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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Political news discourse'
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Slaatta, Tore. "Europeanisation and the Norwegian news media : political discourse and news production in the transnational field /." Oslo : Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, 1999. http://www.gbv.de/dms/sub-hamburg/270814310.pdf.
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Shell, Joshua L. "Bots and Political Discourse: System Requirements and Proposed Methods of Bot Detection and Political Affiliation via Browser Plugin." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1592136507505369.
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Al-Mahadin, Salam. "The notion of audience as a contextual determiner of variation in texts : an English/Arabic discourse perspective." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/10399/758.
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Chen, Yi-ning. "The effects of political attack discourse in presidential news reports : the interactions of attack news discourse, public attitude toward the president and toward the press, 1972-1996 /." Digital version accessible at:, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Kitano, Linus. "Constructing Allies versus Non-Allies in News Discourse : A Discursive News Values Analysis of US Media Reporting on Two Territorial Disputes." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-170375.
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News values are used by journalists to construct events and news actors as newsworthy.The present study investigates the use of news values in the reporting on two territorial disputes, one between China and Japan (Diaoyu/Senkaku) and one between Japan and South Korea (Dokdo/Takeshima), in the US news outlets CNN, FOX News and the Washington Post. In addition, it also examines what news values tend to be associated with the involved parties, US-allies Japan and South Korea, and US non-allies China, as well as to what extent the news values associated with Japan differ between the reporting on the two disputes. This is done through a Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) which examines how news values are construed using linguistic resources. The aim is to produce new insights into how international conflicts are reported on, and how certain nations are made newsworthy in US media. The results suggest that the news values of Eliteness, Negativity, Superlativeness and Timeliness were foregrounded in the reporting on both disputes, while Proximity was far more common in the Diaoyu/Senkaku dispute articles. Eliteness and Personalisation were commonly associated with US allies while a combination of Superlativeness and Negativity was more common with US non-allies, which resulted in Negativity being further emphasised. Finally, Proximity was far more commonly associated with Japan in the Diaoyu/Senkaku dispute articles compared to the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute articles. Thus, the analysis shows that US allies tend to be constructed as newsworthy in a more positive light than non-allies, and it also indicates that nations defending a contested area in a territorial dispute appear to be framed more positively than their counterparts.
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Spratt, Margaret Ann. "When police dogs attacked : iconic news photographs and the construction of history, mythology, and political discourse /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6189.
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Kananovich, Volha. "Subordinate or equal partner? Framing the taxpayer-government relationship in news discourse and its effect on citizen political judgement." Diss., University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6776.
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This dissertation explores the effects of mass-mediated taxpayer discourse on citizen perceptions of citizen-government relations in the context of the United States, a country where media and political discourse is heavily saturated with taxpayer talk. Specifically, this study considers two contrasting rhetorical constructions of the taxpayer. The first portrays the taxpayer as subordinate to the state by framing taxpaying as a citizen’s obligation through discussing it in legal and procedural terms of tax collection. The second constructs the taxpayer as a partner to which the government is accountable by emphasizing spending tax revenues and thus foregrounding the role of taxpaying in citizen’s claims for greater control over government actions.
Drawing on a variety of perspectives from political science, mass communication, tax compliance research, history, and social cognition, I developed and tested two models to predict the effects of these contrasting constructions on two dimensions of citizen-government relations: power and trust. To test the models, I conducted two randomized controlled experiments: one that utilized a student sample recruited from a large undergraduate class at the University of Iowa (N=207), and one that replicated the results on a nationally representative adult sample (N=617). An additional experiment on a student sample (N=154) validated the experimental treatment.
Taken together, the findings show that taxpayer discourse can affect citizen political judgement, but those effects do not operate through perceptions of power but instead through changes in political trust. When exposed to the tax-collection rhetoric, individuals in the nationally representative sample responded by deeming the government less trustworthy, which made them more motivated to monitor its actions. Notably, when participants were exposed to the public-spending frame, their reactions were statistically indistinguishable from those who did not read any taxpayer-related headlines at all. This suggest that in the context of the United States, where people are socialized into a public discourse that portrays the taxpayer as the ultimate sponsor and judge of government performance, this perspective can be internalized and become the default framework that citizens rely on in forming political judgement. However, when rhetorically denied this privileged position and placed in a subordinate role, citizens can push back by penalizing the government with greater distrust and reclaiming their right for citizen oversight.
Importantly, the distrust-generating effect of the tax-collection frame is mitigated by the perceived scope of government reliance on taxes. The more reliant on taxpayer money participants perceived the state to be, the more trust this frame generated, which is consistent with a cognitive-dissonance explanation. Finally, changes in trust were triggered by taxpayer framing among actual taxpayers, leaving individuals with no actual experience unaffected.
This study advances political communication research by refining the understanding of politically consequential citizen roles in communication scholarship to include that of the taxpayer as one of the most fiscally significant, personally relevant, media-salient, and — as this dissertation demonstrates — politically meaningful citizen roles. The project also contributes to political-science scholarship by suggesting that taxpayer discourse can prevent democratic backsliding in an established democracy and by making a case for considering the news media as an important element of the taxation-democratization nexus.
In addition to scholarly significance, the dissertation has clear policy implications because it suggests new ways to communicate the benefits of democratic governance in more tangible, relatable terms of paying taxes and claiming greater accountability for government performance.
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Hoa, Nguyen, and n/a. "English and Vietnamese political news dicourse : a contrastive analysis in terms of stucture, lexis and syntax." University of Canberra. Education, 1990. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060725.100742.
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The present study is one of the first attempts undertaken to
study English and Vietnamese news discourse on a contrastive
basis. More specifically, it investigates the structure, the
lexical and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese
political news discourse.
It is hoped that the results of the study may help the Vietnamese
teacher and student to make better use of newspapers in the
process of English language teaching and learning. In addition, it
is hoped that the study may benefit the journalist, to some
extent, because it is generally assumed that if the knowledge of
news discourse structure, the linguistic features and the factors
involved are professionally known and shared, this will
facilitate news discourse production and comprehension.
The study reveals two different strategies used by English and
Vietnamese political news writers. English news writers
predominantly employ the IP structure pattern whereas
Vietnamese news writers employ BTN (Background-to-News).
Lexically, English newspapers use more lively, vigorous language,
metaphors, puns and hyperbole. In contrast, the occurrence of
serious, formal language is a very pronounced feature of
Vietnamese newspapers. This is the area where Vietnamese
students of English often have difficulty, as is indicated by the
survey. The greatest syntactic difference is sentence order,
namely, English news stories often use S + V + (O) + (A) while
their Vietnamese counterparts use A + S + V + (O) +. The other
difference is that English news paragraphs are mostly single
sentence paragraphs as disctinct from their multi-sentence
Vietnamese ones.
Chapter One is an introduction explaining the rationale, the
methods, and the data for analysis, of the present study.
Chapter Two is concerned with the theoretical background to the
study. It deals with such concepts as cohesion, coherence,
structure, relevance, text and discourse.
Chapter Three provides a contrastive overview of English and
Vietnamese newspapers, essentially in terms of ownership and
the approach to news.
Chapter Four examines the different structure patterns used by
English and Vietnamese reporters and journalists.
Chapter Five and Six study the different lexical and syntactic
features of English and Vietnamese political news discourse,
respectively.
In chapter Seven, a comparison of English and Vietnamese
political news discourse is given, which is based on the analyses
presented in chapters Four, Five and Six. In addition, it presents
the results of a survey of comprehension difficulty encountered
by Vietnamese students studying English now at the University
of Canberra, and looks at some discourse strategies involved in
news discourse production and comprehension.
The last chapter offers some implications for TEFL in Vietnam,
which are based on the author's own experience and results of a
survey. The author hopes that these implications may be of some
help to the practising teacher as well as the student.
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Retano, Melissa Garrison. "The Discourse of Gay & Lesbian Adoption: Constructing the issue for the public." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2009. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/31559.
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Mass Media and CommunicationPh.D.
This dissertation examines the public construction of gay and lesbian adoption by looking at the public discourse surrounding the issue. A discourse analysis was conducted of five print news publications and twenty interviews were conducted with participants in the issue. The goals of this research project included assessing how participants in the gay and lesbian adoption issue sought to influence its public construction, what frames they employed, how they interacted publicly with other participants, and how they constructed their identities and the identities of other participants. Other goals included assessing how the print news media covered the issue and how the participants strategized to garner media attention. The results indicate that the discourse of gay and lesbian adoption includes dominant themes, including the best interests of children, the definition of family, civil rights, and social science research. Within these themes, participants sponsor opposing frames, interacting with each other through their discursive strategies. Overall, print news coverage of the issue tended to reflect the opposing discourses of proponents and opponents of gay and lesbian adoption although more recent coverage tended to favor proponents. This dissertation contributes to the research areas of British cultural studies, social constructionism, media studies, and framing. The results have implications for those who advocate for political and social change as they indicate that proponents of gay and lesbian adoption are finding success through a negotiation strategy of advocating for change while upholding existing American cultural values.
