Open Theses and Dissertations
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Browsing Open Theses and Dissertations by Department "Communications Studies"
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- ItemOpen AccessA Case Study of Carbon Capture and Storage Development in Three Communities: Understanding the Role of Community and Sense of Place in Local Risk Perspectives(2013-07-10) Boyd, Amanda Dawn; Einsiedel, Edna F.Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged as one potential strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It refers to the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial sources and the long-term storage of this CO2 in stable underground reservoirs. One factor in the successful implementation of CCS is support from residents who live near proposed or operational CCS projects, as these residents will likely have a strong impact on the development and deployment of the technology. This study uses the theoretical framework of interactional field theory to examine how the factors of ‘community’ and ‘sense of place’ influence residents’ perceptions of CCS in their area. The objectives of this study are to 1) examine community views of key issues surrounding CCS; 2) investigate factors that contribute to perspectives of CCS; and 3) to ascertain how local residents view CCS or other energy developments especially in regards to community (perceptions of their place and local relationships). Data for this study was collected using in-depth individual and group interviews, participant observation and secondary data collection. One hundred and twenty residents in three Western Canadian communities were interviewed between May and November 2011. The case study communities included: 1) Priddis, Alberta where a University research project was planned but cancelled due to local opposition; 2) Weyburn, Saskatchewan which hosts one of the world’s largest and earliest demonstrations of carbon storage in an Enhanced Oil Recovery project; and 3) Fairview, Alberta where there is no proposal for CCS. The three case studies provide an opportunity to examine perceptions of CCS in areas at different stages of implementation and offer a unique comparison of the local contexts that shape the support for or opposition to energy developments. The factors that influenced community perceptions of CCS included: 1) place-based knowledge and experience; 2) demographic and community sustainability characteristics; and 3) interactions and relationships among residents. Results suggest that ‘sense of place’ and ‘community’ are important when examining how residents view energy deployments. Collective risk perceptions are influenced by the interrelationships and communication between people about a place of shared concern.
- ItemOpen AccessAnti-Hermes: Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century(2017) Pattinson, Telford-Anthony; Pierson, RyanThis dissertation conceives of a post-structuralist philosophy of communication as informed by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1990). This philosophy of communication is based upon two things. First, within the primary literature, the problem of power is a consistent thread around which Deleuze organizes his concepts. Two, concurrent with his analysis of power, Deleuze produces a disparate critique of communication itself that develops and matures across the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in which he moves from ideas of transmission, information, and opinion, respectively, to focus his analysis of the relationship between power and communication. However, while the history of Communication Studies has also evinced an interest in this relationship between power and communication, the field has not taken up Deleuzian philosophy as a viable mode of theoretical inquiry to further address this association. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. To make the Deleuzian perspectives about power and communication translatable in terms that are relevant to Communication Studies, this dissertation engages in a close reading of Deleuze’s “Postscript of the Societies of Control” essay (1992), in which control is described as several things—the opening of confined spaces, the breakdown of social institutions, and the materialization of communication in practices of technology, labour, and economics. However, this dissertation explains, expands upon, and critiques these perspectives on control that Deleuze only sketches in this essay. Additionally, to make the link between Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies more cogent, the Deleuzian descriptions of control are thematized on the level of movement, which are treated as both concrete and analogical, which situates one’s freedom by modulating the capacity to move altogether. On one hand, control-as-movement is concrete, since messages, smartphones, capital, information, and people are all things in the world that move from one point to another. On the other hand, control-as-movement is analogical, as much as power and communication have been modelled by Communication Studies as being unilinear and unidirectional, from a sender to a receiver. And yet, today, control is multilinear and multidirectional, within which power and communication are omnipresent.
- ItemOpen AccessArts space under (narrative) construction.(2012-10-03) Deimert, Julie; Dr. Rusted, BrianLocated at the intersection of urban development and civic arts governance, an experimental arts space is diversely represented by its three vested groups. For Calgary Municipal Land Corp (CMLC), the Seafood Market is a grassroots marketing campaign; for Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA), the repurposed building is an experiment in arts space governance; and for artists the donated space is a temporarily affordable haven at the centre of a ‘creative city’ make-over. Helping to identify the underlying motives and methods of these narrators are Bourdieu’s capitals theory and Lefebrve’s notions of spatial practices. By combining a narrative research approach for data analysis with an arts-based research text, this communications case study demonstrates the conscription of artists as characters in the dominant narrative of urban gentrification and the influences limiting their active participation in complicating that narrative.
