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Expressions of Belief in the Jian Ghomeshi Case
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- Author / Creator
- Richard, Vickie
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In late October 2014, accusations of sexual assault levelled against Jian Ghomeshi dominated the Canadian news cycle. This case offers an opportunity to examine the public’s struggle to determine whether to believe Ghomeshi’s alleged victims, to make sense of how that belief matters, and ask what responses these beliefs demand. This project is a narrative study of expressions of belief in the Ghomeshi scandal. In this project, I use a multi-step approach to explore what it meant for participants to say they believed or did not believe Ghomeshi or his alleged victims. In order to first characterize the context in which those comments were made, in Chapter 1 I sketch a broad timeline of events that make up the Ghomeshi scandal using news articles and publicly available online media. In Chapter 2, I detail a discursive analysis of Ghomeshi’s Facebook post which publicly triggered the scandal. In Chapter 3, I provide a thematic analysis of the responses to the Facebook post made by commenters on the same platform. Finally, in Chapter 4 I present a discursive psychological analysis of what the expressions of belief in these responses might mean, an analysis I augmented with a discussion of Charles Taylor’s strong evaluations. I conclude with a discussion of this work.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Arts
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.