Temple University--Theses
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Luecht, Jennifer. "GENDERED DISCOURSE ON THE TRAIL TO THE WHITE HOUSE: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF MEDIA COVERAGE DURING HILLARY CLINTON’S 2015/16 CAMPAIGN TO BECOME DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20481.
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This textual analysis examines online mainstream media coverage during Hillary Clinton’s 2015/16 presidential campaign. Previous research on female political candidates indicates that there are both subtle and unsubtle ways the media reinforces masculinity in the political realm.
The results of the study provide a commentary on the internet as a cultural text and Feminist Communication Studies, suggesting that there may be a decrease in the institutionalized sexism in the reporting of mainstream online media. Although encompassing only a small snapshot of the 2015/16 presidential race, the results also suggest that media seemed to lack a category for Clinton – she is both an inside and outsider, sitting at the cusp of a transformative historical event.
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Egglestone, Tia Ashleigh. "A critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the contesting discourses articulated by the ANC and the news media in the City Press coverage of The Spear." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012975.
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This research focuses on the controversy surrounding the exhibition and media publication of Brett Murray’s painting, The Spear of the Nation (May 2012). It takes the form of a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), underpinned by Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional approach, to investigate how the contesting discourses articulated by the ruling political party (the ANC) and the news media have been negotiated in the City Press coverage in response to the painting. While the contestation was fought ostensibly on constitutional grounds, it arguably serves as an illustrative moment of the deeply ideological debate occurring in South Africa between the government and the national media industry regarding media diversity, transformation and democracy. It points to the lines of fracture in the broader political and social space. Informed by Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse and the role of power in the production of knowledge and ‘truth’, this study aims to expose the discourses articulated and contested in order to make inferences about the various ‘truths’ the ANC and the media make of the democratic role of the press in a contemporary South Africa. The sample consists of five reports intended to represent the media’s responses and four articles that prominently articulate the ANC’s responses. The analysis, which draws on strategies from within critical linguists and media studies, is confined to these nine purposively sampled from the City Press online newspaper texts published between 13 May 2012 and 13 June 2012. Findings suggest the ANC legitimise expectations for the media to engage in a collaborative role in order to serve the ‘national interest’. Conversely, the media advocate for a monitorial press to justify serving the ‘public interest’. This research is envisioned to be valuable for both sets of stakeholders in developing richer understandings relevant to issues of any regulation to be debated. It forms part of a larger project on Media Policy and Democracy which seeks to contribute to media diversity and transformation, and to develop the quality of democracy in South Africa.
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Bradfield, Sarah-Jane. "A critical discourse analysis of the Daily Nation and the Standard’s news coverage of the 2007/2008 Kenyan elections." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/63437.
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This study investigates the Daily Nation and Standard’s news coverage of Kenya’s 2007/2008 general election and the unprecedented eruptions of violence which followed. This research responds to the question which came about as Kenyan print journalists and editors considered their role in possibly contributing to the violence, which took on an ethnic dimension. Vernacular radio has been fingered for having escalated longstanding ethnic tensions, but the role of the press has not been fully understood. In the aftermath of the violence, print journalists and editors met over a series of Round Table events in Nairobi to consider whether their conduct during the election could have encouraged violence. Although ten years have passed since this incidence, much of what happened within the Kenyan print media during and after the 2007/2008 general election remains unexplored and, largely, unexplained today. Although the pre- and post-election phases spanned months, my research is confined to purposive samples from a four-week period from 3 December 2007 to 4 January 2008. These four weeks were selected as they are roughly representative of the three phases of the national election which are considered significant to this study, namely the pre-election phase, the election, and the post-election violence. The research is concerned with analysing and understanding the coverage in the two dailies, the Daily Nation and Standard, and comparing the discursive work of the two, particularly in relation to identity and ethnicity. This study draws on cultural studies, critical discourse analysis and normative theories of the media to inform the research project. The critical discourse analysis explores the discourses articulated during and after the election, with a particular focus on issues of identity, ethnicity and incitement. Through this process the study found that both publications avoided references to ethnicity, despite this being an important factor in Kenyan politics and voter behaviour. In analysing these issues the study found that while the publications might claim to attempt to avoid fuelling tensions by not reporting on ethnicity, the disavowal comprised a silence which positioned the press in a collaborative role, in which it colluded with a powerful Kenyan state. Although a significant amount of time has gone by since the 2007/2008 elections, this study still considers the event significant in understanding the conduct of journalists during times of violence, and specifically for the future of journalism in Kenya.
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Mohammed, Safwat Ali Saleh. "A corpus-based study of the collocational behaviour and idealogical usage of political terms in the Arabic news discourse of pre-revolutionary Egypt." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.658018.
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Studies of Arabic collocation have to date been highly influenced by the intensional approach (Evert, 2005: 16), where collocations are regarded as phraseological units which are semantically opaque and have a degree of fixedness. However, no studies have approached Arabic collocation from the neo-Firthian perspective, where collocations are seen as the co-occurrence of words within a certain distance, a directly observable and quantifiable phenomenon. This thesis investigates Arabic collocation from that perspective, in terms of textual meanings and discursive usage in media discourse. Doing this entails two interdependent levels of analysis. A) At the micro-level of analysis, collocations are investigated textually, using corpus linguistic methods, and applying Sinc1air's model of the Extended Lexical Unit (ELU). According to the ELU, a given lexical item is characterized syntagmatically and paradigmatically at different linguistic levels: lexical (collocation), syntactic (colligational patterns) semantic (semantic preferences), and pragmatic (semantic prosody). B) At the macro-level of analysis, collocations are taken beyond the boundaries of the text to a wider context of discourse, in order to decode the ideological meanings encoded in collocational and lexical choices. At this level, ideological uses of collocations are described and interpreted in the light of the underlying socio-political context, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methods and a framework of several discursive strategies to discover ideologically-motivated representati ons. The analysis is based on a nearly 100 million word tagged and lemmatized corpus, derived from the Egyptian newspaper Al-ahram and covering 10 years from 2000 to 2009. Two political abstract nouns are analyzed as a case study (huwiyya 'IDENTITY' and diimuqraaTiyya 'DEMOCRACY'), to explore their collocational behaviour and ideological usage in the media discourse in pre-revolutionary Egypt The analysis reveals that both huwiyya 'IDENTITY' and diimuqraaTiyya 'DEMOCRACY' have three meanings in this corpus: social, individual and conceptual for huwiyya, and political, social and conceptual for diimuqraaTiyya. Each meaning is textually realized in particular colligational patterns, and has distinct semantic preferences for particular lexical fields of collocates. Pragmatically, the two lemmata have positive and negative semantic prosodies as deduced from the co-textual collocates. The social meaning of huwiyya is associated with a positive prosody evoked from positive actions taken by a community or a group of people towards their identity, contrasting with a negative prosody when the identity is depicted as being lost or wiped out. The individual meaning has a negative prosody, as it is typically used in contexts relating to reporting accidents and investigating crimes. As for diimuqraaTiyya, it has a predominantly positive prosody, i.e. a collective moral/ideal value, as well as a negative prosody of unreality and allegation. By going beyond the microanalysis to explore the construction of ideology in discourse, the macro-analysis reveals that the Arab, national, Islamic and Jewish identities have negative prosodies and negative ideological representations, in contrast to the largely positively-presented Egyptian identity. Similarly, when democracy is referred to in co-texts including Mubarak, Egypt, the thenruling National Democratic Party, it is portrayed extremely positively; conversely democracy is derogated ideologically in co-texts including Islamists, opposition, America and Israel. This overall picture can be understood in the light of the identity of the Al-ahrarn newspaper as a pro-regime publication that propagandizes in accord with the ruling regime's policies and interests. The positive and negative portrayal of particular groups and ideals is in accord with the political preferences of Mubarak's regime. This thesis advances the study of collocation in Arabic theoretically and methodologically through: a) demonstrating the applicability the model of the Extended Lexical Unit (ELU) to Arabic collocation, with some required modifications due to the nature of Arabic morphosyntax, by exploring the collocational profile and textual meaning(s) of given lemmata in empirical data; and b) combining corpus linguistic and CDA methods in discovering the covert ideological meanings of overt collocations, and interpreting them contextually. It is a real advance for Arabic collocation study to use these methods to gain insights into collocational behaviour, as a linguistic phenomenon in real usage.
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Maruri, Ramos Catalina. "Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of CNN and Fox News Headlines: A Case of Immigration Detention in the US." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-169780.