- ItemOpen AccessBetween the Lines: Canadian Foreign Correspondents and the Construction of Canada's Cold War Identity(2014-07-04) Steward, Gillian; Keren, MichaelThe purpose of this study was to reveal how Canadian foreign correspondents constructed a Canadian perspective in their reports on key Cold War conflicts. Four Cold War conflicts and four correspondents were selected; The Suez Crisis (1956) as reported by Peter Worthington for The (Toronto) Telegram; erection of the Berlin Wall (1961) as reported by Stanley Burke for CBC Television; the Vietnam War (1971-73) as reported by Joe Schlesinger for CBC Television; Nicaragua’s civil war (1981-1984) as reported by Oakland Ross for The Globe and Mail. With the application of critical discourse analysis the reportage revealed that there was a common, unspoken, Canadian perspective or sensibility expressed by the correspondents. Most of their reports focus on people who are victimized by the clashes between the super powers. They dwell on the people who are caught in the middle of violent Cold War conflicts over which they have very little control. Analysis also revealed that except for Worthington’s reports from The Suez Zone in 1957-58, the mention of Canada or Canadians is rare, as is the posturing by the Soviet Union and the United States, posturing that sometimes threatened to break out into nuclear war. Instead, these Canadian correspondents were more concerned about the hapless men, women and children, caught in the crossfire of the proxy wars fought by the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Although interviews with correspondents revealed that they hadn’t given much thought to what a Canadian perspective would entail, the perspective in their reportage reflects Canada’s history and identity as a country that values surviving rather than domination. It also reflects Canada’s history as a country that often found itself caught between the demands of two super-powers – Britain and the United States. During the Cold War federal leaders sought to carve out a role for Canada in which it sought common ground with smaller nations rather than become completely subservient to the demands of its key ally – the United States. This public shunning of the U.S. is another key theme in the reports of the four foreign correspondents.
- ItemOpen AccessColorblind and Colorbound: Racial Ideology in the Discourses on Intimate Interracial Relationships(2017) Jonahs, Andrea; Bakardjieva, MariaThis dissertation seeks to better understand the problem of racism—its locations, its strongholds, its discursive resources. More narrowly, it assumes that discourses pertaining to one’s private, intimate life offer a unique microcosm by which to examine contemporary racial ideology. To this end, this study examines online reader comments about intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) and asks the question, what do the online discourses on IIRs reveal about our shared understanding of race and racism? The theoretical framework in this study draws upon critical discourse analysis (CDA), critical race perspectives, and Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory. I use a thematic analysis to parse over 600 online comments, in response to three online articles, discussing the subject of IIRs, dating “preferences” and racism. Inductive and deductive coding capture rhetorical strategies and language features used to make sense of racialized dating practices. The patterns and themes that emerge from the analysis contribute to understanding the shifting nature of contemporary racial ideology. The discourses on IIRs reproduce everyday racism, that is, the repetitive, normalized, taken-for-granted ways in which racist structures are preproduced and reinforced (Essed,1991). Everyday racism undergirds colorblind ideology, the dominant racial ideology of our time that seeks to deny the ubiquity of racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; van Dijk, 1992a). By focusing on discourses about IIRs, this research highlights some unique features of colorblind ideology, expanding its discursive resources, and demonstrating its overall elasticity and resilience. The findings in this research indicate that the language of “preference” is a key feature of colorblind ideology. “Preferences”—drawing upon the term’s highly individualized yet broad definition—effectively sanction, downplay and normalize racism in the discourses on IIRs through a number of rhetorical strategies. Illustrating the flexability of colorblind ideology, I argue that colorblind discourses pull into its orbit colorbound discourses. Colorbound discourses express a bold attachment to the racialized body while at the same time, deny any racial meaning (racism defined as racist ill-intent) to such attachment. Colorboundness illustrates how social estimations of, and attachments to, racialized “looks” or makeup (which also shape estimations about character and intelligence) operate to maintain the racial hierarchy. Boundary work at the public-private border, sustained by a neoliberal ethos, is also central to colorblind and colorbound discourses. Boundary work articulates social values and obligations through the delineation of the private/public sphere. As such, liberal and neoliberal ideologies are reified through an emphasis on individual autonomy and free market values over discourses of colorblindness, meritocracy, and equality. Although less frequent theme in the data, everyday anti-racism discourses indicate efforts to challenge everyday racism. Everyday anti-racism, drawing on a variety of context-driven language resources, bring an (un)common sense into the discursive arena and expand the strategies for anti-racism efforts.
