'Censorship' in Academic Discourse

Dan Steward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This presentation is not (or only incidentally) about censorship in the academy. This is about the use and meaning of the term 'censorship' in academic discourse. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods of content analysis (understood broadly to include discourse analysis as well as the use of data science tools for analyzing larger corpora of texts), I explore the academic discourse regarding 'censorship' in a corpus of several thousand texts. The corpus on which this presentation is based includes journal articles and book chapters in the JSTOR database that use some variant of 'censor' or 'censure' in their titles, with a focus on a random draw of texts that have a high proportion of these tokens in their full text. This study addresses variation over time and across disciplines in the ways that 'censorship' is used (e.g, institutional contexts, communications media, social actors deemed 'censors' or 'censored'), the theories and stakes upon which such use is grounded, and proposals for re-defining the meaning of the term. Some consideration is given to the ways in which academic use of 'censorship' varies from non-academic use (whether popular or elite) as well as the shifting array of synonyms in play.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 63. Discursive Developments Across Disciplines and Ideologies