Symbolic violence and diversity in the digital age: The genesis of a new lexicon.

摘要

This dissertation examines the nexus of communication, diversity, and policy setting in major institutions---higher education, the media, and government---in an historical era when the Internet, social networks, mobile devices, and other forms of digital media define the times. The ultimate aim is to develop a new, conditional lexicon that provides a meaningful, original, and creative form of discourse for moving forward the concept and practice of diversity in the social sites, spaces, and realms that we inhabit. Higher education is central here for the simple reason that this social domain creates, distributes, and maintains cultural and economic capital and is the most vital site in the ongoing competition for upward social mobility. After foregrounding the central issues on many levels: personal, institutional, and political, the dissertation charts a path toward a new lexicon or terminology to refer to diversity and a fresh philosophical ground upon which to base the overall case for diversity. This approach is founded on the idea that we can re-contextualize the communication of power since by its very nature it is arbitrary. The dissertation proposes a new mode of articulation regarding the communication of diversity by adapting the theoretical concepts of symbolic violence, symbolic politics, and framing with the science of implicit social cognition (ISC), and the legal methodology known as behavioral realism. By combining symbolic violence and its durable effects with ISC and re-contextualizing the communication of power, the dissertation outlines a course toward a new lexicon. Finally, by bringing together philosophic principles with practical guiding steps as instructions for the lexicon's formation and communications reference points as tools to deliver and disseminate the lexicon to the public arena, the dissertation proposes the new lexicon's provisional structural configuration. As result, the expression fair measures is selected and adopted as a new framing mechanism to replace affirmative action and other similar phrases in the quiver of the argument in favor of diversity. The dissertation concludes by identifying policy and research implications of the theoretical analysis presented here within the context and requirements of maintaining and energizing the evolutionary drive of a robust democratic society.