- ItemOpen AccessCommunicating Social Identity: The Sensory Performance of Cattle Branding(2013-09-23) Bird Rondeau, Jennifer Joanne; Rusted, BrianThis thesis investigates the practice of cattle branding as a cultural performance, the sensory aspects of which contribute to the creation, maintenance, and communication of the social identity among cattle ranchers. This thesis used methods of sensory ethnography to generate sensory data to reveal how sensory knowledge permeates this cultural performance. The analysis is divided between five components of ritual activities used to study cultural performance: formalism, traditionalism, invariance of actions, rule-governance, and sacral symbolism (C. Bell 1997, 138). The main conclusion drawn from the analysis is that by using sensory ethnography in research on performance and identity new conceptual ground can be gained in communications and sociocultural studies by establishing a renewed focus on how sensory relations are social relations (Howes 2003, 55).
- ItemOpen AccessDialogue and Dissemination: The Social Practices of Medical Illustrators in the Pharmaceutical Context(2013-09-13) Brierley, Meaghan; Einsiedel, Edna F.This dissertation investigates the social practices of North American medical illustrators in the creation of images for their pharmaceutical sponsors. It tells a contemporary story of the relational attributes that support these visual science messages, using theories of social practice and research on communities of practice. Ethnographic interviews conducted with 28 medical illustrators reveal that visual accuracy is the result of a process of negotiation influenced by transitioning community interests. Medical illustrators face increased complexity in the communities of practice responsible to professional representations of science bridging research science, marketing, regulatory, legal, and health advertising interests. Medical illustrators invoke accuracy in challenging negotiations through relationships with beauty, technology and science story, in order to engage in traditional dialogues with medical science practitioners despite a commercial pharmaceutical context of dissemination. The accuracy of images is not a singular, uncomplicated entity, but a fertile area of active creation, a social construction through negotiated meaning. Medical illustrators transition to working contexts that allow them to engage in production processes that bridge dialogue and dissemination, in smaller biotech companies, not-for-profit educational contexts, or their own research science studies. This research contributes to the disparate literatures of medical illustration, practice theory, the social studies of scientific imaging and visualization, and visual culture where the material world is a complex socio-material space.
- ItemOpen AccessDisclosing National Identity Within National Debate: The Study of Social and Political Ideologies in Canadian Climate Change Rhetoric(2013-10-02) Kingdon, Julia; Brent, DougThis thesis examines the ideological rhetoric of Canadian climate change discourse to understand how such communication may be influencing certain perspectives towards Canadian identity and affecting the Canadian government’s policy approaches to climate change. An ideological rhetorical critique is applied to the rhetoric of the NRTEE, Greenpeace, and the Friends of Science to determine the ideologies and identities being rhetorically articulated within these pivotal perspectives of Canada’s climate change discourse. This thesis also identifies ideological similarities between each of the three organizations’ climate change rhetoric, and discloses the similarities between their rhetorical constructions of Canadian identity. The finding of shared ideologies and versions of Canadian identity demonstrates how ideological rhetorical analysis can function to create solidarity even amongst the most polemical of parties. The methods and findings of this thesis also function to exemplify the initial means through which a representative and inclusive Canadian climate policy could be derived.
