Media representations of the Colten Boushie case : a critical discourse analysis of property, rural crime, and laissez-faire racism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the media’s portrayal of the Colten Boushie case, who was killed by Gerald Stanley in Saskatchewan, Canada. This case and its media representations sparked debates about race, property, and rural crime. Despite some research delving into this case and the controversies it triggered, a substantive analysis of the media’s role is missing. Such an analysis is relevant, as it sheds light on how media framing impacts public discourse and policy to deepen our understanding of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada. An inductive and iterative frame analysis of sources published between August 2016 and April 2020 informed my critical discourse analysis of prominent themes. I problematize the media’s framing as promoting oppositional interpretations of events that reflect a group positioning, polarizing ambivalent and contingent frames along Indigenous-settler and rural-urban interpretations of the case. This research reveals the roles of the media in affirming and challenging specific legal and political orders in Canada. A frame analysis of the sources renders visible the normative ideas that perpetuate the power dynamics of settler-colonial discourse. This research emphasizes the significance of frame analysis as a method to examine how ideas are conveyed and disseminated to different publics. It problematizes the diverse attitudes that are circulated in different provinces with attention to differences evident in small, medium, and larger population centres. Contradictory patterns emerge that point to both an awareness of settler colonial realities and continued negative colonial attitudes toward Indigenous people in Canada. I address these contradictions by testing my frame analysis results against the theory of laissez-faire racism. Laissez-faire racism is informed by group position theory and refers to contemporary constructs of racial prejudice that continue Indigenous disadvantage as a legacy of colonial discrimination. I use the theory of laissez-faire racism to interpret the overt and covert racial ideologies discerned in my frame analysis of the Colten Boushie case and Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".