Digital Commons Network^™

Subterranean Dissent In The Okefenokee Swamp: The Life And Politics Of Walt Kelly's 1950s Pogo, James E. Black Dr.

Communication Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to analyze how and why Kelly initially began interjecting political satire into his comic strip Pogo and how he was able to avoid being blacklisted during the time of the Red Scare. The scope of this study includes a history of the medium, a biography of the author, and a discussion of humor as a means of dissent and personal artistry. The methodology uses both historical documentation and semiotic analysis of Kelly’s work from high school, the Disney studios, The New York Star and Pogo. Case studies include gender racial, and political analysis. …

Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities Of Post-Black Film And Visual Culture, Michele P. Beverly

Communication Dissertations

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new …

The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television, Karen C. Petruska Phd

Communication Dissertations

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media …

Black Public Creative Figures In The Neo-Racial Moment: An Analysis Of Tyra Banks, Tyler Perry And Shonda Rhimes, 2005-2010, Danielle E. Williams

Communication Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines how Tyra Banks, Shonda Rhimes, and Tyler Perry negotiate blackness in terms of racial representation both in their interactions with the press and public as well as in their final product. Banks, Rhimes, and Perry are among the few prominent African American executive producers working in an industry of inequality. Each is the creative figure behind a prominent prime-time television show. This project contributes to the discussion of race and representation in the field of television studies.

I argue there is a connection between how Banks, Rhimes, and Perry publicly discuss race and how these perspectives …

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture And Material Imagination, Drew R. Ayers

Communication Dissertations

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21^st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of …

Exploring Subtext Processing In Narrative Persuasion: The Role Of Eudaimonic Entertainment Use Motivation And A Supplemental Conclusion Scene, Elizabeth L. Cohen

Communication Dissertations

This study sought to expand current narrative persuasion models by examining the role of subtext processing. The extended elaboration likelihood model suggests that transportation leads to persuasion by reducing counterarguments to stories’ persuasive subtexts. The model implicitly argues that transportation should reduce total subtext processing, including counterarguments and intended elaboration. But this study reasoned that people with stronger eudaimonic motivation to have meaningful entertainment experiences, would put more effort into processing stories’ subtexts while engaging with the narrative. Because less eudaimonically motivated individuals may be at risk for missing the subtext, it was also expected that adding a supplemental conclusion …

"Doing It For The Dudes": A Comparative Ethnographic Study Of Performative Masculinity In Heavy Metal And Hardcore Subcultures, John Ike Sewell Jr.

Communication Dissertations

Abstract: This ethnographic study compares and contrasts performative masculinities of the overwhelmingly male heavy metal (HM) and hardcore (HC) subcultures. Conclusions derived from this research indicate the following: identities associated with HM and HC conflate masculinity with working-classness, HM and HC identities (and thus masculinities) are merging at present; participation in HM and HC enclaves can serve to symbolically marginalize constituents, and this symbolic marginalization can result in repercussions in the lived world outside of subculture; the hegemonic masculinity of HM and HC subcultures is subsidiary hegemonic masculinity, meaning that it supports the male-dominated structure of mainstream culture without …

Reconsidering Testimonial Forms And Social Justice: A Study Of Official And Unofficial Testimony In Chile, T. Randahl C. Morris

Communication Dissertations

Testimony flows from a story that originates long before the opportunity to be a witness about human atrocities occurs. And, ironically, testimony – the voice that is suppressed during times of state sanctioned terror – continues to flow long after the perpetrators fade from power. It is this ethereal and enduring paradox that raises the questions of what testimonial forms are, how they communicate, and whether they positively impact social justice as evidenced by enhanced communicative freedoms.

The testimonial forms of this study are narratives about human rights atrocities which emerged from the 17-year military junta in Chile led by …

Mass Media And Representation: A Critical Comparison Of The Cctv And Nbc Presentations Of The Opening Ceremony Of The 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Games, James R. Schiffman

Communication Dissertations

A critical comparison of the CCTV and NBC broadcasts of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics demonstrates how two sets of narratives that on the surface glorify China and the long Chinese cultural and historic tradition offer very different ideological projections about China's rise as a power and engagement with the wider capitalist world. For CCTV, China has finally righted a longstanding historical injustice and established itself as a co-equal nation among nations. For NBC, ambivalence about China is the watchword, and further reforms that by implication will help clear China of its non-democratic, totalitarian, and economically mercantilist …

Strategies Of Narrative Disclosure In The Rhetoric Of Anti-Corporate Campaigns, Richard A. Herder

Communication Dissertations

In the years following World War II social activists learned to refine rhetorical techniques for gaining the attention of the new global mass media and developed anti-corporate campaigns to convince some of the world’s largest companies to concede to their demands. Despite these developments, rhetorical critics have tended to overlook anti-corporate campaigns as objects of study in their own right. One can account for the remarkable success of anti-corporate campaigns by understanding how activists have practiced prospective narrative disclosure, a calculated rhetorical wager that, through the public circulation of stories and texts disclosing problematic practices and answerable decision makers, activists …