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Immigration policies and border control in the US were hardened significantly more ever since the new government’s immigration executive order in 2017. A series of massive raids and immigrant detentions were carried out which got the attention of both human rights activists and the news media. How these immigration detention events are portrayed in the news media reflect, moreover, a series of discourses which seem to attract audiences from either left-wing or right-wing political ideologies, specifically to read CNN and Fox news respectively, according to previous survey-based research. This paper aims to identify through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) how those in detention are represented in the news headlines of Fox News and CNN, and secondly, identify what possible left-wing and right-wing political ideologies about immigration are expressed in the news outlets. Reference strategies and transitivity will encompass the micro-level analysis, which focuses on language construction. For the macro-level analysis, on the one hand, discourse practices like process of production and consumption will be considered, and on the other hand, American foreign policy viewed from the left-wing and right-wing perspectives will be discussed to consider differences in style, tone, and perspective in CNN and Fox News’ headlines in relation to immigration detention events. Results show that CNN, tied to left-wing audiences, portray the immigration detention events from the perspective of immigrants who are in a vulnerable position since they are detained with their families. Moreover, Fox News, tied to right-wing audiences, show the events more from the viewpoint of the government and the public entities in charge of the immigration policies, who are in need to restrain, detain, and deport immigrants for the sake of the country’s security. This paper aims to contribute further to the research on political ideologies as a relevant factor to understand differences in discourse in the news media for future research.
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Ferro, Soriano Jose Ignacio. "El discurso Periodístico Informativo en momentos de tensión electoral: Tratamiento periodístico de los diarios de circulación nacional “El Comercio” y “La República”, sobre la candidatura de Ollanta Humala en la semana previa a la segunda vuelta de los comicios electorales generales del 2011 (30/05/11 - 04/06/11)." Bachelor's thesis, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10757/652553.
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Esta investigación se centra en el análisis de los textos informativos publicados por los diarios de circulación nacional: El Comercio y La República, relacionados a la candidatura de Ollanta Humala Tasso durante la semana previa al balotaje de los comicios electorales en Perú el año 2011. Y tiene el propósito de evidenciar, si en momentos de tensión política, como es una segunda vuelta, el equilibrio periodístico informativo y sus elementos se ven afectados por el contexto. Para ello, se explica la estrecha relación que guarda el periodismo con la política. Luego, se toma en cuenta los fundamentos del periodismo, para definir la naturaleza, matices y el lenguaje del periodismo informativo. A partir de ello, se construye el concepto de Equilibrio Periodístico Informativo, el cual está apoyado en una serie de elementos y de referentes. De igual forma, se considera el contexto político de la época, el cual sirve de referencia. A partir de ello, los resultados del análisis demuestran que el concepto de información, supuestamente asentado en ambos enunciadores, pierde algunas referencias por una serie elementos y presiones propias de tales coyunturas, donde hay una polarización política.This study focuses on the analysis of news published by El Comercio y La República, newspapers with nationwide circulation, which are related to Ollanta Humala Tasso’s bid for presidency during the previous week to the results of the second-round round-off elections in Peru in 2011. It also aims at showing, if under circumstances of political tension, as it is a second-round election, the equilibrium in news journalism and its elements are affected by context. For this purpose, it explains the close relationship between journalism and politics. Then, it deals with the fundamentals of journalism in order to define the nature, nuances, and language of news journalism. Based on the abovementioned, the concept of Equilibrium in News Journalism is developed, which is supported by a series of elements and referents. Similarly, the political context at that time is considered as a reference. From this, the results of this study show that the concept of news journalism, which is supposedly to be the foundation of both local newspapers involved in this study, loses certain references due to the presence of a series of elements and tensions from the contexts where there exists a political polarization.
Tesis
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Ivarsson, Linnea. "Att utforma den perfekta skandalen : En studie av hur Expressen rapporterade om SD-skandalen i november 2012." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-73721.
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Title: How to Construct the Perfect Scandal – a study of the news reported by Expressen concerning the SD-scandal Author: Linnea Ivarsson This C-paper presents the incident concerning the political party Sverigedemokraterna in Expressen in November 2012. The newspaper was the main source of the news reporting with the mobile phone camera film from the occurance and led the way of the news reporting in Sweden about three party members. The paper investigates how the story telling of the so called SD-scandal was constructed, using Critical Discourse Analysis as the analysis method combined with selected parts from the analysis method of critical linguistics. The theories that have been used to establish the results of the analysis are Critical Discourse as a theory based on Norman Fairclough and Teun A. van Dijks theoretical keystones combined with Sigurd Allerns and Ester Pollacks theories and schematic point of view on the constructions of political scandals in media. With the theories and analysis methods above mentioned the results turned out to confirm the theory about how political scandals in media are constructed and designed with certain strategies and agenda. The authors of the articles in Expressen showed the reader that they throughout the process had a certain plan with the material the editors of the newspaper had before the scandal burst. The way they used quotes from the witnesses, the leader Jimmie Åkesson and from the political members combined with how they edited the mobile phone film and published it in a strategic way analyzed with the discourse analysis as a starting point showed that the newspaper constructed the roles and the discourse that were intermediated. Coincidences did not exist in this news reporting and the process from the first interview with the witness until the last article when some of the men were resigned seemed to have been strategically planned out even before the first article was published. In the conclusion of the paper it shows that Expressen seemed to have a well planned strategy in their news reporting of the three politicians in the film and the occurrences. Political scandals in media have looked the same for quite some time and by the result of this analysis it will still have the same construction since the outcome of this story was effective and profiting for the newspaper. At the same time, the discourse of hypocritical and lying politicians is effectively reproduced through how the reporting was constructed and angled. Even though racism might have seemed to be the main theme of the articles, the purpose seemed to have been to put the politicians in a precarious and almost unfixable situation, a process we have seen many times before in media.
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Thornberg, Jack. "Distant Suffering : A multimodal analysis of the politics of pity in news agencies’ mediation of the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun." Thesis, Försvarshögskolan, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-7014.
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This thesis explores of how American and British television mediated the crisis that started with the 4 April 2017 alleged chemical attack in Syria and culminated with the subsequent attack on Syria by the United States 7 April 2017. It builds upon a rich literature and focuses on the politics of pity in the mediated representation of distant suffering as set out by Luc Boltanski. The thesis utilizes a methodological approach which merges Lilie Chouliaraki’s ‘analytics of mediation’ with Roxanne Lynn Doty’s view of discourse analysis. The results find that CNNW mediated the distant suffering based on ostensibly a priori knowledge, whereas BBC News was more inclined to guide the spectators along a line of investigative reasoning.
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Oddo, John. "Traversing the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Busy Day in the Rhetorical Life of a Political Speech." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302368612.
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Cavicchia, Giorgia. "Involvement and detachment in David Cameron and Ed Miliband’s political discourse. An analysis of deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ in UK 2015 General Election news interviews." Master's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2016. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/10799/.
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The goal of my study is to investigate the relationship between selected deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ and the involvement/detachment dichotomy in a sample of television news interviews. I focus on the use of personal pronouns in political discourse. Drawing upon Caffi’s (2007) classification of mitigating devices into bushes, hedges and shields, I focus on deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’: I examine the way a selection of ‘I’-related deictic shields is employed in a collection of news interviews broadcast during the electoral campaign prior to the UK 2015 General Election. My purpose is to uncover the frequencies of each of the linguistic items selected and the pragmatic functions of those linguistic items in the involvement/detachment dichotomy.
The research is structured as follows. Chapter 1 provides an account of previous studies on the three main areas of research: speech event analysis, institutional interaction and the news interview, and the UK 2015 General Election television programmes. Chapter 2 is centred on the involvement/detachment dichotomy: I provide an overview of nonlinguistic and linguistic features of involvement and detachment at all levels of sentence structure. Chapter 3 contains a detailed account of the data collection and data analysis process. Chapter 4 provides an accurate description of results in three steps: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and discussion of the pragmatic functions of the selected linguistic features of involvement and detachment. Chapter 5 includes a brief summary of the investigation, reviews the main findings, and indicates limitations of the study and possible inputs for further research. The results of the analysis confirm that, while some of the linguistic items examined point toward involvement, others have a detaching effect. I therefore conclude that deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ permit the realisation of the involvement/detachment dichotomy in the speech genre of the news interview.
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Linnander, Mathilda. "“Exciting animal” or “blood thirsty beast”? : A critical discourse analysis of the coverage of the wolf issue in Swedish news media." Thesis, Högskolan i Jönköping, Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-44494.
