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Queering Storytelling: Challenging Normative Storytelling Methodology And Building A Queer Approach To Documentary Filmmaking, Ruben Schneiderman May 2024

Queering Storytelling: Challenging Normative Storytelling Methodology And Building A Queer Approach To Documentary Filmmaking, Ruben Schneiderman

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Projects

As representations of queer people on screen grow, so too has the violence for queer folks at the margins. This project looks at four documentaries that cover key moments in LGBTQ history to see how filmmaking methodologies and choices can further the harms of institutional violence. Key themes include homonormative and assimilationist representations in film, the formation of a reductive cultural memory of queer politics, and the obscuring of the global crises of AIDS. Through an analysis of these films, I argue for the formation of queer documentary methodologies that are grounded in the ideas put forward by queer theorists …


Theorizing Folk Cinema, Cora M M Lewis Apr 2024

Theorizing Folk Cinema, Cora M M Lewis

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This honors project theorizes the concept of folk cinema. The project grapples with the complex history of the study of folklore and cinema’s historic inaccessibility as a medium in order to position folk cinema as a revolutionary project capable of reimagining both cinema and folklore. Avoiding concrete definitions or the urge to label any specific films as folk cinema, the project explores folk cinema theoretically through the experimental Spanish short film Aguaespejo Granadino, the films of the Bolivian Third Cinema filmmaking collective the Ukamau Group, and finally my own creative intervention via the creation of a short diary film.


Bác Hồ In The Business Lounge: The Curious Case Of Vietnam's Neoliberal Socialists, Huong Nguyen Apr 2024

Bác Hồ In The Business Lounge: The Curious Case Of Vietnam's Neoliberal Socialists, Huong Nguyen

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This project examines how neoliberal economic policies and socialist signifiers have co-existed in Vietnam since the 1980s market reforms. Focusing on Vietnam’s national airline, Vietnam Airlines, I draw on the ideas of Michel Foucault to show how neoliberal governmentality subsumes socialism to shape better citizens, workers, consumers, and human capital. Through an autoethnographic thick description of a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to San Francisco, I capture neoliberal governmentality's intimate interactions with the subject. With Aihwa Ong's theory of “neoliberalism as exception” as a guide, I analyze how the selective deployment of socialist signifiers in the spaces, practices, and …


Mixed Speak: Towards A Re-Poetics Of Race And Self, Celina Mizuki Ohga Samuelson Apr 2023

Mixed Speak: Towards A Re-Poetics Of Race And Self, Celina Mizuki Ohga Samuelson

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This paper tells the stories of mixed-race Japanese people. I engage in a re-poetics, positing storytelling as an essential tool into complicating our understandings of race and self. I examine the relationship between language and race, exploring how subjects existing within a space of mixedness navigate identity-formation and racial belonging. Operating under a socio-constructivist lens, I begin with a brief re-telling of the history of race in Japan, re-framing mythologies of race throughout literature, legislation, and into national and colonial projects. While popular discourse alleges Japan was and is a country of racial homogeneity, I argue that this falsifies colonial …


Pachuquismo E Identidad Nacional Imaginada En Los Estados Unidos Y México En La Década De 1940, Isabel Saavedra-Weis Jan 2023

Pachuquismo E Identidad Nacional Imaginada En Los Estados Unidos Y México En La Década De 1940, Isabel Saavedra-Weis

Hispanic Studies Honors Projects

Pachuquismo was a counterculture born in the barrios of East L.A. in the 1940s. Mexican-American youth created their own social group defined by specific clothing (zoot suits), music fusions (mambo and swing), and linguistic dialects (caló). However, on both sides of the U.S. and Mexican border, pachucos had a poor reputation. In the U.S., mainstream media portrayed pachucos as juvenile delinquents and domestic threats. In Mexico, pachucos were mimicked and heavily criticized for their Americanization. In this essay, I identify how U.S. and Mexican mainstream media reacted to pachucos, and what those portrayals can tell us about the imagined national …


Deconstructing The University: Contemporary Dei, Neoliberal Rationalities, And The Abolition Of The Administrative Apparatus, Jonah Henkle Oct 2022

