ABSTRACT

The Pursuit of Hegemony - School Shootings as Cultural Scripts

by Meriem Rebbani-Gosselin


As attested by the amount of related media coverage, school shootings seem have become an important public concern in the last decade. While this phenomenon has enjoyed a wide coverage in the media, there is only a limited amount of scholarly research available on the subject. Furthermore, research on Canadian school shootings is practically inexistent. Focusing on the Dawson school shooting as a case study, this thesis hypothesizes that the repetitive occurrences of school shootings reveal a deeper social malaise regarding masculinity in North America. By carefully studying school shooting occurrences from 1996 to 2006 as well their news media coverage, this thesis proposes that we gain important insights into the culture of masculinity and gender relations in contemporary North America.