Visual Studies Commons^™

Xbox In Japan? Understanding The Distinctions Of The Japanese Video Game Market To Increase Microsoft's Competitive Advantage, Sekani Adebimpe

Senior Theses

Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony remain the biggest players in the video game console space. While all three companies have achieved worldwide success, Microsoft’s performance with the Xbox brand in Japan is an outlier for its historically poor sales numbers dating back to its 2001 debut. The purpose of this thesis is to unearth the various cultural distinctions inherent to the Japanese gaming industry that Microsoft must consider to gain a stronger foothold in the country, as well as diagnose the biggest issues facing Xbox with Japanese consumers. To accomplish this, several cultural frameworks were used to assess the differences between …

Hasta Que La Muerte Los Separe: La Representación De La Violencia Machista En La Literatura Y El Cine Hispánicos Contemporáneos, Anna M. Martija Perez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Violence against women is a worldwide social problem that is far from being eradicated. Sociologists and psychologists have studied this complex issue rooted in the unbalanced distribution of power between the sexes and writers have portrayed it in their works since the Middle Ages to present. This dissertation provides a comparative study of recent representations of male violence in fictional and non-fictional works produced in different Hispanic countries. The works analyzed include: Icíar Bollaín´s film Te doy mis ojos (2003); recent documentaries such as Home Truth (2017) and Las tres muertes de Maricela Escobedo (2021); shortfilms like Disonancia (2005) and …

The Making Of Everyday Hollywood: 1930s Film Influence On Everyday Women’S Fashion In Nebraska, Anna Naomi Kuhlman

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the influence of film fashions on middle-class, Nebraskan women’s dress during the Great Depression (1932-1940). The Great Depression challenged the middle class: while standards of living remained high, the economic means to achieve those standards diminished. Despite the crisis, women strove to keep up with current fashion trends. While previous literature has examined how Hollywood directly affected trends and styles of the 1930s in major American metropolitan contexts, the manifestation of trends in the dress of middle to lower socio-economic classes in Middle America remains under-examined. Against the backdrop of Depression-era hardships specific to Nebraska’s agricultural economy, …

Technology Of Cinematic Architecture In Science Fiction Movies, Hasan Al-Haj, Lena Hosni, Rana Ghannoum

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Cinematic architecture in the broadest terms, portrayed spaces as a scene, where it conceives and reads the built environment in terms of sequences. It explores the effect of futuristic architecture and highlight the significant role of cinematic architecture in the society. Both movies and architecture function as languages, with two components: the signifiers, which are the tangible forms of signs, and the signified, which are the concepts, thoughts, and ideals that the signifiers contain. Unfortunately, the world is experiencing fast changes as a result of the massive rise of technology and capitalism, and the cinema industry plays an important role …

Memorias De Mi Familia, Melissa Z. Montero

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Memorias de Mi Familia is an hour-long personal documentary through which I explore the meaning of “home.” I was born and raised in New York to a Puerto Rican mother and Ecuadorian father and lived between two worlds—sometimes more. While on a visit to Puerto Rico with my mother, Sylvia, I search for belonging and explore my family’s story of migration between the island and the United States.

Through interviews, family films, home videos and photographs spanning over 60 years, I examine the revolving migration pattern common to many Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, a …

Lee Isaac Chung, Minari (2020): Having An Amerikorean Life, Nagehan Uzuner

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Minari by Lee Isaac Chung is a drama which chronicles the life of a Korean family who moves to the USA during 1980s in pursuit for a better life. The acculturation process is experienced differently by family members. Children are mostly bored with their new life in the rural area of Arkansas while their mother, Monica, is terrified of living in a mobile home which is made of a truck trailer in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, the grandmother joins the family from Korea to take care of the kids with a more positive approach dealing with their struggles. The …

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

The Puppy In The Polka Dot Pajamas: A Multimedia Approach To Children's Literature, Grace Phillips

Honors Projects

In a world that seemingly becomes crueler by the day, some topics are not handled with the tact they require and deserve. Issues of bullying and self-expression can often evoke undesirable emotions when discussed. Although it may be difficult to achieve, every child deserves to grow up in a world free of bullying that promotes authentic self-expression. To do my part – however minor it may be – in fostering a more accepting community, I used this project as an opportunity to create a story that shared anti-bullying messaging in a suitable and enjoyable manner for children.

Male And Female Interactions: A Multimodal Analysis Of Shonen Manga, Alexandria Perez

The Montana English Journal

A qualitative multimodal content analysis of popular manga examined how female and male character interactions represented gender roles. An analytical tool was developed using multimodal, semiotic, social semiotic, gender, and feminist theories to understand representations of males and females in this popular media. This study showed that traditional gender norms are still present in manga, but there are some that break stereotypes. Also, in using both textual and visual elements to interpret multimodal texts, understanding of character interactions were enhanced because the intermodal interactions created new meaning. Implications suggest positive outlooks for manga being used as an educational tool by …

Armored Feelings: Romantic Love, Sexual Consent, And Gender-Based Violence In French First World War Narratives (1914–1956), Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Armored Feelings examines how the First World War reconfigured how the French thought and wrote about romantic love, sexual consent, and gender-based violence. It posits this devastating event as a critical juncture during which the misogynistic and racist notion of amour à la Française took its modern shape as a rhetoric buttressing the nation’s brittle sense of cultural superiority while obscuring diverse forms of gendered aggression – especially those perpetrated by its citizens against women. This dissertation also establishes that the notion of women’s sexual consent coalesced during the period under examination as a troubled and troubling response to the …

Indie Developers And The Queer Content Renaissance In Video Games, 2013-2017, Shane Michael Hansaruk Mr.