- ItemOpen AccessEnvironment, Communication and Democracy: Framing Alberta’s Bitumen Extraction Onscreen(2013-09-25) Takach, George; Rusted, BrianThis study in environmental communication addresses links among land, natural resources and people in a world shaped increasingly by global economic forces and pervaded by the power of pictures. Hosting what has been called the world’s largest industrial project, the bituminous (‘tar’/‘oil’) sands, Alberta has become an epicentre of the clash between economic growth mandated by extractive capitalism and its unsustainable ecological costs. A high-stakes, international public-relations battle has emerged, with independent filmmakers producing documentary films challenging Albertans’ environmental stewardship, and government and industry producing advocacy videos defending it. Situating this negotiation of Alberta’s place-identity in a discourse beginning in 2004—the year the US deemed the extraction of the sands to be economically viable—this study is inspired theoretically by the Canadian critical tradition, notably extensions of Innis’ ideas on communications into environmental studies, and methodologically by arts-based research (re)presenting diversities and complexities of voice, nuances of character and potential affect on audiences that would be diminished in conventional scholarly prose. Thus, this study proceeds in three phases: interviews with commissioning and creative principals of the films/videos; a critical visual framing analysis of that work, focusing on its creators’ positioning of Alberta and broader cultural, political and economic forces at work; and a synthesis and (re)presentation of my findings in a script for a hybridized documentary film. Five conclusions emerging from this study are: (1) place in a globally-recognized, resource-based economy is positioned and contested largely in response to events and to representations of that place originating beyond its borders; (2) in representing resource extraction and its effects, visual strategies focus on both the macro and the micro; (3) visual omissions or denials can be as significant in environmental discourse as explicit representations; (4) producers of films/videos use a wide spectrum of frames ranging from anthropocentric (e.g. denial, progress, money) to ecocentric (e.g. eco-justice, present-minded, ecocide); and (5) the significant costs, production time and distribution challenges of producing and exhibiting documentary films professionally favour presenting generalizations and drama over nuanced details in addressing complex issues like environmental concerns about resource extraction.
- ItemOpen Access“Ethnic Media, Identity, and Community: A Case Study of the “Koleso” Newspaper”(2013-09-09) Jukova, Lolita; Schneider, BarbaraThe purpose of this study was to identify community and identity based connections that the “Koleso” newspaper creates for its readership - the Calgary Russian-speaking community. By applying a variety of different research methods such as content analysis of the “Koleso” newspaper, focus groups and an interview with the Editor-in-Chief, within the core and ethnic identity theoretical framework, I demonstrate that the “Koleso” creates for its readership connections in time and space and preserve elements of their multiple identities. The subject of Canadian ethnic media in general and the Russian ethnic print media in Canada in particular remains not well-enough researched. This thesis, therefore, contributes to an overall study of ethnic media by providing a unique perspective on a particular Russian ethnic publication and its influence on building multiple identities and connections with the Russian-speaking audience in Calgary.
- ItemOpen AccessExtreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses: The Treatment of Women in Black Metal, Death Metal, Doom Metal, and Grindcore(2014-01-27) Kitteringham, Sarah; Rusted, BrianThis is a communicative research project that focuses on the treatment of women in extreme metal bands that stem from scenes in Canada. This research addresses the following question: using constructs derived from the Communication Theory of Identity, what are the contributions to studies in extreme metal that can be made by qualitative research on women's experiences of negotiating gender and identity as performers and fans in extreme metal scenes? It also chronicles the history and sounds of extreme metal, and outlines the extreme metal scene in Canada. The methods of inquiry include autoethnography, participant observation, and qualitative interviews. It found that among other challenges, women in extreme metal bands struggle with negative and reactionary responses from both males and females in the metal scene, and how they are represented in the media. Despite these issues, participants in this study identified the increasing number of women in extreme metal bands, and stated that discourse around gender was changing for the better.
- ItemOpen AccessFacebook Identity Formation: Observing the Dramaturgical Evolution of 'Self'(2013-09-30) Krivan, Sabrina; Bakardjieva, MariaThis study explores the relationship between online Facebook identities in relation to face-to-face, or offline, identities present in the social world. A two-month observational study of Facebook participant’s profiles was conducted to determine how online identity was formed and what connection the offline world has to the Facebook platform. Typologies and persona categories were developed to explain how users navigate the online world and engage with techniques of self-presentation to produce a favourable impression. The main findings that developed out of the study were three-fold: 1) Online interaction on Facebook is rooted in the offline, in that content from the offline informs Facebook interactions and physical profile features; 2) Strategies of self-presentation occur online – as they do offline – but online presentation is performed through typology and persona qualities; online user behaviour is exhibited through ‘type’ definition, and development and management of identity is performed through self-presentation techniques to ensure consistency of persona characteristics; and 3) Facebook is an digital archive of online identities that are continuously performed and validated by our network of online and offline contacts.