Deconstructing The University: Contemporary Dei, Neoliberal Rationalities, And The Abolition Of The Administrative Apparatus, Jonah Henkle

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

The following chapters attempt to develop some working theories to combat capitalist exploitation and racist and gendered oppression in the university, culminating in a call for the abolition of the university’s administrative apparatus. The project is divided broadly into two parts, which are referential to each other, but maintain slightly different areas of focus. Part 1 details a preliminary critique of the political-economy of the contemporary neoliberal university, drawing influence from Marxian economics and structuralist theories of ideology, critiquing contemporary discourses of diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI). Part 2 focuses more directly on issues pertaining to oppression and difference, maintaining …


Audio Virology And Affect Contagion In The Times Of Preemptive Power And Sonic Futurism: The Sonic Warfare Of Fatima Al Qadiri, Aram Kavoossi Jan 2022

Audio Virology And Affect Contagion In The Times Of Preemptive Power And Sonic Futurism: The Sonic Warfare Of Fatima Al Qadiri, Aram Kavoossi

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This project examines the State’s use of sound technologies in particular to conjure affects facilitative of the maintenance and control of human bodies and political activities. In tension with this current, it will also study the subversion of sonic war machinery by cultural workers and musicians in the production of transnational political solidarities against the state militarization/securitization of life and preemption/commodification of death–a socio-economic paradigm fed by the (neo)colonial underbellies of capitalist modernity, from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the colonization and military exploitation of the ‘Middle East’.


The Stars Told Me About You: Reclaiming Filipino Mythology Through Film, Tara Renee Masangya Mercene Jan 2022

The Stars Told Me About You: Reclaiming Filipino Mythology Through Film, Tara Renee Masangya Mercene

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

The Philippines holds a long history of colonization and occupation from Spain, Japan, and the United States of or (the US). Today, the Philippines is heavily influenced by Western culture, holding ideologies paralleling their past colonizers. For this project, I would like to explore the culture of pre-colonial Philippines and how it is reviving itself in the present, which I frame as the postcolonial. Looking specifically at Filipino folklore and mythology I am interested in understanding the scars of colonization and how lore and rituals have sought to heal these pasts through its remembrance of traditional thought. In this moment …


Notoriously Ruthless: The Idolization Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lucille Moran Sep 2019

Notoriously Ruthless: The Idolization Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lucille Moran

Political Science Honors Projects

It is now a fixture of mainstream commentary in the United States that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a popular idol on the political left. Yet, while Justice Ginsburg’s image and story has reached an unprecedented level of valorization and even commercialization, scholars have yet to give sustained attention to the phenomenon and to contextualize it: why has this idolization emerged within this context, and what is its impact? This paper situates her portrayal in the cultural imagination as the product of two political forces, namely partisanship and identity politics. Considering parallel scholarly discourses of reputation, celebrity, …


Superhybridity And The Swallowing Of Subculture: Collisions Of Afro-Asian Cross-Cultural Production And Consumption In Post-Internet American Popular Culture, Valentia Sundell May 2019

Superhybridity And The Swallowing Of Subculture: Collisions Of Afro-Asian Cross-Cultural Production And Consumption In Post-Internet American Popular Culture, Valentia Sundell

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

Responding to a recent resurgence in Afro-Asian imagery in the American consciousness, this paper examines the meaning and direction of the contemporary Afro-Asian relationship in post-Internet American popular culture. To investigate these questions, this paper constructs a brief history of the American Afro-Asian relationship through the performance of racial identity and cross-cultural production and consumption from the 1850s through the 2000s. An increase in American Afro-Asian imagery has not come from a place of abstraction, but rather stems from a lengthy and complex history of cross-cultural collisions, collaboration, and convergence along with a post-Internet that allows for the ready flow …


Race In Romance: Racialized Femininity And Intimacy Between Asian Female And Non-Asian Male, Minju Kim May 2018

Race In Romance: Racialized Femininity And Intimacy Between Asian Female And Non-Asian Male, Minju Kim

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

The film “Racing Romance” is a study of Asian female and non-Asian male intimacy. The film is based on an understanding that intimacy, desire and love are critical parts of one’s self-identification, while these desires are inevitably influenced by the historical and social contexts of race to varying degrees. There has been a limited academic interest in the female agency of Asian women in interracial intimacy. Too often, interracial marriages and relationships are simply celebrated as part of multiculturalism or anti-racism, without getting proper attention to the subtleties of racial and gendered dynamics that influence both members of the relationship. …


How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill Apr 2018

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.


