Recovering The Voices Of The Silenced

This thesis aims to portray the possibilities of constructing a more rational, and pleasant discursive context which facilitates the harmonious coexistence of cities and countryside, attempting to position peasant workers in a more humane, transparent and amicable lifeworld. The data of this thesis are mainly composed of two parts, one is a collection of 63 pieces of news items clipped from 4 popular newspapers of Hangzhou City roughly dating from March 2005 to March 2006, and the other is a collection of transcribed interviews with 5 peasant workers. Detailed analysis shows that the discourse of peasant workers in the selected newspaper has, actually, undergone discursive variations with the characteristics of 3 shifts, and what has been claimed to be the peasant workers' voices in media discourse is actually a hybrid discourse manipulated by the interests group with top-down chains. Therefore more channels should be given to peasant workers so that they could speak for themselves instead of being talked, studied, targeted, and consumed by a group of non-peasant-workers. The analysis of interview data shows how peasants are driven out of their hometown, and transformed into the docile slaves, how their dislocated urban life is discursively rationalized, and how the desire of returning to a true self, working for pleasure, and being embraced and soothed by the authentic lifeworld is made numb. Although many aspects of the discourse of peasant workers might have been influenced, contaminated, or colonized by an ever approaching urban discourse, I still spot a patch of tacit, pure, natural and virgin land of soul which yearns for a transparent and authentic lifeworld by probing into the depth of 'what have been silenced by the newspaper discourse', and this portion of discourses has been further elaborated in terms of how life and work, human and nature, and man and man get harmonized in such a lifeworld. In the final conclusion part of the thesis, I has argued from the perspective of CD A that the possibilities of enhancing the 'happiness index 'of peasant workers is to let those silenced, unheard voices be heard and reconstructure the discourse.