured many consequences from this, such as emotional distress, loss of autonomy, stigmatization, marginalization, and are blamed for the increased risk to the baby from their body size. Aims: I sought to learn how CNMs legitimize their talk about risk and to gain a critical understanding of how CNMs are reproducing and/or resisting societal discourses of risk and responsibility with pregnant people with BMIs of 30 or higher. Methods: Van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimation (authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization) provided the theoretical framework. In an outpatient clinic, I recorded and transcribed verbatim twelve prenatal appointments where CNMs were implementing a new risk-reduction guideline for patients with a BMI of 30 or higher in pregnancy. Using a critical discourse analysis approach influenced by van Leeuwen, Fairclough, and Gee, the transcripts were coded for van Leeuwen’s categories and subcategories of legitimation and then analyzed. Findings: CNMs predominantly used authorization to legitimize the introduction of the BMI guideline in the appointments. When the CNM would give the weight gain, diet, or exercise recommendations, the CNM would follow a similar sequence in their conversation to the other CNMs in the study. The sequence began with CNM stating the recommendation and then assessing for compliance. If the pregnant person was in compliance, there would be explicit praise. If not, either the pregnant person or the CNM would offer an explanation. Then, CNM would validate the explanation. When the CNMs discussed the risks or reducing the risks of having a BMI of 30 or higher, the CNM would most often use the legitimation category rationalization. Conclusions:. CNMs were both reproducing and resisting ideas of risk and responsibility when discussing the BMI guideline. The CNMs appeared aware of the moral weight of the conversation but did not stray from the guideline’s recommendations. CNMs carefully crafted their language to meet both the needs of their patients and the needs of the organization.
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    Damned if They Go, Demand if They Stay: The Compounding Effect of Selective Misidentification, Marginalization, and Nation-State Politics on the "Intractability" of Romani Statelessness
    (2023) Hulmequist, Rumyana
    Romani statelessness is an intentional product of Western historical political processes, especially in the European context. It is therefore not intractable, as it may seem to be based on the decades of unsuccessful attempts at “integrating” Roma into the European Union’s society. Broadly, this paper illustrates distinct, Romani-specific social and cultural conditions that contextualize the complexities of Romani statelessness via a comparative analysis that demonstrates the negative impacts of selective misidentification, marginalization and nation-state politics both individually and jointly. Selective misidentification conceptually refers to an iterative historical process in which inconsistent labeling or perception of Roma, whether or not it is true, perpetuates and/or exacerbates disparate treatment and harms for Roma while benefiting or aligning with the desired social and political outcomes of others, especially the state. I consider selective misidentification broadly, referring to its various manifestations in both concrete and discrete forms. Concrete forms of selective misidentification such as in legal documentation of citizenship or property ownership, or discrete forms such as the politics of ethnic/racial identity and assimilation, are products of social, political, and cultural norms expressed and preserved through policy-making and implementation.
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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.
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    My Wife, My Choice: Reproductive Policymaking and Social Control in Turkey
    (2015-09) Binnet, Pelin Azer
    Looking at the trajectory of Turkish reproductive politics since the 1960s in three distinct periods, this study examines the mismatch between liberal legal reforms, and the lack of change in the gendered reproductive and sexual discourses within a context. By using interpretive policy analysis and discourse analysis, I follow the reproductive policymaking narratives in Turkey to examine to understand how reproductive reforms can create mechanisms of social control over women – and how women and families circumvent these mechanisms in pragmatic ways in return. I make use of newspaper archives going back to the 1950s and Parliament debate transcripts to understand what different reproductive technologies meant for the policymakers and the public, why certain technologies were legalized while others were not, what kinds of social norms the policymakers and the public expected these technologies to work within, and how the abortion debate changed in Turkey during the 2000s to re-politicize the issue after its “resolution” by the military government of early 1980s. I trace the evolution of reproductive policies along with the discursive creation of its constituents, and the discursive creation of the discriminatory gendered and economic rationalities they depend on.