Scholarship as Cipher: Collective Disruption of Educational Hierarchy Through Engagement With Critical Discourse Analysis

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Transnational Policy Discourse

Abstract

This paper presents findings of a critical discourse analysis of three public state university diversity statements and also describes the evolution of a study and writing group into a collective of scholars. Through a dynamic process of exploring our own diverse identities and perspectives and comparing and expanding on our individual analyses, we engaged with a process of scholarship that brought to mind a freestyle hip-hop cypher, a cyclical process through which individual artists challenge one another and build off one another’s contributions to a shared spontaneous performance. Our project includes an investigation of how power and ideology are expressed through policy discourses, but also how we can disrupt these messages through a particular mode of investigation and sharing.

Authors

• Allison Mattheis, California State University - Los Angeles

• Ai-Khanh Nguyen, California State University - Los Angeles

• Chris Wiebe, California State University - Los Angeles

• Kimi L Wilson, California State University - Los Angeles