‘SOME LIKEN IT TO THE ARAB SPRING’

Abstract

This critical discourse analysis of 16 newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor examines comparisons made between the Arab Spring and the Quebec student strike to discern what these comparisons tell us about perceptions of civically engaged youth involved in collective action. The texts were drawn from major Canadian daily newspapers and English language student newspapers using a keyword search and then analyzed for their representations of the strike. The study finds that criticisms of the protesters pointed to their youth as the rationale for their exclusion from democratic dialog and that texts delegitimized the protests by ridiculing comparisons to the Arab Spring and by implying that collective action was more legitimate abroad than in Quebec.

KEYWORDS:

• Quebec student strike
• Arab Spring
• citizenship
• Appraisal framework
• youth
• social movements
• democracy from below
• critical discourse analysis
• childism

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the organizers of the 1st International Conference on Education for Democratic Citizenship in Marrakech, Morocco.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Cégep is an acronym for Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel or, in English, a General and Vocational College. Students in Quebec generally require a diploma from a Cégep before being admitted to universities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Bishop's University Senate Research Committee.

Trevor Gulliver (author to whom correspondence should be addressed) has been a professor in the School of Education of Bishop's University since 2009 where he prepares teachers of English as a second language for Quebec public schools. His research explores issues of power and identity in language learning and teaching and applies insights and methods from critical discourse analysis to examine constructions of group identity in texts, particularly those used in education.

Lindsay Herriot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta. Lindsay's research interests include the roles of extra-curricular organizations in schools, LGBTQ students, childhood and adolescent theory, citizenship education, and student voice.