- ItemOpen Access"Follow the World's Creators": Negotiating the Value of GIF Art and Artists(2017) McCutchin, Carla; Eiserman, Jennifer; Shepherd, Tamara; Keller, Jessalynn; Hogan, MélThis study employs Adam Arvidsson’s (2009) ethical economy theory to examine how the value of GIF art and artists is negotiated on the social media platform Tumblr.com. According to Arvidsson corporations generate value by guiding the development of social relations through the construction of a collaborative ethos. On Tumblr, this ethos is manifested through their business model and brand identity which invites users to “Follow the World’s Creators.” Through its business model and brand, Tumblr discursively positions itself as a site where creators and creative activity obtain cultural value, but also supply the platform with reputation value. By conducting a series of interviews with 15 GIF artists over email, my study shows that the value of GIF art and artists is predominantly conferred through circulation, a method of sharing that is afforded by Tumblr’s reblog function.
- ItemOpen AccessFostering environmental citizenship through public deliberation: Investigating Canadian participant perspectives from the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative(2014-04-30) Medlock, Jennifer Elaine; Einsiedel, EdnaDrawing on the deliberative turn in environmental governance, green political theorists have put forward public participation, particularly events involving dialogue and deliberation, as a way to foster “environmental citizenship”. They argue, for example, that through participation individuals acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to reflect on environmental problems; gain more appreciation for “nature” and humans’ interconnectedness with the natural world; become more attuned to the collective good over individual interests in coming up with policy solutions; and, become more motivated to take future action on environmental issues. However, very little empirical research has examined this contention in practice and it remains an open question as to whether and how deliberation fosters environmental citizenship, and in what forms. This thesis aims to close that gap through an empirical case study of the Canadian arm of a global public consultation process called “World Wide Views on Global Warming” (WWViews) that involved more than 4000 citizens across 38 countries. Positioning participatory initiatives as “experiments in citizenship” (Luque, 2005), it explores how Canadian participants understood themselves, and others, as environmental citizens, and how these perceptions shifted as a result of participating in WWViews. Through a set of 28 semi-structured interviews six to seven months post-WWViews and survey responses before and immediately after the event, the analysis identifies a range of environmental citizenships among participants, contingent on different notions of climate governance, the citizen’s expected relation to the state, and interpretations of the issue of climate change itself. Predominant within the analysis is the influence of dominant climate discourses, both within and beyond the consultation setting (e.g. the science-focused discourse prevalent at UN-level negotiations or the climate skeptic discourse seen in mass media coverage), on how participants understood themselves to be environmental citizens. In particular, ambivalence and/or scepticism over the nature of climate change was far-reaching among WWViews Canada participants, influencing how they perceived interactions with fellow participants, how they assessed the success of the consultation event itself, and what actions they deemed most appropriate for environmental citizens to take moving forward.
- ItemOpen AccessHunting for Food Citizenship: Food, Politics, and Discourses of the Wild(2017) Carruthers Den Hoed, Rebecca; Elliott, Charlene; Schneider, Barbara; Rock, Melanie; Colpitts, George; Knezevic, IrenaIn the words of food hunting advocate Tovar Cerulli (2012a), hunting is taking a seat at the table of food “citizenship”: it is increasingly positioned as a way for people to engage with questions about how food and people ought to be governed. While a burgeoning literature on food citizenship exists, it focuses on agrarian citizenship projects and overlooks wilder food practices, like hunting. Given that several prominent food activists are now advocating the practice, food hunting warrants careful examination as a model of food citizenship. This study uses a Foucauldian view of discourse to explore the food citizenships mobilized in food hunting lifestyle manuals. It finds that models of food citizenship mobilized by these food hunting texts echo elements of agrarian food citizenships, but also diverge from them in startling ways—rendering hunting-based food citizenships nigh unrecognizable as expressions of food citizenship, at least by agrarian standards. Rather than champion reconfigurations of agrarian-industrial food networks to foster close-knit communities and relations of care, food hunting citizenships aim to reconfigure human-nature relations so that humans are compelled—via appeals to biological and genetic destiny—to govern themselves in ways suited to the Anthropocene, the current ‘age of humanity,’ in which humans must contend with (and check) their power to threaten nature, and endure the power of nature to threaten humans (Davoudi, 2014, p. 360). As of and for the Anthropocene, hunting-based food citizenships are rather grim and defeatist: prudent hunters exercise vigilance and self-control in the wild, minimizing human-wrought destruction threatening human and food security; whereas resilient hunters cultivate the readiness and resourcefulness required to endure disruptive changes wrought by wild-nature and the perpetual vulnerability of humans in wild food systems. Hunting-based food citizenships, however, open up space to consider the role of sentient animals—as autonomous, self-governing actors—within models of food citizenship. They also render visible wild species, wild lands, and wild discourses as integral to debates about food policy.
