“Students” as Nodal Point of Identity: Analyzing the Discourses of Quebec’s News Media and Students in the 2012 Printemps Érable
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis presents a comparative discourse analysis of Quebec’s news media and students in the context of the 2012 student strike and more broad-based uprising known as the Printemps érable (Maple Spring). More specifically, the analysis concerns how educational issues were represented in the discourse of the news media compared to that of students, as expressed in mainstream newspapers and student association press releases, respectively. It also addresses the role of these discourses in either reproducing or contesting hegemonic political and economic ideologies. The discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) is operationalized as the primary methodological framework for this study, focusing on the articulation of polysemic signifiers as moments and nodal points. Ten texts were selected from The Gazette and ten from La Presse, as well as ten press releases from the FECQ/FEUQ and ten from the CLASSE. Analysis reveals that the signifier “students” represents a nodal point of identity or master signifier central to each discourse, as they fail to conform to notions of a common media or student discourse. The discourse of The Gazette may be described as that of an illiberal or neoliberal democracy, while those of La Presse and the FECQ/FEUQ are more or less both liberal democratic and neoliberal capitalist. The discourse of the CLASSE is identified as postliberal, with features of direct and participatory democracy, and though it reproduces few neoliberal articulations it also contests few. In the end, challenging the political order appears more practicable than challenging the economic one.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".