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This is a study of how the wolf is constructed as a controversial issue in Swedish newspapers. The wolf is the most debated and controversial animal in Sweden and splits the country into two camps. On one side are the people who believe that the animal is a natural part of the Swedish fauna and should be protected. On the other side are those who view the wolf as a threat and want the animal to be made extinct. The first group tends to live in urban areas, while the second one has its stronghold in rural areas. To investigate how the wolf is constructed as an issue in Swedish newspapers, debate articles from one urban and one rural newspaper are studied. These articles are then analysed with the method of Critical Discourse Analysis, the centre-periphery theory and the concepts of political alienation. The study finds that there are significant differences in how the wolf is constructed as a controversial issue by newspapers published in urban and rural areas. The articles from the urban newspaper argue in favour of the wolf and claim that keeping the animals captivated is what makes them dangerous, rather than their nature. They tend to focus on the ethical aspect of zoos rather than the wolves themselves. In the rural newspaper the wolves are instead portrayed as a threat to both humans and animals, and the rural way of living. Rural newspapers are also very critical of both the national government and the EU.
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Sabao, Collen. "The reporter voice and objectivity in cross-linguistic reporting of controversial news in Zimbabwean newspapers : an appraisal approach." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/79939.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The dissertation is a comparative analysis of the structural (generic/cognitive) and ideological properties of Zimbabwean news reports in English, Shona and Ndebele, focusing specifically on the examination of the proliferation of authorial attitudinal subjectivities in ‘controversial’ ‘hard news’ reports and the ‘objectivity’ ideal. The study, thus, compares the textuality of Zimbabwean printed news reports from the English newspapers (The Herald, Zimbabwe Independent and Newsday), the Shona newspaper (Kwayedza) and the Ndebele newspaper (Umthunywa) during the period from January 2010 to August 2012. The period represents an interesting epoch in the country’s political landscape. It is a period characterized by a power-sharing government, a political situation that has highly polarized the media and as such, media stances in relation to either of the two major parties to the unity government, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T). Couched in the theoretical explications of Appraisal Theory, specifically the ‘reporter voice’ configuration, the study sought to investigate the proliferation of journalistic ideological subjectivities in ‘hard news’ reports – a genre of news reporting that is largely characterised by claims of ‘objectivity’ and/or ‘neutrality’ and dispassionate journalistic reporting positions. The study, also assuming the orbital structure model developed by Iedema, Feez and White (1994) and White (1997, 1998) in the analysis of ‘hard news’ report in English broadsheet reporting, furthermore sought to investigate whether the textuality and cognitive/rhetorical structure of ‘hard news’ reports in news reports from the three Zimbabwean language journalistic cultures are organised around the same structure. The corpus of news reports analysed in this study were examined for the proliferation of instances of observable authorial ideological positionings by focusing how the choices made in terms of lexical, lexicogrammatical and syntagmatic resources signal evaluative keys that betray authorial ideological subjectivities. The texts were, thus, subjected to close textual analyses in terms of generic structure and journalistic voices. The study shows that Zimbabwean news reports in English, Shona and Ndebele generally share the same structure as expressed by the orbital model, in which authorial subjective evaluations are curtailed through a variety of strategic impersonalisations – largely ‘attribution’. However, despite these similarities, significant differences were observed with regards to the textuality of news reports as well as the uses made of attributed materials.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die verhandeling behels ʼn vergelykende analise van die strukturele (generiese/kognitiewe) en ideologiese eienskappe van Zimbabwiese nuusberigte in Engels, Shona en Ndebele, wat veral op die ondersoek van die proliferasie van subjektiwiteite in die houdings van outeurs by ‘kontroversiële’ ‘hardenuusberigte’ en die ideaal van ‘objektiwiteit’ fokus. Die studie het dus die tekstualiteit van Zimbabwiese gedrukte nuusberigte uit die Engels koerante The Herald, Zimbabwe Independent en Newsday, die Shona-koerant Kwayedza en die Ndebele-koerant Umthunywa uit die tydperk Januarie 2010 tot Augustus 2012 vergelyk. Dié tydperk verteenwoordig ʼn interessante tydvak in die land se politieke landskap. Dit is ʼn tydperk gekenmerk deur ʼn magsdelende regering, ʼn politieke situasie wat die media tot ʼn groot mate gepolariseer het en as sodanig mediastandpunte in verband met enige van die twee belangrikste partye in die eenheidsregering, die Zimbabwe Africa National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) en die Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T). Uitgedruk in die teoretiese uiteensettings van teorie van waardebepaling, in die besonder die ‘stem van die verslaggewer’-konfigurasie, het die studie gepoog om die uitbreiding van joernalistieke ideologiese subjektiwiteite in ‘hardenuusberigte’ – ʼn beriggewingsgenre wat grootliks deur aansprake van ‘objektiwiteit’ en/of ‘neutraliteit’ en posisies van emosielose joernalistieke beriggewing gekenmerk word – te ondersoek. Die studie, wat ook die orbitale struktuur-model ontwikkel deur Iedema, Feez en White (1994) en White (1997, 1998) by die analise van ‘hardenuusberigte’ in Engelstalige breëbladberiggewing gebruik het, het verder daarna gestreef om ondersoek in te stel daarna of die tekstualiteit en kognitiewe/retoriese struktuur van ‘hardenuusberigte’ in drie joernalistieke kulture in Zimbabwe om dieselfde struktuur heen georganiseer is. Die korpus nuusberigte wat in hierdie studie ontleed is, is nagegaan vir die proliferasie van gevalle van waarneembare ideologiese posisionerings van die skrywers deur te fokus op hoe die keuses wat gemaak is ten opsigte van leksikale, leksiko-grammatikale en sintagmatiese hulpbronne bewys lewer van waardebepalende sleutels wat ideologiese subjektiwiteite van die outeurs verklap. Die tekste was dus onderworpe aan noukeurige tekstuele analises ten opsigte van generiese struktuur en joernalistieke stemme. Die studie het aangetoon dat Zimbabwiese nuusberigte in Engels, Shona en Ndebele in die reël dieselfde struktuur deel as wat deur die orbitale model uitgedruk word, waarin subjektiewe evaluerings deur die outeur beperk word deur ʼn verskeidenheid strategiese onpersoonlikhede – hoofsaaklik ‘toeskrywing’. Ondanks hierdie ooreenkomste is beduidende verskille waargeneem met betrekking tot die tekstualiteit van nuusberigte asook die gebruik wat van toegeskryfde materiaal gemaak word.
Deep gratitude goes to the Graduate School (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences – University of Stellenbosch) for the funding/scholarship extended to me through the African Doctoral Academy (ADA), which has made this work see the light of day
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Clark, Allen Stanley. "The Crisis of Translation in the Western Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis of al-Qācida Communiqués." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1257195409.
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Sumner, Lindsay McRae. "Problematizing Humanitarianism: A Critical Analysis of Major American Newspaper Coverage of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1243880099.
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Donkor, L. C. S. "Mediating gendered politics : Ghanaian politicians and news discourse." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2016. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3003900/.
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Mediating gendered politics: Ghanaian politicians and news discourse Research has shown that there are gendered differences in media coverage of political candidates. Kittilson and Fridkin (2008) have shown that women, irrespective of what countries they live in, tend to be systematically stereotyped. Female candidates receive less coverage and the content of the coverage often focuses on their age, style, appearance and family status (Ross, 2010). Over the past decades, several studies have also shown that because of the media’s agenda-setting role, slanted coverage helps create and maintain barriers to the political aspirations of female electoral candidates (Bystrom & Dimitrova, 2014). This research considers the extent to which these patterns and trends can be found in African contexts where rather less research has been undertaken on this particular set of mediated relations, taking a case study approach by focusing on the coverage of mixed gender election campaigns in Ghana. In particular, this study explores how the news media in Ghana frame women candidates and what women candidates and elected representatives say about their relationships with and portrayal by the media. Coverage of three election campaigns was analysed and generated a series of related, comparative datasets which focused on both national and party election campaigns, which took place between 2008 and 2011. Eighteen women candidates who stood in the 2012 parliamentary elections were also interviewed across all main parties. The methods of data analysis were a synthesis of content, frame, and discourse. The analyses of both data (news stories and interviews) were framed and interrogated from a feminist perspective. Findings from the analysis of 198 news items suggest that viable women were covered more frequently than men in terms of visibility and less viable women trailed; in terms of tone, coverage tended to be generally more negative for some of the women than the men and it increased with the level of authority of the office. Coverage focused on the women’s personal attributes, especially their familial relationships and novelty, and for the men, their professional attributes. Again, the focus of coverage was mainly, gendered and prejudicial against women, especially in terms of their character traits, familial relationship, and professional (expertise) attributes. The interview findings, also, demonstrated that women were covered more negatively in sexualised and familial frames, compared to their male colleagues. Some women themselves seem to also have very negative attitudes towards the media. Largely, these findings corroborate many other studies on women candidates.
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Tay, Geniesa. "Embracing LOLitics: Popular Culture, Online Political Humor, and Play." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Media and Communication, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/7091.
