Discourse analysis

Given the demands of the era of accountability and standardization, the purpose
of this study was to explore how educational leaders construct their identity and agency.
The study utilized overlapping post-structural and critical theoretical frameworks on
identity and agency to analyze how high school principals interpret and enact
comprehensive school reform rhetoric and their state’s educational leadership standards.
In addition to several cycles of coding, a critical discourse analysis was performed with
the input of the participants’ high schools in order to further analyze the form and
function of discourses, socially situated meanings, and ideologies that constitute being an
educational leader and doing the work of an educational leader.
The findings from the study revealed that the high school principals discursively
construct their professional identity and agency by engaging in discourses and social
practices related to managing the personnel, numerical data, and external expectations of
the organization. As a result, the participants use the comprehensive school reform rhetoric as a way to legitimize and rationalize their duty as educators. The socially
situated meaning attributed to the state’s educational leadership standards is not as clear,
with the participants dismissing their value for a lack of context. In interpreting and
enacting the school reform policy mandates set forth by the district and the state,
principals conserve a corporatized model of school leadership that borrows much of its
neoliberal language from the business sphere. The principals are positioned as mid-level
managers, confirming Foster’s (2004) description of the contemporary school leader who
is preoccupied with controlling the numeracy, information systems, and language of the
organization.
Future research should focus on performing critical discourse analysis studies
with the upper levels of management, including, but not limited to, the central office and
the office of the superintendent, as a way of exploring a more transcendent meaning of
schooling and school leadership that focuses on human development. This study has the
potential to provide leadership preparation programs and policymakers significant insight
into the problems, paradoxes, and possibilities of school reform rhetoric and its impact on
local school leaders.

The dissertation is about the significance for, and impact upon public administration of the correspondence theory of truth or veridicality, and its underlying epistemological assumptions. The underlying thesis is that, unduly influenced by the success of the natural sciences, and naive in accepting their claims to objectivity, many disciplines have sought to emulate them. There are two principle objections. Firstly, all other considerations aside, the supposedly objectivistic methodologies apparently applied to the explanation and prediction of the behavior of interactions of physical objects, may simply be inappropriate to certain other areas of inquiry; and more specifically objectivist methodologies are indeed inappropriate to understanding of human subjects, and their behavior, relations and interactions, and thus to public administration. The second objection is that it is of course logically impossible for any supposedly empirical discipline, as the natural sciences claim to be, to justify the belief in a supposedly objective realm of things-in-themselves existing outside, beyond, or independently of the changing, interrupted and different 'appearances' or experiences, to which an empirical science is qua empirical, necessarily restricted. Correspondence of any empirical observations or appearances (and the consequent or presupposed theoretical explanations) to an objective realm, upon which the claim to objectivity is based, is unverifiable. In light of the above it becomes evident that far from being objective, the natural sciences themselves, and the empirical observations upon which they are supposedly grounded, are subject to conceptual mediation and subjective interpretation; subjective and inter-subjective coherence replacing objective correspondence as the criterion of veridicality. Consequently it becomes clear that the presuppositions and prejudices of the observers enter, in the forms of concepts and preconceptions, into the very observations, and even more so into the theoretical constructions, or theories, of the natural, and indeed human and social sciences, and their claims to be authoritative and true. Subsequent discussion is then focused on both the coherence of individuals' experiences and understanding, and their inter-subjective coherence - which both rises from and constitutes, a "community". The role of language facilitates such coherence.

If we define language fluency as more than simply a way of speaking, but also a
way of thinking, acting, and being, then we enter a conversation of language as
‘Discourse’ that was sparked by James Paul Gee. This conversation invokes discrete
designations of Discourse as home-based, school-based, dominant, and non-dominant.
These designations reveal divisions between Discourses that are believed to manifest
themselves in the identity formation of ‘language-minority students:’ those whose
home Discourse is non-dominant. The dominant Discourse that these students
encounter in school generates two documented paths: Richard Hoggart’s scholarship
boy and Herbert Kohl’s not-learner; both paths reflect the limited agency of these
students within academia. In order to counteract this delimiting of student agency, this
project proposes a progressive shift towards a post-modern conception of identity
formation; this can be accomplished by opening the Composition classroom to student authored, non-traditional, ‘hybridized’ Discourses.

There is an ancient genre of discourse which has served primarily to rationalize masculine privilege. The aim of the authors of this discourse has been to establish the "natural" superiority of men by methodically certifying the "natural" inferiority of women. This genre of discourse is misogynous discourse. Designed to amplify and expose the degrading effect of misogynous discourse on the human psyche, this analysis of misogynous language and discourse is achieved through a critical technique known as defamiliarization, which allows the reader to examine the discourse from a new and incongruous perspective. In this instance defamiliarization is accomplished simply by reversing the gender of the language, making it seem as though it was written by women about men, instead of by men about women. The final goal of this study is to demythologize this language and thereby render it neutral.