Standing Rock, Markus Hoeckner May 2017

Standing Rock, Markus Hoeckner

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

The documentary film Standing Rock is the culmination of a long-term project exploring contemporary Native American life and the continuing oppression Native peoples face in American society today. Following my previous video work with indigenous people and their efforts to preserve water and sacred sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to travel to North Dakota to observe and document Native resistance to the latest transgressions against their land and sacred sites at the Standing Rock Reservation. Over several months of participant-observation and five trips to the sites of ongoing protests in North Dakota I attempted to learn more …


Converging Horror: Analyzing The Importance Of Convergence Culture On A Digital Audience Through An Examination Of The Conventions And Politics Of The Horror Genre, Kelsey M. Fox Apr 2017

Converging Horror: Analyzing The Importance Of Convergence Culture On A Digital Audience Through An Examination Of The Conventions And Politics Of The Horror Genre, Kelsey M. Fox

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

This thesis draws attention to the genre of horror in new media through a close examination of various digital texts, arguing that these new texts, while built on traditional horror narratives used in cinema, are also examples of Convergence Culture, a mobile, multiplatform, participatory medium that engages professionals and amateur content creators. The thesis begins with a review of scholarly work about horror as a genre, continues with a close analysis of several digital horror texts and their online communities, and ends with the argument that these new texts are good examples of how horror has accommodated Convergence culture, morphing …


Science Fiction And The Myth Of Trajectory Evolution, Jocelyn D. Pickreign Jun 2013

Science Fiction And The Myth Of Trajectory Evolution, Jocelyn D. Pickreign

The Macalester Review

Stephen Jay Gould first proposed the idea of “iconographies of progress.” Today, one of the most prominent forms of progress iconography is the science fiction story. Science fiction as a genre frequently portrays evolution as a linear trajectory of increasing complexity, and in doing so, furthers a worldview that is not unlike the pre-Darwin understanding of human beings as both the center and the pinnacle of the natural world.


Decolonization And Community Media: Fostering A Decolonial Imaginary In El Alto, Bolivia, Rebecca Jackson Jan 2013

Decolonization And Community Media: Fostering A Decolonial Imaginary In El Alto, Bolivia, Rebecca Jackson

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

Radio Trono, a community radio in Bolivia, uses grassroots critical theory and participatory media to illuminate the influence the colonial matrix of power has on participant's bodies, daily lives, and imaginations. Corporal decolonization, the theory of decolonization developed by the collective that manages Radio Trono, focuses on the body as a site of liberation at multiple scales of geography, and links new bodily configurations to new imaginaries and possibilities for resistance to coloniality of power. This theory infuses Radio Trono's production process and content while the radio's presence in El Alto works to decolonize and democratize the city's media system.


Productive Resistance, Nihilist Production, And The Fetish Of Negation, Hanna Backman Jan 2013

Productive Resistance, Nihilist Production, And The Fetish Of Negation, Hanna Backman

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

No abstract provided.


Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, And Global Imagination, Maxwell E. Loos May 2011

Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, And Global Imagination, Maxwell E. Loos

International Studies Honors Projects

At Ground Zero, the transnational phenomena of tourism and terrorism intersect. In this thesis, I introduce the concept of global imagination, and analyze how tourism and terrorism affect this process of global imagination for Americans, arguing that tourism plays an important role in constructing a globe, while terrorism – particularly the 9/11 attacks – works to interrupt imaginative process itself. I then explore how tourism of terrorism at Ground Zero influences global imagination, containing the events of 9/11, allowing for the construction of only a very specific globe in which the U.S. is an innocent, benevolent actor in world history.