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The Internet, and Web 2.0 tools can empower audiences to actively participate in media creation. This allows the production of large quantities of content, both amateur and professional. Online memes, which are extensions of usually citizen-created viral content, are a recent and popular example of this. This thesis examines the participation of ordinary individuals in political culture online through humor creation. It focuses on citizen-made political humor memes as an example of engaged citizen discourse. The memes comprise of photographs of political figures altered either by captions or image editing software, and can be compared to more traditional mediums such as political cartoons, and 'green screens' used in filmmaking. Popular culture is often used as a 'common language' to communicate meanings in these texts. This thesis thus examines the relationship between political and popular culture. It also discusses the value of 'affinity spaces', which actively encourage users to participate in creating and sharing the humorous political texts. Some examples of the political humor memes include: the subversion of Vladimir Putin's power by poking fun at his masculine characteristics through acts similar to fanfiction, celebrating Barack Obama’s love of Star Wars, comparing a candid photograph of John McCain to fictional nonhuman creatures such as zombies using photomanipulation, and the wide variety of immediate responses to Osama bin Laden's death. This thesis argues that much of the idiosyncratic nature of the political humor memes comes from a motivation that lies in non-serious play, though they can potentially offer legitimate political criticism through the myths 'poached' from popular culture.
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Lundh, Daniel. "Contructing the "New Moderates" - a case study in political communication." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för mediestudier, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-80535.
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In this thesis, the“NewModerates” communications strategy used by The Moderate Party and the representation of social practices and social conditions by Alliance for Sweden-coalition in the 2006 and 2010 Swedish election campaigns are analyzed.The campaigns are placed in the context of current research on modern political communication and analyzed through Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis framework.The results indicate that The Moderate Party wanted to encourage voters to reassess their opinion of the party through the “NewModerates”-strategy, by indicating considerable changes in their policies.Official guidelines for which discursive and social practices should be utilized in party communication to achieve these goals were issued.The Moderate Party positioned themselves against The Social Democratic Party, partially by referring to themselves as the “new worker’s party” of Sweden.
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Smith, Anna Maria. "Otherness and identity : British New Right discourse on race, nation and sexuality." Thesis, University of Essex, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.303458.
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Mullin-Lery, Corinna. "Political Islam and the United States' new 'Other' : an analysis of the discourse on political Islam (2001-2007)." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2008. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2321/.
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In this thesis I examine how and why political Islam has come to occupy the position of ontological "other" for the United States, in particular in the period after September 11th and in the context of the "war on terror". In order to do this, I argue that much of the language employed in analyses of political Islam within the various genres of academic writing, political statements, opinion pieces and think-tank reports during this period can be seen to constitute a "discourse" in the Foucaudian sense. In considering its epistemological, historical and ideological roots and manifold contemporary expressions, I demonstrate how this discourse has come to perform both an identity-constructing/affirming role, as well as a politically expedient, rhetorical justificatory function in mainstream political thought and action vis-a-vis the Muslim world. Despite its seemingly hegemonic hold on mainstream perspectives on political Islam, I examine the increasing body of literature that attempts to subvert the discourse on political Islam through critical reflection on issues of U.S./western identity, deconstruction of the discourse's central assumptions and paradigms and, finally, the development of a counter-discourse in its place. These critical endeavours, as well as my own contributions to the counter-discourse, are also discussed in this thesis.
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Mundayat, Aris Arif, and risrif@yahoo com au. "Ritual and politics in new order Indonesia : a study of discourse and counter-discourse in Indonesia." Swinburne University of Technology, 2005. http://adt.lib.swin.edu.au./public/adt-VSWT20051129.093517.
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This thesis will examine the more active role played in Java by the urban wong cilik (the underclass; literally, the 'little people') in contesting the state�s authority,
particularly during the later years of the New Order regime, and following its demise in
1998. I will provide examples of social practices employed by the wong cilik in their
everyday lives and in their adaptation to periods of significant social and political
upheaval. These demonstrate the ways in which they are able to contest the state�s efforts
to impose its authority. These practices also develop and employ a variety of subversive
discourses, whose categories and values diverge significantly from the official language
of government. The examination of the relative linguistic, cultural and normative
autonomy of the seemingly powerless underclass reveals an extremely contested political
terrain in which the wong cilik are active rather than passive agents in urban society.
These ideas have developed out of urban field research sited around warungs
(sidewalk food stalls), urban kampongs and in the city streets of the three Javanese cities
of Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Jakarta. These urban social spaces will be shown to be
significant for the underclass because they constitute sites through which they constantly
interact with diverse social groups, thereby sharpening their knowledge of the
contradictions and feelings of otherness manifest between the classes in Java�s large
cities. It will be shown how, in these spaces, the underclass also experience the state�s
attempts at control through various officially sanctioned projects and how the underclass
are able to subvert those projects through expressive means such as songs, poems and
forms of mockery which combine to make the state�s dominant discourses lose much of
their efficacy.
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Zhao, Meng. "The Media, Education, and the State: Arts-Based Research and a Marxist Analysis of the Syrian Refugee Crisis." Chapman University Digital Commons, 2019. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_dissertations/8.
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By 2019, the Syrian civil war has lasted for nearly eight years and it has created the largest humanitarian crisis since WWII (Achlume, 2015). Using the siege of Aleppo in 2016 as a case study, the author applied a Marxist-humanist theoretical framework and incorporated arts-based research methodology to examine how US news media supports capitalist social relations. The research question for this study was: how do the US media depictions of the siege of Aleppo, Syria in 2016 reflect capitalist social relations? There were three sub-questions that followed: (1) Which elements of the siege of Aleppo in 2016 get the most attention in the specific outlets examined? In what ways do these depictions support the US government and/or corporate interests? (2) What are some of the ways in which Syrian refugees are depicted in the various outlets examined? How and in what ways is US humanitarian policy reflected? How are Syrian’s racialized through these depictions? and (3) How are corporate and government interests tied to these media outlets? This study used narrative inquiry, visual analysis, and critical discourse analysis as research methods to discover five major themes found in US news media’s reporting on the siege of Aleppo in 2016. The author then examined these five main themes through a Marxist-humanist lens to discover how the US news media, the supposed “gatekeeper” for the public, establishes, maintains, and reinforces an ideology that supported hegemony for the dominant class.
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Al, Saad Tamy, and Anders Nyman. "New Course, New Discourse, New Racism? : Right-Wing Alternative Media in Sweden." Thesis, Högskolan Väst, Avd för juridik, ekonomi, statistik och politik, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-14113.
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Like elsewhere in Europe, the tides of nationalist right-wing rhetoric in Sweden have become instrumental in generating a wave of anti-liberal and anti-immigration sentiments in politics and media. In particular, one branch of right-wing alternative media has become a breeding ground for normalizing such rhetoric. Does the anti-immigration stance in such media disguise racist inclinations? In this thesis we examine the discourse of three right-wing alternative media sites in Sweden to explore the possible employment of different types of racism in their articles. By taking the constructivist viewpoint and adopting the post-colonial conceptions of the 'Self' and the 'Other', racist discourse was analyzed and characterized as either biological or cultural. From these two theories, we derived concepts concerning descriptions of contemporary and ideal Swedish society that will be used as further indicators of racist discourses. In this single case study, 94 articles from Fria Tider, Nya Tider, and Samhällsnytt were analyzed on the topics of immigration, integration and crime through a qualitative content analysis. The results show that most of the articles contain cultural racist discourse.
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Goes, Maria Eunice Lobo. "New Labour and the idea of work : a public political discourse analysis of the New Labour Party, 1991-2001." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.271970.
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Mandelzis, Lea. "Representations of security, peace and politics in the Israeli news discourse of Israeli newspapers, 1993-1994." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/30551.
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The mass media, among other institutions, plays a critical role in the reproduction of socio-political and ideological discourses, which include a variety of representations. These promote social solidarity by reinforcing national identity, common beliefs and language, and forming collective memories. Since media representations are closely linked to the policies of elite institutions and to public opinion, they are especially important during transitions from war culture to peace culture. A century of violence between Jews and Arabs has reinforced traditional Jewish myths and stereotypes, and enhanced the Israeli quest for security and desire for peace. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict shapes the socio-political and ideological discourses, reflected by the Israeli mass media. This thesis analyzes representations of topics and actors relating to security, peace and politics by exploring news text in context, hence, the printed news discourses between 1993-1994. It focuses on the Israeli printed media before and after the signing of Oslo accords between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993. This dramatic event marks a significant shift in Jewish history, and is defined in this study as a "transitory" breakpoint, accompanied by a national breakpoint. Global changes in the 1990s marked the beginning of a new chapter in Middle East politics, and in Israeli-Palestinian relations, in particular. It led to the Oslo peace process, culminating in the historic signing of the Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993. This not only entailed the mutual recognition of the State of Israel and the PLO; it also changed perceptions of the Palestinian leadership among Israelis, as reflected by the news media discourses.
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Tregidga, Helen, and n/a. "Power and politics of organisational sustainable development : an analysis of organisational reporting discourse." University of Otago. Department of Accountancy and Business Law, 2007. http://adt.otago.ac.nz./public/adt-NZDU20071219.160116.