- ItemOpen AccessIan McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication(2014-09-23) Cohen, Naor; Keren, MichaelSince authors are skilled communicators, novels can help reimagine our communicative motivations and public sphere in a contemporary context. Their fiction can situate politically-conscious narratives in pertinent, culturally salient contexts to reflect and challenge our deepest convictions. In this work I consider three novels by British author Ian McEwan, which show his liberal-communicative thought: Black Dogs, Amsterdam and Saturday. These texts exemplify his aesthetically accomplished and intellectually dense oeuvre. Each novel explores one major theme. Black Dogs addresses historical narratives, concerned with how we integrate past events into our current identities. Amsterdam challenges the notion that expert elites can achieve greatness when their actions lack moral responsibility. Saturday undermines the deterministic conception of reason and science in light of political, economic and ecological insecurity and irrationality in today’s post-9/11 world. In all three books, daily random events shatter the protagonists’ worldviews. McEwan takes a liberal-pluralist approach, representing the contingent and irrational elements challenging classic liberalism. Promoting individual autonomy, reason, and scientific progress, perfectionist liberal thinkers like John Locke and John Rawls presented fundamental moral entitlements that bind all human beings across time and place by virtue of their humanity. However, as different cultures interact, issues of legitimacy, stability and cooperation in democratic societies arise. Current political and communication theory addresses these concerns by seeking common ground from which to evaluate diverse political orders. Influenced by John Durham Peters’s ethical-political communication theory, this study sets out a theoretical framework that combines political and communicative investigations, and sees today’s liberal and communicative projects as similarly motivated. Within this space, I critically examine McEwan’s contribution to a communicative and political moral code that can guide us through the fact of pluralism. This moral code accepts the burden of reason, and the fragility of happiness in modern time, pointing to our psychological pathologies and contradictions in moral conscience. We can be skeptical about our moral, political and scientific convictions while avoiding moral relativism. We can celebrate individual autonomy, self-fulfillment and freedom of choice only if they come with empathic interest for the other. Any other possibility will diminish our greatest achievements.
- ItemOpen AccessLiving stories one day at a time: Recovery storytelling in online communities of practice(2017) Hedges, Amber; Schneider, Barbara; Schneider, Barbara; Johnston, Dawn; Ewashen, CarolRecovery is an on-going, socially constructed practice that is “done” by individuals through storytelling. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and explain how members of an online community of practice –r/stropdrinking (r/SD)– normalize recovery by crafting and enacting a recovery identity through recovery storytelling in a stigma-laden world with others. The aim of this thesis is to make sense of how self-described disordered drinkers “do” recovery in online communities of practice (CoP). I argue that alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a disorder of a person in social context, and that storytelling is the process through which recovery is enacted in the world. For data collection and analysis, I applied an autoethnographic storytelling approach. Three processes of recovery storytelling emerged: (re)storying, (re)forming, and (re)learning. These aspects are mutually interdependent and make up a recovery helix that must be nurtured through storytelling. CoP is also described as helical, made up of engagement, imagination, and alignment. These helixes work together to when people “do” recovery online, and are helpful models to unpack how recovery is done in concert with others. This thesis provides an alternative narrative about the lived experience of AUD recovery in pursuit of dismantling stigma. By telling stories about AUD recovery, I am promoting help-seeking and manifesting a social context that responds to AUD with compassionate concern.