Major Papers

Queer content in video games has existed since the 1970s, but as time and technology have progressed, so too have the potential for queer content in video games. During the mid-2010’s, a sudden increase in the number of games with queer content began, lasting between the years 2013 and 2017. This research project examines this period in great detail to determine the cause of this drastic increase. Through examining queer games literature, two queer games databases, and two select titles from this period, I determine that independent, or “indie” developers, have a substantial impact on the increase of queer games …

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Countercode: Bodies Un-Becoming, Aaron Reynolds

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2022

In COUNTERCODE: BODIES UN-BECOMING, my intent is not to present a cohesive map or identify a single, primary mode of resistance. Rather, the five artists I have selected —Shana Moulton, Cooper Gibson, Amy Yeager, Jazmine Morris, and Clara Wouters—explore the socio-cultural implications of identity expression and persona play, particularly as it relates to the encoding of subjectivity in contemporary forms of digital media and pop culture. Their works glitch codes, find slippages, and create opacities in the fabric of capitalist realism, a term used by theorist Mark Fisher to describe the widespread acceptance of capitalism as the only viable economic …

A Stillness In The Desert? Engaging The Public Through An Immersive Exploration Of Southwest Soundscapes, Julian Kilker, Thomas Bjelic

Creative Collaborations

The pandemic highlighted the anthropocentric nature of soundscapes, while the recent popularity of electric cars, quadcopters, and “noise cancellation” earbuds demonstrated how consumer products can rapidly change our awareness of sound. While light pollution is already extensively addressed in scholarly research, popular works such as The End of Night, and public engagement such as The International Dark Sky Association, the complex interplay of sound, natural resources, and public engagement is still emerging, particularly in creative fields.

Two UNLV scholars and artists are collaborating on this project: Julian Kilker, who specializes in visual and emerging technology research, and Tom Bjelic, who …

Merging Modest With Complexity, Mark Garry

Doctoral

This thesis will enable a retrospective critical examination of aspects of my practice as an artist from 2005 - 2020. The research question addresses the implication of multiple forms of inter-reliance enabled in the practice. This will be enabled by opening a discursive space that retrospectively, integrates and critically examines the role and function of inter-reliance as a structural methodology and how this is implicated in the practice over this period.

This thesis will use term inter-reliance to define a play of relations where individual art works when viewed in isolation exist only in partial illumination as a form of …

Rodcon, Program, 2022, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--Welcome to RodCon
--Location
--Schedule
--What's That?
--Artists
--Food
--Sponsors
--Autographs

Out Of The Gutter, Into The Gram: A Comical Message And A Digital Medium, Tala Majzoub

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

By analyzing three different comics on Instagram by the Lebanese political cartoonist, the Art of Boo, this essay argues that comics generate political meaning through emulating the medium of Instagram on the one hand, and by inviting the audience to become active participants on the other. Although a lot has been written about digital activism and political cartoons in the Arab world, little has been theorized about what makes this form of political artistic expression and dissent powerful on digital platforms. By drawing on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, this essay demonstrates that the medium of comics operates as a …

Perhabs I Will: A Content Analysis And Media Production Focusing On Contemporary Comedy And Comedians, Abs Anderson

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research examined the comedy talk shows Billy on the Street (2011-2017), The Eric Andre Show (2012-present), and Ziwe (2021-present) in order to discover the specific types of humor incorporated within their programs. This study searched for the presence of cringe, stand-up, surreal, sketch, and improvisational comedy in each show. The study analyzed each program using the benign violation theory and the hierarchy of influences model. A content analysis of 15 episodes selected across every program found at least three of the five genres present in their content. An additional purpose of this study was to produce a comparable program …

Until One Resembles The Other, Chad E. Mundie Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition titled Until One Resembles the Other, conceived during the years 2021-22 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from April 9-22nd.

The following writing explores themes of labor within the home, generational knowledge, interiority, exteriority, and emotional residue through a series of essays surrounding areas of interest within my practice. The writing concludes with documentation of the show and an accompanying explanatory text.

Breed(Ing) Narratives: Visualizing Values In Industrial Farming, Camille Bellet, Emily Morgan

Animal Studies Journal

In this study, we consider how farmed animals, specifically pigs and chickens, are visualised in literature designed for circulation within animal production industries. The way breeding companies create and circulate images of industrial animals tells us a lot about their visions of what industrial animals are and how they believe animals should be treated. Drawing upon a wide range of material designed for circulation within animal production industries, from the 1880s to the 2010s, this paper examines how representations of pigs and chickens contribute to stories of perfection and advance ideals of power, race, gender, and progress. We demonstrate that …