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This research begins and ends with a concern for the environment, in particular with unease about current constitutions of the organisation/environment relationship. This thesis explores the discourse of organisational sustainable development examining organisational representations of sustainable development and 'sustainable organisations'. How a group of New Zealand organisations have come to (re)present sustainable development and how they have come to (re)present themselves in relation to sustainable development within a set of reports is analysed. The analysis aims to problematise the discourse and challenge such constitutions by opening out the debate surrounding the 'meaning' of sustainable development within this organisational context. The research considers the role of organisational reporting in creating and maintaining organisational legitimacy, something which is underplayed in the current literature. The thesis makes a contribution to both theoretical development and analytical method through elucidating sustainable development and sustainable development reporting from a discourse perspective.
Discourse (in particular the influences of Foucault and Laclau and Mouffe) both frames and informs the analysis. The discourse of organisational sustainable development is examined through an analysis of an archive of organisational reports and the context of which they are a part. The archive consists of 220 organisational reports (both annual and standalone) from member organisations of the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development from 1992-2003. The texts which make up the archive were selected as they represent 'important texts' in the discursive debate surrounding organisational sustainable development.
Six themes employed in the discourse when representing sustainable development are identified. These themes are: 1) enlightened self-interest and the business case; 2) organisational sustainable development as a balancing act; 3) organisational sustainable development as necessary and important; 4) being sustainable: a responsibility and/or obligation; 5) the challenge and opportunity of organisational sustainable development; and 6) sustainable development: a new or old concept. Overall, 'organisational sustainable development' represents a reweaving of the discourse of organisations and accounting and the discourse of sustainable development. 'Organisational sustainable development' is shown to be organisationally focused, and generally does not challenge the traditional rational economic objectives of these organisations.
Representations of 'sustainable organisations' within the texts are analysed to show how organisational identities are constructed in relation to sustainable development. Five representations are recognised; 1) 'sustainable organisations' as providers; 2) organisations as leaders in sustainable development; 3) 'sustainable organisations' as responsible and committed; 4) 'sustainable organisations' as protectors; and 5) 'sustainable organisations' as accountable and transparent. How the process and practice of 'sustainability' reporting serves in constituting the identity of 'sustainable organisations' is underscored.
Potential effects of such discourse are acknowledged. The hegemonic potential of the discourse is recognised along with an identification of the ideologically-laden assumptions embedded within the texts. In reflecting on the discourse and its effects, the thesis concludes on a pessimistic note regarding the form of sustainable development articulated and the unchallenging nature of this form of sustainable development on the current structures of organisations and organising.
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Moot, Dennis. "Visual Culture, Crises Discourse and the Politics of Representation: Alternative Visionsof Africa in Film and News Media." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1596021641358625.
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Hager, Sandy. "'New Europeans' for the 'New European Economy' : Citizenship Discourses and the Lisbon Agenda." Thesis, Linköping University, Department of Management and Economics, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-5802.
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Combining insights from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and neo-Gramscian IPE theory, this paper puts forth a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective to analyse the discursive articulation of ‘European subjects’ in the context of the EU’s Lisbon Agenda modernisation strategy. It is suggested here that the transformation proposed in Lisbon to the new economic imaginary of the knowledge based economy (KBE), depends on ‘new subjects’ and thus new discursive constructions of identities to reflect the new economic and social formations it envisions. The citizenship discourses of two of the Lisbon Agenda’s main supporters, specifically European business lobbies (represented by the ERT and LCEC) and the EU Commission, are examined in order to explore the relationship between citizenship rights and responsibilities and the two main goals of the Agenda, namely economic competitiveness/growth and social inclusion/social welfare protection modernisation. The argument is made that the discursive articulation of a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ variant of citizenship, especially evident in the discourses of the EU’s business lobbies and the EU Commission since the ‘shift’ to jobs and growth in early 2005, represents an attempt to further the commodification of the EU polity, and as a result, subordinate the more social goals of the Lisbon Agenda to the perceived imperatives of economic growth and competition. The Lisbon Agenda does not therefore mark a dramatic ‘turning point’ in favour of a more ‘social Europe’ as was speculated early on, but instead works to consolidate the dominance of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ as the socio-economic governance model for the EU. The paper ends with a discussion of the possible counter-hegemonic movements challenging the orthodoxy of embedded neoliberalism and neoliberal communitarian conceptions of citizenship.
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Weir, Antony John. "Theatre as public discourse : a dialogic project." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/24167.
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This project aims to develop and explore questions of theatre as public discourse and the representation of England and Englishness in contemporary British theatre during the period 2000-2010. I present a dual focus in this practice-led research process, creating an original creative work, Albion Unbound, alongside an academic thesis. I describe the relationship between play and thesis as ‘dialogic’ with reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. His ideas on language, subjectivity and authorship offer an insightful perspective upon the theory and practice of theatre-making, but Bakhtin himself makes a concerted claim for drama’s inherent monologism, generically incapable of developing genuine dialogic relations between its constituent voices. Chapter One explores the ‘case against drama’ and identifies the different senses of theatrical dialogism which emerge in critical response. Chapter Two considers Bakhtin’s work around carnival, the grotesque and the history of laughter, framed within a debate about the ‘politics of form’ in the theatrical representation of madness and mental illness. A key division emerges between political, discursive theatre and experimental theatre, as I question the boundaries of Bakhtin’s ideas. Chapter Three questions the nature of political theatre and its British traditions via Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt’s claim that David Edgar represents the ‘model’ political playwright engaged in theatre as ‘public discourse’. I focus upon three-thematically linked of Edgar’s plays, Destiny, Playing with Fire and Testing the Echo to engage questions of the ‘state-of-the-nation’ play and Edgar’s varied formal strategies employed in constructing his dramatic worlds and the political discourse he seeks with an audience. Chapter Four extends this debate to question the alleged ‘return of the political’ in new writing between 2000-2010 and specifically a body of plays which engage issues of nation and identity – those plays contemporaneous to Albion Unbound. Chapter Five provides a reflexive conclusion, elaborating upon the creative, collaborative process of making Albion Unbound, accounting for its successes and failures as a piece of contemporary theatre. I also reflect upon the relationship of theory and practice the project has developed, the dialogic relationship between thesis and play. Chapter Six is the play itself, as it was performed.
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Adams, Timothy Lee. "Discourse and Conflict: The President Barack H. Obama Birth Certificate Controversy and the New Media." TopSCHOLAR®, 2011. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1071.
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A creative exploration of the consequences of public speech in the era of freely accessible, social media, as the author, a former elections official, records and explores the consequences of public dissent in the case of President Barack Obama’s eligibility controversy. This non-fiction narrative culminates with the author’s analysis and observations on both his personal experiences and the state of public speech and political power in contemporary America.
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Rabo, Olga. "Gender Stereotypes in Online News Headlines: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online News Headlines Around the Case of Ksenia Sobchak." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-22606.
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This thesis is a critical analysis of the discourses used in online news headlines to reporttwo events that took place during 2018 Russian Presidential debates (on February 14,2018 and March 14, 2018) and focused on Ksenia Sobchak, the only female presidentialcandidate of the 2018 election. By analyzing 52 headlines published in Russia’s mostpopular and most read online news outlets, the purpose of this study is to investigatewhether there are any gender stereotypes used by the journalists to create a particularrepresentation of Sobchak, and to understand if, through this representation, a particularideology is put forward. The framework used to carry out the research is based onFairclough’s critical discourse analysis method combined with a sociolinguisticapproach influenced by Halliday. The application of this framework resulted in studyingthe three interrelated elements of discourse: sociocultural practices, which explore therole of women in the Russian political arena and put headlines under analysis into animmediate context; discourse practices, which focus on the peculiarities of online newsproduction, particularly headlines; and linguistic analysis of the headlines themselves,in which lexical choice, quotation patterns, and transitivity analyses were performed.The analysis revealed that headlines include hidden gender stereotypes, which alignwith Russia’s patriarchal ideology and which are used to represent Sobchak lessfavourably in comparison to her male opponents.
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Hackell, Melissa. "Towards a neoliberal citizenship regime: A post-Marxist discourse analysis." The University of Waikato, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10289/2530.