This study investigates the court interpreter's cultural role and factors affecting bilingual communication in judicial settings. It examines court interpreting as communicative activity and as a challenging type of intercultural communication. Locating the study between prescribed standards of conduct and their practical applications in the courtroom, this thesis features the interpreter's performed role and its impact in bilingual interactions. Offering a dynamic perspective on intercultural challenges, the study investigates judicial interpreters' practice in relation to linguistic foundations, communicative strategies, and dual standards toward their performance. For exemplification purposes, the study includes a series of arguments and counterarguments posted on the National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators website. The overall argument to assess factors affecting bilingual communication in legal settings aims to assist court interpreters in their daily practices. An additional goal is to create a venue for more effective communication and more equitable administration of justice in intercultural context.

The common intellectual ground shared by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georges Bataille routinely suffers from a dearth of consideration. Yet Bakhtin's celebrated "carnival" writings are invested in undeniably Bataillean interests---death, excess, transgression, heterogeneity. Both Bakhtin and Bataille inherited the Wagnerian Nietzsche's nostalgia for effusive communal ritual, collapsing the boundaries between bodies and the boundary between life and death (this is "transgression," eroticism , according to Bataille; too often transgression is spoken of in terms of stealing a pornographic magazine). Thus bodies in Bakhtin and Bataille are "open," mainly in comic and inglorious ways, and death is the cynosure of festival. Death for Bakhtin and Bataille is not negative; it is "sacred" (Bataille's term), serving as communal cement and a celebration of life. Not, however, life in the sense of 401k's and insurance. Rather, life as exuberance and generosity ("sovereignty" according to Bataille).

Academic public administration (APA) supposedly provides theoretic and programmatic guidance for bureaucratic public administration (BPA). But in reality, a relationship best characterized as a gap between "theory" (APA) and "practice" (BPA) is deemed to exist between the two social practices. Scholars who have analyzed APA theoretic literature ascribed the theory-practice problematic to methodological inadequacies, the implication being that investment in appropriate social science methods would enhance the intellectual rigor and social utility of APA discursive works. To provide a much richer perspective on the theory-practice problematic, this study conceptualizes theoretic discourses as social actions. When scholars theorize, they invariably want to get things done, thus they are involved in social actions linked to some purposes, interests, and issues. As individuals with disciplinary affiliations and commitments, APA scholars bring purposes and interests to their work. So, what kinds of purposes underpin APA theoretic works? Since actions are meaningful within social practices, a corollary question is: What disciplinary influences constrain or authorize APA discourse, and why? To answer the questions posed: first, a discourse analytic method is utilized to analyze textual cohorts (i.e., authorial intentions, issues, themes, genre forms, and methods) in symposia articles published in five mainstream APA journals over a fifteen-year period. Second, a conceptual framework for understanding the disciplinary conditions authorizing and restricting theoretic discourse is outlined using the parameters of practice theory. Discourse analysis and practice theory are complimentary methodological and analytic tools. Discourse analysis focuses on discourse systems, whereas practice theory seeks to explain the relationships that obtain between human actions and social systems. In other words, discourse-practice approach focuses on the individuals' choices of discursive activities and explains how these choices are shaped by the social practices within which the discursive activities unfold. Using insights from practice theory, a speculative perspective relating the failure to reconfigure the discipline's telos in light of changed objective conditions is offered as the basis for the theory-practice problematic in academic public administration.

The purpose of this study was to show support that certain cultural characteristics of an individual could be identified based on the region where that individual was born and raised. These cultural characteristics were identified and defined, and strategies on understanding these cultural characteristics were reviewed. This study revealed that by focusing on this understanding, trust can be established quickly and it is this trust that is the basis of building any type of relationship. Several different macrocultural systems were examined in this study. These included the United States, Asia, Central and South America, India, the Middle East, and the European Union cultures. These are the largest and the fastest growing regions of the world as well as the locations where most of the newly established business relationships are being formed.

Unearthing is a hybrid of nonfiction genres, and follows a narrator as she attempts to piece together past and present memories and meditations about family history, travel, and the idea of home. Using an orchid as a metaphor for someone who is searching for home, Unearthing attempts to expose in the author what might also be found in the reader, an exploration of what is meant by home. By following a trail of biography, personal narrative, and memoir, the reader is given every opportunity to identify with the narrator's struggle with the idea of rootlessness and rootedness, travel and home.

A progressive discourse on race is impeded by several factors: debates on the reality or unreality of the term race itself; discussions of ethnicity that tend to marginalize a discussion of race; the view by majority members of society that race is a topic for discussion principally by minorities; and the lack of models for non-confrontational public conversations on the subject. In the process, a discussion of racial change rarely enters the discourse beyond brief responses in opinion polls. This study proposed the Race and Change Dialogue Model to facilitate the exploration of how race operates in society on an interpersonal level in everyday lives of people across cultures and how changes in racial attitudes occur over time. Theories of race and ethnicity, language, effective communication strategies, and social change provided a starting point, but a "re-languaging" approach was used to advance the innovative nature of this work. In audiorecorded oral histories for public dissemination and interviews in a documentary series on public television, cross-cultural narrators were provided with a safe rhetorical space to tell their stories and to be heard, and a framework of "racenicity" allowed for the discussion of the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, and culture as fused aspects of the same issue. An environment was created that enhanced effective communication of a difficult subject. Despite the challenges that arose in the patterns of talk about racial change, the door has been opened to bring change into the dialogue in a more prominent way that moves the discourse on differences in more productive directions. An alternate model for public discussions on race as "racenicity" was created that has the potential to build coalition in the U.S. and has implications for other societies as well.