Policing the Educational Crisis: English Canadian National Newspaper Reports of the 2012 Quebec Tuition Protests

Abstract

Utilizing a Critical Discourse Analysis, this research examines the coverage of the 2012 Quebec Tuition Protests by Canada’s two national English language newspapers. The goal was to uncover what relationships were formed and constituted by media when representing people challenging neoliberal assumptions of payment for continuing education. The result, I argue, is similar to the conclusions of Stuart Hall et al. about the British press’ coverage of muggings in the 1970s: media and the state form a reciprocal relationship in constituting an “ideological state-apparatus.” The difference, however, is that when centered on an issue of pedagogy in late capitalism, new marketized actors and interests begin to emerge in the role of the state. As such, adults who challenge the reciprocity of the market and media – specifically when it comes to assumptions about learning, school, or education – become infantilized; they lack the supposed revelatory truths of the market and violate the norms of what I refer to as new debt politics.