Etude de la litterature reflexive de la recherche universitaire quebecoise en communication mediatique

What is told by the reflective literature on Québécois academic research on media communication? That is the research question of this thesis which proposes an analysis of the reflexive literature which is defined as a genre with imprecise contours, but which is particular in its interest in a scientific field of study—here, studies of media communication—and which makes this field the primary object of reflection. The reflective texts are divided into two streams: the “state of the field,” and historiography. The studies in media communication are defined as a sub-field of communication studies in the same way for example, that organizational communication or interpersonal communication are subfields.;Mobilized by a preoccupation with the interrelations which are deployed between the production of scientific knowledge and its environmental context, the research proposes to tease out the regularly occurring themes which cut across the reflexive literature on media communication studies in Québec. From the outset, the thesis posits the historical context of this reflexive literature and presents how this same literature also interprets its own context of production by identifying the principal themes of media communication in Québec as well as in Canada (Robinson; de la Garde; Salter; Lacroix & Levesque). Since the process and the object of the reflexive literature invites “its authors” to a return their disciplinary selves, and considering that one of the important objects of media communication is “culture,” the question of identity—disciplinary, politico-epistemological, and geo-cultural—must be examined. Finally, this research states, following from Mumby, White, and others, the conviction that the literature and the texts which constitute it, in history as in the humanities and social sciences, unveil narratives which construct/interpret reality which thus allows the postulate that the reflexive literature, through “the state of the field” and “historiography” produces such narratives.;Considering the closeness of the object of study, the literature which is produced by members of his scientific community, the author of this thesis adopts a methodological approach which is reflexive and which privileges the implementation of an appropriate distance from the object by adopting specific writing strategies. The approach of the thesis is reiterative and its process is presented as both qualitative and inductive. The process of constituting a body of texts to be analyzed (the corpus) necessitated the elaboration of numerous documents which detail the historical events and bibliographic production in media communication since its beginnings at the start of the 20th century; these documents are presented in an appendix to the thesis.;The analysis of the corpus, structured according to a periodization based on common internal and external elements in the retained documents, reveal the presence of a Québécois narrative. This narrative is neither univocal nor homogeneous, and reveals contradictions. All the same, it is possible to observe therein thematic regularities such as theorization/contextualization, which needs to be put in parallel with a specific insistence on the normalizing and universal character of Québécois research. Finally, this Québécois narrative must be understood according to its interrelations with the English Canadian narrative as well as with the historical evolution of academia and society in Québec and Canada since the 1960s.