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This thesis is empirically grounded in New Zealand's restructuring of unemployment and taxation policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically it is inspired by a post-Marxist discourse analytical approach that focuses on discourses as political strategies. This approach has made it possible, through an analysis of changing citizenship discourses, to understand how the neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime proceeded via debate and struggle over unemployment and taxation policy. Debates over unemployment and taxation in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s reconfigured the targets of policy and re-ordered social antagonism, establishing a neoliberal citizenship regime and centring political problematic. This construction of a neoliberal citizenship regime involved re-specifying the targets of public policy as consumers and taxpayers. In exploring the hegemonic discourse strategies of the Fourth Labour Government and the subsequent National-led governments of the 1990s, this thesis traces the process of reconfiguring citizen subjectivity initially as 'social consumers' and participants in a coalition of minorities, and subsequently as universal taxpayers in antagonistic relation to unemployed beneficiaries. These changes are related back to key discursive events in New Zealand's recent social policy history as well as to shifts in the discourses of politicians that address the nature of the public interest and the targets of social policy. I argue that this neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime was the outcome of the hegemonic articulatory discourse strategies of governing parties in the 1980s and 1990s. Struggles between government administrations and citizen-based social movement groups were articulated to the neoliberal project. I also argue that in the late 1990s, discursive struggle between the dominant parties to define themselves in difference from each other reveals both the 'de'contestation of a set of neoliberal policy prescriptions, underscoring the neoliberal political problematic, and the privileging of a contributing taxpayer identity as the source of political legitimacy. This study shows that the dynamics of discursive struggle matter and demonstrates how the outcomes of discursive struggle direct policy change. In particular, it establishes how neoliberal discourse strategies evolved from political discourses in competition with other discourses to become the hegemonic political problematic underscoring institutional practice and policy development.
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L'Hôte, Émilie. "The language of politics : a corpus-based cognitive analysis on new Labour discourse (1994-2007)." Lille 3, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011LIL30031.
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Nous présentons une analyse du discours du new Labour party au Royaume-Uni de 1994 à 2007. Notre étude trouve son originalité dans les cadres théoriques et méthodologiques de l'analyse, et dans ses interprétations. Nous élaborons une analyse cognitive de discours politique basée sur une étude de corpus. D'un point de vue théorique, nous combinons les ressources le la linguistique cognitive (théorie de la métaphore conceptuelle, théorie des espaces mentaux, blending theory) et celles de l'analyse de discours, pour offrir un regard nouveau sur le fonctionnement du discours politique, tout en conservant un maximum d'objectivité dans notre analyse. Notre étude se base sur un corpus de textes du new Labour Party, ainsi que deux corpus secondaires composés de textes du parti Conservateur et du "old" Labour Party (1945-1993). En surcroît d'analyses qualitatives détaillées, nous procédons à une analyse quantitative de nos données grâce à WMatrix, qui permet un travail sur concordances, collocations et mots-clés définis par le test du rapport de vraisemblance. Nous montrons que l'élaboration d'une méthode originale permet d'éclairer le fonctionnement d'un discours politique : il s'agit à la fois de comprendre comment le discours des nouveaux travaillistes reflète les changements du part au niveau des choix politiques et de l'organisation, et de montrer comment le discours du parti fait partie intégrante de ses stratégies de rénovation, puis de maintien au pouvoir. Nous traitons des questions de l'identité, de stére��otypes politiques, de la place du changement dans le discours, avant d'étendre notre réflexion à l'élaboration d'un modèle métaphorique de discours politique contemporainWe present an analysis of new Labour discourse in Britain over the 1994-2007 period. Our study find its originality both in its frameworks of analysis and in the interpretations it offers. Our goal is to design a copus-based cognitive analysis of political discourse. From a theoretical point of view, we combine elements of cognitive linguistics (conceptual metaphor theory, mental space theory, blending theory) and elements of discourse analysis, to offer a fresh look on efficient political discourse, while preserving a satisfying degree of objectivity in our analysis. Our study is based on a large corpus of texts and speeches from the new Labour Party, as well as on two secondary corpora composed of texts from the Conservative Party of the same time-period, and of texts from the Labour for the 1945-1993 period. In addition to detailed qualitative analyses, we present a quantitative analysis of our data with the online software WMatrix, which allows us to work on concordances, collocations and keyword analysis as defined by log-likehood scoores. We show how the elaboration of an innovative and efficient method can shed light on how political discourse works : new Labour discourse not only reflects policy and organisational changes inside the party, but it also an essential part of the strategies of renovation and of power legitimation used by the Blair-Brown team. We tackle issues of party identity, political stereotypes, and change in discourse, before opening up our study to the elaboration of a metaphorical model of contemporary political discourse
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Ball, Sophie Anita. "Reclaiming the commons : a discourse for new politics : how grassroots activists are shaping the future." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2015. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/15146/.
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Where neoliberalism has encroached upon, privatised, destroyed or damaged commons, where it has limited or denied access to physical, economic, cultural and political spaces, then movements to reclaim spaces, to ‘reclaim the commons’, have emerged to counter these trends. This thesis argues that contemporary concepts of the commons help us to transcend the pro-capitalist/anti-capitalist dichotomy and to reconceptualise the political and economic sphere. The examples of discourse and practice that this thesis explores illustrate both the emergence of the language of the commons from many different spheres of life and also its influence across a range of fields. The analysis includes a historical overview of the commons, while focusing on the evolution of the concept from the latter half of the 20th century to the present day, with the most recent material taken from events occurring in 2012. In the case-study, contemporary grassroots activists talk about their work and what the notions of the commons mean to them. Through this vision, we recognise what is lost through the hegemony of ongoing capitalist appropriation, accumulation and exploitation of all aspects of life and reassert rights over - reclaim - that which has been lost. Through the struggle of all those involved in reclaiming the commons, a discourse for new politics emerges and shapes the future. This thesis suggests the emergence of a new discourse of the commons that makes possible a reconceptualisation of social, economic and political spaces.
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Frazier, Erica Lynn. "The Green New Deals of Great Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland : A Critical Discourse Analysis." Thesis, Orléans, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017ORLE1159.
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Cette thèse suit l’évolution et la transmission du concept de GND à travers le temps et l’espace via l’analyse des documents produits par les groupes GND de Grande Bretagne, d’Irlande et d’Irlande du Nord dans une perspective comparative. La thèse intègre des méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives, dont des entretiens semistructurés, l’analyse lexicométrique et une forme adaptée de l’Analyse Critique du Discours afin de répondre à la question suivante : « Comment les discours et les idéologies des 'Green New Deals' de l'Irlande, la Grande-Bretagne et l'Irlande du Nord peuvent-ils être compris en relation les uns aux autres et dans leurs contextes respectifs ? » La thèse explore l'influence des contextes et des groupes sur les discours et le contenu idéologique des textes Green New Deal, et avance l’argument que bien que les Green New Deals aient, à des degrés divers, le potentiel pour constituer la première étape d'une transition sur le long terme vers une économie politique juste et verte, ils se doivent de développer certains thèmes pour permettre à leur potentiel transformateur d’opérer, au lieu de renforcer les idéologies actuellement dominantesThis thesis follows the evolution and transmission of the Green New Deal concept through time and space by examining the British, Irish and Northern Irish Green New Deal documents from a comparative perspective. It uses quantitative and qualitative methods including Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and the collection of elite oral history interviews to respond to the guiding question, “How can the discourses and embedded ideologies of the Green New Deals of the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and Northern Ireland be understood in relation to one another and their respective contexts?”. The thesis explores the influence of contexts and groups on the discourses and ideological contents of the Green New Deal texts, ultimately finding that though the Green New Deals have the potential to act as transitional documents in a move towards a just green political economy, further work must be done to develop key themes in the texts and ensure they realise their transformative potential rather than simply reinforcing currently dominant ideologies
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Schneider, Christian Elias. "Orientation towards Asia Pacific or Europe - Political, economic and socio-cultural aspects of the current discourse on identity in New Zealand." St. Gallen, 2006. http://www.biblio.unisg.ch/org/biblio/edoc.nsf/wwwDisplayIdentifier/02604973001/$FILE/02604973001.pdf.
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Roghult, Madeleine. "Tolerance or truth? : The good, the bad and the political in the discourse of the American Family Association." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-82444.
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This master’s thesis conducts a discourse analysis on a political organization within the New Christian Right (NCR), the American Family Association (AFA). The purpose of the study is to analyze the conditions of possibility for a politics that aims to prevent progress for LGBT rights and does so by analyzing the political terrain where operations of power produce particular and meaningful political practices. As analytical tools the study relies on a theory of the political by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who together with Michel Foucault also provide an elaborate theory of power. Theoretical work by Wendy Brown provides insights into how politics can be expressed when social antagonisms are prevented from engaging in political contestation. Results of the discourse analysis trace social antagonisms in AFA discourse to a dislocation of the social where new articulatory practices have established new relationships between elements of discourse and thereby also changed the nature of social intelligibility and interaction. AFA discourse articulates family values based on the privileged signifiers of freedom, democracy and rights, which is utilized both for a separatist politics of discrimination and an inclusive politics of social assimilation. AFA discourse shows many points of antagonism and organizes an enemy in postmodernism. Freedom as a mode of governmentality conditions the political demands that are and can be made which can be traced to a hegemonic neoliberal articulation. AFA discourse challenges neoliberal hegemony through the process of separatism, yet is intimately bound to the hegemonic way of making political demands in order to gain discursive strength and legitimacy.
