Digital Commons Network^™

Cold Turkey: A Mass Smoking Cessation Event Induced By A Film, Elsie E. Sheppard

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Popular culture can influence how people act in real life. The film Cold Turkey, directed by Norman Lear, provides an example of how people can take inspiration from a film's plot and recreate it to an extent. The people of Greenfield, Iowa, where Cold Turkey was filmed, decided to quit smoking for 30 days, similar to the movie's events. As a result, tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris International, became interested in how and why these people quit smoking for a prolonged period.

My project aimed to compile documents, interviews, and other content about Cold Turkey, Norman Lear, and the …

Community-Engaged Learning: The National Response Within Institutions, Sarena Akhter

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Community-engaged learning (CEL) has become a relevant part of the current experiential and community culture, with more than 30 universities in Canada (and likely more) partaking in some form of CEL at their institution. However, how does each institution implement CEL, and how accessible are digital media and resources for students and communities who want to learn more about CEL at these institutions? Our research primarily focuses on data collection from digital media (e.g., websites, articles, Google searches) and draws conclusions based on our findings. Our team focuses on rating the overall culture of CEL in Canada based on the …

Ten 'Thorny' Data Collection Practices Of Research Use, Proshat Nouri

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

When conducting research, there are various ethical dilemmas associated with the practices researchers engage in and with. Once the notion of data privacy and collection are integrated into research, the ambiguity surrounding ethics and whether a practice is deemed ethical heightens. This research output presents ten scenarios of research use that demonstrate thorny data collection practices.

Forest City Memories: Rethinking London's Past And Present, Athena Nadalin, Kaity Adam

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

No abstract provided.

The Fear And Biopolitical Control Of The ‘Terrorist Other’, Percy Percy Sherwood

Western Research Forum

“I think Islam hates us,” Donald Trump said as a presidential candidate in a CNN interview in March 2016, conflating the religion with ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ Trump’s statement exemplifies the prevailing fabricated enemy and resulting Islamophobia in the context of the ‘global war on terror.’ Since 9/11, powerful actors are using abstractions, ideologies, and narratives—that are usually defined along racial lines—to conjure up a fear so permeable that it serves to legitimize massive levels of violence in the name of self-righteousness. How do the racist abstractions, ideologies, and narratives that are associated with Islam and Muslims produce fear and insecurity …

Musical Artists As Entrepreneurs: Assessing Popular Artists’ Brand Partnerships, Social Media Usage, And Performance Of Identity Politics, Amara Pope

FIMULAW

Today’s popular music artists have the potential power to shape hegemonic ideologies of identity categories across multiple media and industries. This position of power is unique to modern musical artists due to recent changes in the music industry’s business model and the introduction of social media. Record sales have diminished. Labels and artists have adapted in new and creative ways with a heavier reliance on brand partnerships. I wish to fill a gap in the literature that explores how brand partnerships may affect modern musical artists’ performances of identity politics through three case studies: Drake, Post Malone, and Cardi B.

The Proto-Pixel Art Of Malevich And Kandinsky: Black Square, Its Digital Descendant And Neo- Vitalist Impulse, Irina Lyubchenko

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In the beginning of the 20th century Kazimir Malevich, an important Russian avant-garde artist and thinker, created his iconic painting Black Square, which represented what he believed to be the basic unit of visual reality. Around the same time Wassily Kandinsky, another important Russian artist renown for his experiments in purely abstract art, discovered his own unit of representation – the point. This paper examines how the visual and philosophical aspects of contemporary digital reality, reflected in the aesthetic of the pixel, could have sprung from the early 20th century experiments in assembling the visible world from its basic units, …

Pasolini's Laugh: Joyful Ignorance In The Decameron, Andrea Privitera

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In this paper, I discuss Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and its 1971 film adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini. To be more precise, I focus on the fifth novella of the sixth day, the one about Giotto and Forese, and its audiovisual re-elaboration, which can be seen as a very brief and at the same time very vivid example of Pasolini’s ideas on society, language and communication.

"Duchamping In Game Making": An Analysis Of Pippin Barr's Parodic Computer Games, Devin A. Wilson

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

Devin Wilson analyzes some of Pippin Barr's subversive videogames, examining the methods by which they parody game design conventions.

Star As Genre: Actors And Their Externalities In Popular Tamil Cinema, Ganga Rudraiah

Research Day (Arts & Humanities, FIMS, and Education)

The star machinery of Tamil cinema presents itself as a nearly unfathomable system that produces stars out of actors and fans out of audience on a grandiose scale. The study is invested in determining a specific mode of star films in Tamil cinema as a unique genre by itself. These films from the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India typically frame and deify the male actor as a star. The star’s image prevails over the narrative, thereby organizing the entire film for the star and not vice-versa. The stars in Tamil cinema are not icons for a genre; rather …