Abstract

This critical discourse analysis of 16 newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor examines comparisons made between the Arab Spring and the Quebec student strike to discern what these comparisons tell us about perceptions of civically engaged youth involved in collective action. The texts were drawn from major Canadian daily newspapers and English language student newspapers using a keyword search and then analyzed for their representations of the strike. The study finds that criticisms of the protesters pointed to their youth as the rationale for their exclusion from democratic dialog and that texts delegitimized the protests by ridiculing comparisons to the Arab Spring and by implying that collective action was more legitimate abroad than in Quebec.