- ItemOpen AccessManaging the Medicalization of Madness: A Narrative Analysis of Personal Stories about Mental Illness Online(2015-05-08) Solomon, Monique de Boer; Schneider, BarbaraEmancipatory in spirit this thesis asserts personal narratives are an essential and active contributor to the development of meanings in discourse about mental illness and they have an influential role managing medicalization. The medicalization of madness is increasingly contested as people describe and explain how medical approaches and definitions of mental illness at best fail to adequately account for personal experiences of distress, and at worst are the cause of increased physical and psychological trauma. This thesis examines personal narratives posted publicly on medical, social care, and activist websites by organizations and individuals offering support and information about mental illness, community care options, psychiatric survivorship, activism and advocacy. Initial reviews indicated personal stories are included on websites by organizations and individuals with differing views, either for or against medical approaches, suggesting narratives are valued as a way to support or challenge various perspectives on medical approaches to mental illness. In this thesis the objective is not to determine which view is correct or truthful, rather it is to examine how people manage discourse about mental illness as it relates to their personal experiences, whether they identify as health care consumers, patients, ex-patients, or psychiatric survivors. Drawing on Habermas’s (1987) Theory of Communicative Action and Fairclough’s (1992) Social Theory of Discourse this thesis conceptualizes personal narratives as discursive practices and active sites where meaning is negotiated as people work to express lifeworld experiences in ways that fit with, yet challenge system discourses about mental illness. Using Gubrium and Holstein’s (2009) methodology of Narrative Ethnography the analysis identifies and examines personal stories about what it’s like being a patient, how social relationships matter, and why recovery is personal. The analysis shows people manage medicalization of their experiences in their stories by making meaningful connections between personal experiences and discourse about mental illness via a narrative practice (introduced here) called narrative bridging. To accomplish this people use narrative strategies of resisting, re-informing, and reinforcing discourse about mental illness, and it is through these strategies and the consequences of narrative bridging that medicalization is managed in personal narratives.
- ItemOpen AccessProrogation 2008: A Case Study in how Media Communicate Democracy(2012-11-16) McBrien, Alex; O'Neill, BrendaThis thesis concerns the topic of how media communicate democracy, and uses the prorogation of Parliament in 2008 as its case study. A content analysis of the Toronto Star, National Post, and Le Devoir was performed to answer the question of what agendas and frames were used by the media (i.e., newspapers) when covering the prorogation crisis in 2008. Analysis of the agendas and frames used by federal political parties was also done to understand the impact that frames and agendas had on newspaper coverage. This study utilized both frame and agenda setting theory to determine which agendas and frames were most salient during the prorogation crisis of 2008. The results suggest that newspapers placed more salience on frames and agendas concerning socialists, separatists, questions of political leadership, and regional divisions, rather than communicating the role of responsible government in a Westminster Parliamentary system.
- ItemOpen AccessPublic Participation, Mediated Expertise, and Reflexivity: How Multiple Medical Realities Are Negotiated in Runners’ Self(Care) Practices(2016) Campbell, Patricia Ann; Einsiedel, Edna; Schneider, Barbara; Elliott, Charlene; Estefan, Andrew; Denison, JimResearch from science and technology studies (STS) has called for increased public participation and representation in science and technology that often challenges the boundary between expert and lay knowledge. While many scholars have focused on governance and formal interventions, this thesis attends to how laypersons participate in shaping technoscience of their own accord. Contextualized by a broader communications studies approach, the study’s theoretical framework builds on science governance discussions regarding the nature of expertise by applying the model of coproduction and the concepts of tinkering and care to settings of spontaneous, user-based participation. To access these settings, this thesis examines laypersons’ negotiation of multiple medical realities in their (self)care practices through the lens of two communities: the online social network of the website, Running Mania, and the face-to-face running group, the Red Deer Runners Club. The ethnographic methods include participant observation of the Running Mania injury forum and thirty-seven email/face-to-face interviews. The findings indicate that this collective running practice shapes runners’ reflexive understanding of medical expertise, which often challenges the sociocultural biases of the supposedly “objective” institutional framing of medical discourse. Running bodies are the site of multiple sources of mediated expertise that articulate with their caring practices: healthcare and medical professionals, running-specific social networks, and website/print sources. Within the running collective, lay expertise and medical expertise join to coproduce a hybrid discourse of care, particularly in settings of controversy. As individuals, participants negotiate multiple medical realities in the lived experience of their (self)care practices by tinkering with technologies, bodies, and multiple expert discourses. Using runners as a lens, the thesis demonstrates how laypersons participate with expertise as they (re)produce medical knowledge in their everyday practices. It also challenges determinist approaches to communications technology by illustrating the subtle ways in which processes of mediation are implicated in the sharing and (re)production of this expertise. Finally, it calls for increased reflexivity from healthcare providers and attentive experimentation in the enactment of “good” care.