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Farquhar, Russell Murray. "Green Politics and the Reformation of Liberal Democratic Institutions." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Sociology and Anthropology, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/944.
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Various writers, for example Rudolf Bahro and Arne Naess, have for a long time associated Green politics with an impulse toward deepening democracy. Robert Goodin has further suggested that decentralisation of political authority is an inherent characteristic of Green politics. More recently in New Zealand, speculation has been raised by Stephen Rainbow as to the consequences of the direct democratic impulse for existing representative institutions. This research addresses that question. Examination of the early phase of Green political parties in New Zealand has found that the Values Party advocated institutional restructuring oriented toward decentralisation of political authority in order to enable a degree of local autonomy, and particpatory democracy. As time has gone on the Values Party disappeared and with it went the decentralist impulse, this aspect of Green politics being conspicuously absent in the policy of Green Party Aotearoa/New Zealand, the successor to the Values Party. Since this feature was regarded as synonymous with Green politics, a certain re-definition of Green politics as practised by Green political parties is evident. This point does not exhaust the contribution Green politics makes to democracy however, and the methodology used in this research, critical discourse analysis (CDA), allows an insight into what Douglas Torgerson regards as the benefits in resisting the antipolitical tendency of modernity, of politics for its own sake. This focusses attention on stimulating public debate on fundamental issues, in terms of an ideology sufficiently at variance with that prevalent such that it threatens to disrupt the hegemonic dominance of the latter, thereby contributing to what Ralf Dahrendorf describes as a robust democracy. In this regard Green ideology has much to contribute, but this aspect is threatened by the ambition within the Green Party in New Zealand toward involvement in coalition government. The final conclusion is that the Green Party in New Zealand has followed the trend of those overseas and since 1990 has moved ever closer to a commitment to the institutions of centralised, representative, liberal democracy and this, if taken too far, threatens their ideological integrity.
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Ould, Meiloud Ahmed, and Meiloud Ahmed Ould. "The Islamic Rational State: The Arab Islamists' New Politico-Legal Discourses of a Post-Caliphate Order." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/625674.
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The future of political Islam, especially in respect to its response to the contemporary salient liberal values, has attracted immense scholarly interest. Some scholars expect a perpetual conflict because of the inherent 'illiberalism' of Islam; while others project an imminent post-Islamist turn, as liberal politics takes hold in Muslim societies. Examining the discourses of Arab Islamists, my dissertation points to a different development. Based on a comprehensive textual analysis of the writings of five contemporary Arab Islamists, projected against a survey of a century of Arab Islamic juridico-political thought—including three decades of engagement with democracy—I argue that these Islamists have formulated coherent (in foro interno) foundations for an Islamic rational state. These foundations, which reflect neither an abandonment of all traditional Islamist aims nor a neglect of divine texts, rest on a reconfiguration of Islamic legal theory, in which classical methods of textual analysis are discarded in favor of a systematic rational exploration of the Lawgiver's aims (maqasid). This novel hermeneutics warranted the exclusion of all past Islamic juridico-political frames (including the early Islamic caliphate) and their rationalizations as binding. Thus, unencumbered by legal precedents, these Islamists conceptualize the political sphere as anthropocentric and therefore open to reasonable overlapping consensus.
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Millar, Katharine M. "Support is the new service : gendered political obligation, the military, and collective subject formation in international relations : an examination of support the troops discourse and civil-military relations in the US and UK from 2001-2010." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4cbb21f4-2e5a-4089-b78a-f1d349e8d409.
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Military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq highlighted a key characteristic of contemporary Western civil- military relations. Today, a small group of volunteers fights a distant conflict while popular familiarity with military service and war declines. There is a disconnect between this way of war and enduring cultural understandings of the appropriate normative relationship between gender (particularly masculinity), military service, and citizenship. This study examines "support the troops" (StT) discourses in the United States and United Kingdom during the "global war on terror" (2001-2010) as a representation of this on-going transformation in gendered/ing civil-military relations. Methodologically, the study employs structured discourse analysis to map an original data set of previously unexamined documents produced by UK and US state and military officials, pro-military non-governmental organizations, peace and anti-war movements, and media. It is the first systematic social scientific study of the "support the troops" phenomenon. The patterns inductively generated within the mapping are interpreted using a poststructural (re)conceptualisation of the military as a discursive structural effect, as well a formal institution and social relation. The study argues that StT is a means of addressing the gendered civilian anxiety that accompanies non-service in wartime. It finds that StT is a political contestation over the appropriate normative structure of gendered civil-military relations. Through the articulation of three ideal-typical, intertwined logics of gendered political obligation, StT discourse reconstitutes military support, rather than military service, as the sine qua non of contemporary normative citizenship. Via a series of gendered associations and contrasts with "the troops", support is further produced as a means of military participation. Correspondingly, ostensibly separate "civil" society is (re)masculinised. Together, the underlying logics of gendered political obligation work to discursively instantiate and (re)produce an idealised vision of the political community, extending and legitimating the transnational liberal social order.
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Abolghasem, Rasouli Sina. "Urban Segregation in Malmö : Discourse Policy Analysis at the Local Level and the Emergence of New Actors." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Malmö högskola, Institutionen för globala politiska studier (GPS), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-42759.
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Segregation is frequently described as a consequence of the global restructuring of social, economic, and political expansions in which multicultural cities, like Malmö, become part of them. This study aims to highlight how visions of housing segregation and exclusion in the city of Malmö has been represented in the local policy documents (Master Plans) through the last three decades and to understand how a newly emerged glocal actor, known as BID Malmö, have impacted the urban governance in the city. In order to investigate these developments, this study applies two analytical frameworks. In terms of policy analysis, it employs a what’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach and for the conceptualization of BID Malmö applies the theory of the Global City. Policy analysis shows that urban segregation has been persistent in the city of Malmö through the last three decades, however the representation of problem has shifted vibrantly from placing citizens as the main cause of housing segregation during 1990s to an arena that includes contingent processes and practices that need to be tackled. Policy analysis also shows that Malmö municipality, through shifting the burden of responsibility, now promotes partnership between public and private actors to reduce exclusion based on specific district needs. Moreover, this study argues that the city of Malmö, because of the cross-border network of global cities, is now a space where one can identify formation of new types of global politics of place where informal political actors are emerging and can actually impact the urban governance. Finally, this study maintains that the city of Malmö, along with its newly emerged glocalized actor, fit into the theory of the Global City, by Saskia Sassen. Therefore, this study has also a deductive qualitative analysis.
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Tinnerholm, Ljungberg Helena. "Omöjliga familjen : Ideologi och fantasi i svensk reproduktionspolitik." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-122219.
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The relationship between the state and the people is a central theme in political theory. Discussions in this field have often centered on how a people can come to constitute a state. Less attention, however, has been directed toward the state’s role in constituting and recreating its people. This book examines the Swedish state’s role in forming the people by regulating the use of reproductive techniques: insemination, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and donations of sperm and eggs. The study focuses on how the issue of assisted reproduction was handled and problematized in Swedish policymaking between 1981 and 2005. What problem representations dominated the political debates and decision-making processes surrounding assisted reproduction? How was conflict expressed within the field of reproductive politics (i.e., what aspects caused conflict or political disagreement)? How did collective fantasies play into the political treatment of reproductive technologies? Using historical government and Riksdag material, four major policy debates have been analyzed, from the first legal regulation of assisted reproduction in Sweden in the 1980s up until the inclusion of lesbian couples as beneficiaries of gamete donation. Theoretically, the study is inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s political discourse theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the “logics approach” developed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. This combination of perspectives allows for a dual focus on both the form of political articulations and their affective force. Thus, the analysis tries to capture what was taken for granted within the discourse on reproduction (social logics), what arose as points of political conflict or contention (political logics), as well as the affective underpinnings of these social constructions and struggles (fantasmatic logics). The main result of the study is that even though the period saw a quite revolutionary development of new reproductive technologies, the reproduction policies under study took on much more moderate and hesitant character. Throughout the analyzed period there was a more or less consensual view that new reproductive technologies should only be allowed if they did not go against the “child’s best interest.” At the same time, there was significant political conflict over what constituted this interest. Moreover, the reforms that were made never fully embraced the radical implications of the new technologies. Rather, they clung on to previously established patterns of what a “real” family looked like. Thus, every move to allow a new technology or include another category of people as legitimate users of that technology was contingent upon the articulation of a discursive equivalence with previously naturalized methods of reproduction, ultimately taking the heterosexual, nuclear family as an implicit model. Finally, I argue that the production of “sense” in this terrain of radical undecidability was dependent on the mobilization of a series of collective fantasies about “natural life processes,” “nature’s imperfections,” “a humanist view of mankind,” “the stable, original nuclear family”, and so on.