Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Analyzing Agency In Online News Reporting Of The Events Of January 6th, 2021: A Corpus-Based Investigation, Matthew W. Abernethy

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Over the last decade or so, politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized. A central focus of this polarization has been the news media, including both traditional print news, online news, and television news. Results of this have been a rapid rise in misinformation, disinformation, the demonization of news (especially political) providers as purveyors of ‘Fake News’, and distrust in mainstream news outlets. The central focus of this thesis is bias in news reporting, leading naturally to the question of how widespread this bias really is. This thesis uses corpus linguistic and discourse analytic methods to pursue this …

Principal Agency 50 Years After The Lau Decision: Building And Sustaining Bilingual Education Programs For Asian Languages, Kevin M. Wong, Zhongfeng Tian

Education Division Scholarship

This study examined how three champion principals of Asian language dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs—Cantonese, Korean, and Mandarin—in California have navigated the oscillating language-in-education policies after the Lau decision. We explored principals' various roles through a lens of agency in a social justice leadership framework, specifically considering the opportunities and challenges for agentive leadership from three different phases: foregrounding and engaging, planning and implementing, and evaluating and sustaining. Findings demonstrate that the success of DLBE programs goes beyond the overarching language policies that supposedly enable bilingual education; rather it hinges on the bottom-up commitment, collaboration and resilience of principals, …

“Pick A Card, Any Card”: Learning To Deceive And Conceal – With Care, Brian Rappert

Secrecy and Society

Because of the asymmetries in knowledge regarding the underlying hidden mechanisms as well as because of the importance of intentional deception, entertainment magic is often presented as an exercise in power, manipulation, and control. This article challenges such portrayals and through doing so common presumptions about how secrets are kept. It does so through recounting the experiences of the author as a beginner learning a craft. Regard for the choices and tensions associated with the accomplishment of mutually recognized deception in entertainment magic are marshalled to consider how it involves ‘reciprocal action’ between the audience and the performer. Attending to …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

How Two High School Teachers Conceive Of Student Voice, Value It, And Foster It, Katherine Mary Mccleary

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory study was to examine two high school English teachers’ experience as they worked together to purposefully implement increased student voice in their classrooms. The study focused on how a convenience sample of teachers designed, implemented, and reflected upon classroom assignments and lessons with the intention to increase student voice and ownership in the classroom. Teachers each participated in four individual interviews, four partnership observations and three classroom observations as they related to student voice implementation.

Data from the interviews, partnership observations and classroom observations were analyzed using qualitative methods and through the lenses of …