The Discourse of Fear: Effects of the War on Terror on Canadian University Students

Abstract

This multimethod study is based on written narratives, demographic questionnaires, and interviews. I examine data collected from 99 students of a Canadian university to explore how the War on Terror has affected them. The findings are divided into four categories. The first category of the respondents is mute about the war's effects. The second shows a disjuncture between the respondents' lives and the war. The third reflects the effects on the Canadian soldiers' friends or relatives, and the final represents those who do not have personal connections to the war but feel deeply affected by it. The discourse of fear appears as the most prominent effect in the narratives of the respondents. The basic themes that emerged from the discourse of fear (racism, Islamophobia, and social control) are then developed and discussed as they pertain to the respondents. The findings have many implications for both researchers and educators.

Deconstruction of Natural Order. The Legacy of the Russian Revolution

“…The analysis does not enter into a discussion on to what extent the subject matter of a discoursive creation is real and imagined, but it assumes the verbal expressions of elements of political reality as the results of a semantic creation (Shahzad, 2014). They mirror how the gnostic alters the ontological status of the existing reality by destroying and building a new one on its smoldering ruins (Pellicani, 2003, p. 11).…”

Canadian Discourse and Emotions on Terrorism: How Canadian Prime Ministers Speak about Terrorism since 9/11

“…Other papers focus on the discourse or narrative of Canadian prime ministers but not in relation to terrorism (Cooper & Momani 2014;Dangoisse & Perdomo 2020;Gecelovsky 2020;Snow & Moffitt 2012), some even focus on the 'bad French' of Trudeau´s discourse (Bosworth 2019). Some other papers focus on discourse and terrorism in Canada but focus on angles different from prime ministers speeches -for example discourse of fear of Canadian university students (Shahzad 2014), or of antiterrorism laws (Patel 2007).…”