3.4.1 Description of Data Analysis
Out of respect for the subjects of research, data was analyzed and coded in cooperation with participants to ensure that criteria for analysis were not overly prescriptive. Creating
conclusions in conversation with stakeholders allowed for an important reflective critique. In doing so, participants could further identify, explore, and articulate their positions, their learning and their needs. To do so, participants collaborated throughout the process of research, setting the terms for collecting data and pointing to emergent themes for analysis and conclusion.
Despite the shifting outcomes anticipated from the emergent design, the final product included hybrid principles of critical discourse analysis (Rogers et. al, 2005).
Critical discourse analysis is an effective approach to analyzing this data because it employs a social theory in which discourse constructs, represents, and becomes represented by the social world (Fairclough 1989; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). Attempting to answer questions
meaning-making as dialectic, socially constructed, interactional, and always situated culturally and historically. Thus, critical discourse analysis can be used as more than a tool of critique, bringing together micro-and macro-analyses of social and political forces. Further, this method of analysis demands reflexivity from the researcher (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999),
acknowledging the processive nature of constructing meaning around the subjects of the study.
Van Dijk (2001) called for critical discourse analysis to take hybrid approaches so as not to authoritatively delimit the experiences and perspectives of participants.
As such, this study hybridizes discourse analysis through Foucault. I take my working definition of discourse from Foucault (1972), who wrote that systems of power, made up of practices, simultaneously offer the space to liberate and constrain subjects. Discussing the parameters of discourse, Foucault (1972) named discursive spaces as the locales from which truth and falsehood are produced and made pertinent. He argued that this space is characterized by the interplay between “a code which rules ways of doing things…and a production of true discourses which serve to found, justify, and provide a reason for these ways of doing things”
(Foucault, 1981, 8). This conception is useful in studying the discursive space of youth organizing, where the discourse of activism and organizing is simultaneously outlined and interrogated by asking questions about what is thinkable, speakable and doable in these contexts.
Mouffe’s (1993) post-structuralist political schema of articulation theory is well suited for such discourse analysis of activist youth. Mouffe’s use of articulation theory supports the development of an ontology of democratic citizenship through an analysis of reflexive agency, a will to act, and an ethical ability to make room for the adversary in one’s actions. For Mouffe, the effect of articulation is that the subject invokes her/his identity drawing upon discursive
forms that are always only partial. It is in the inability to fully determine the identities of subjects and practices in terms of a fixed discourse that allows for the engendering of dynamic sociopolitical spaces with greater choice and agency. Nadensan and Elenes (2008) called for research that examines how Mouffe's poststructuralist ontology of society, agency, and citizenship might contribute to more democratic and socially responsible critical pedagogy.
In the processes that follow, I take this consideration into the realm of critical literacy study.
3.4.2 Process of Data Analysis
Each of the youth organizers was examined in detail through two distinct stages of a multi-layered critical discourse analysis. The following steps were undertaken in order to
systematically organize, review, unpack and analyze the discourse of the youth.
First, an analysis of each interview was conducted through the taxonomy of critical literacy praxis (Comber & Simpson, 2001; Lewison, Flint & Van Sluys, 2002). I organize the language of the participants into five categories in order to code their articulated discourse: (a) mobilizing self as social actor to disrupt the commonplace; (b) conducting research, analysis and interrogation of multiple viewpoints on an issue; (c) identifying issues focused on
sociopolitical realities; (d) designing and undertaking actions focused on social justice outside of the classroom; and (e) reflecting upon actions taken and creating vision(s) for future
project(s). An initial reading of the data through this framework provided insight into understanding how the elements of critical literacy praxis operate in the subjects' activism, identifying examples of each element as retold through the language of the participants. This analysis answered the first research question, while serving to organize clusters of trajectories
The second stage included an analysis of how each youth organizer articulated him/herself as activist. Partially, this involved understanding their individual articulation in connection with (or divergence from) emergent themes, actions, and pronounced identifications in relation to organizing and activism. To understand this articulation, I applied Mouffe's (1993) articulation theory as one hybrid element of analysis that accounts for individual subjective identities emerging from and through discursively created social spaces. Analysis through articulation theory involves a process of identifying social meaning, (such as activist identities) where meaning is discursively constituted through the practice of linking relational “elements”
(differences) to one another to define them against each other. These elements, which lack meaning in themselves, become meaningful only when articulated by and through a social discourse that enacts transformation into “moments” (of activism) (Mouffe, 1993). Mouffe delineated element from moment to make the point that a particular signifier only achieves significance in the specific social historical context of its discursive production and articulation.
This is true for activism and activists, defined in relation to their engagement in events that are unique to their historical-material moment. This phase of analysis answered the second research question, bringing a polyvocal understanding to the ways in which youth organizers articulate definitions of activism, interactions with the texts and contexts of activism, and visions of themselves as activists. To do so, I searched the collected data for examples of youth using the term ‘activist.’ Of course, spoken identification is not the only mode through which to align and position one’s self within the realm of activism. Still, these moments in the
transcribed text provided essential self-definition, defining activism and themselves in relation to such definition. In the end, research questions are answered with the understanding that these (and all) youth are continually becoming, that answers change as sociopolitical contexts do.