Browsing by Author "Sorvoja, Liisa"

This thesis focuses on social categories that are constructed from the social value of higher education in the Finnish mass media. The aim of the thesis is to analyze how the hierarchy of education level produces citizenship and social hierarchies. Previous research has shown that the subject is seen in Finnish education policies as a rational agent who makes free choices and self-invests in education. This thesis analyzes power and inequality existing in the discourse of learning and higher education possibilities. I approached the research task using feminist research methodology and the post-structural idea of language and knowledge. Admission to higher education is the context of the study. The data consists of opinion pieces about higher education reforms and the admission process in the spring of 2020. The opinion pieces were published in Helsingin Sanomat. I analyzed the data with a discursive-deconstructive reading and identified affective shades and unequal categories. I focused on the subjectivity of a higher education applicant and tried to find power that operates in discourses. According to the analysis, there is produced a self-responsible subjectivity in the data who struggles to survive in education and in the society. The self-responsible subjectivity is constructed in the contradiction between a dream discourse and demands of employability. In this study, one of the goals is to contextualize knowledge and affects so it is not necessary to look my results out of their historical context. Anyway, the results make possible to understand value choices in the Finnish education policies and social debate. This study argues that the discourse of education possibilities strengths the concept of the ideal citizen who survives because of its own merit. The discourse complicates to recognize social inequality. What is more, highlighting the social value of higher education produces the hierarchy of education paths and categories based on education level.