Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine and simulate as well as prepare. Thus, reading the …

A Feel For The Game: Ai, Computer Games And Perceiving Perception, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

I walk into the room and the smell of burning wood hits me immediately. The warmth from the fireplace grows as I step nearer to it. The fire needs to heat the little cottage through the night so I add a log to the fire. There are a few sparks and embers. I throw a bigger log onto the fire and it drops with a thud. Again, there are barely any sparks or embers. The heat and the smell stay the same. They don’t change and I do not become habituated to it. Rather, they are just a steady stream, …

The Game Studies Crisis: What Are The Rules Of Play?, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

Though no field or discipline’s historical vector presents itself as a strictly linear building of knowledge, the historical trajectory of Game Studies is problematic: certainly not linear, yet also not even multiplicious or rhizomatic. Instead, we are cyclical. Past debates often re-emerge, zombie-like, muttering the same arguments, often encased in binaries as endemic to our field as they are to the objects we study: unbridgeable disagreements on fundamental concepts; incompatible ontologies and epistemologies; incommensurability writ large. We view this as a chronic issue which has of late culminated in a crisis, exacerbated by changing institutional prerogatives championing multidisciplinary approaches and …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

#Metoo And The Politics Of Collective Healing: Emotional Connection As Contestation, Allison Page, Jacquelyn Arcy

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity in their personal accounts of sexual violence. This article explores the digital circulation of these affects and considers how the outpouring of tweets about sexual harassment and abuse contribute to a feminist politics centered on collective healing. The particular emotions expressed in the #MeToo Twitter archive subvert the logics of quantification and visibility that undergird popular feminism and the attention economy, and produce an affective excess that works toward movement founder Tarana Burke’s original project of “mass healing.” At a moment wherein popular feminism emphasizes individual …

Twisting Facts To Suit Theories: In Defense Of Sherlock, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts.

Mediated Merchandise, Merchandisable Media: An Introduction, Elizabeth Affuso, Avi Santo

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

There are many reasons why film and media scholars ought to take merchandise seriously. That filmrelated merchandise is a lucrative part of the film business is only a starting point, but still a good place to start. In 2018, character and entertainment licensing accounted for 44.7% of retail sales of licensed merchandise, generating $121.53 billion in sales. [1] [#N1] This earned entertainment companies approximately $6.2 billion in royalties. [2] [#N2] Not surprisingly, five of the top ten licensors are entertainment companies, with Disney positioned at the top with $53 billion in merchandise sales. Universal Studios is ranked 4th ($7.3 billion), …

“We Smoked A Gator!”: An Exploration Of College Football Fans’ Instagramming Of Food, Mark A. Slavich, Brendan O'Hallarn, Craig A. Morehead

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The ritual of tailgating is a staple of college football Saturdays, particularly for fans of teams in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Fan traditions help infuse pregame gatherings around the stadiums with team spirit, as fans frequently theme their food and drink to represent their chosen team. New social media platforms—particularly photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram—have taken tailgates to the virtual space. Through interviews with participants who partake in the phenomenon, this study sought to ascertain what fans of SEC teams gain from the process of social media participation. Utilizing the critical framework of symbolic interactionism, this exploratory study examines meaning …

Determinants Of Organic Cotton Apparel Purchase: A Comparison Of Young Consumers In The Usa And South Korea, Tae-Im Han

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The purpose of this research was to examine consumers from distinct cultural groups and identify similarities and differences in their green purchase behaviors. The sample consisted of consumers from the U.S.A. and South Korea and the theory of planned behavior was used as a theoretical framework to test the influence of diverse constructs on consumers' purchase intentions toward organic cotton apparel. For both countries, perceived behavioral control (PBC) and descriptive norms were strong predictors of purchase intentions and injunctive norms strongly influenced attitude formation. However, the study also found different results between the two groups. For example, while attitude was …

Marital Satisfaction Of Turkish Individuals: The Role Of Marriage Type, Duration Of Marriage, And Personality Traits, Gökçe Bulgan, Gülşah Kemer, Evrim Çetinkaya Yıldız

Counseling & Human Services Faculty Publications

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of marriage type (family-arranged versus self-choice), duration of marriage, and personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and neuroticism) in predicting married Turkish individuals’ marital satisfaction levels. Participants were 288 (147 female and 141 male) married Turkish individuals living in urban cities in Turkey. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed significant results for the linear combination of marriage type and duration of marriage as well as personality traits in explaining individuals’ marital satisfaction levels. More specifically, duration of marriage, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism were found to have individual significant contributions to …

He Scores Through A Screen: Mediating Masculinities Through Hockey Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

Hockey video games highlight the ways in which the video game medium shapes and conditions the experience of producing and/or performing the sport “in real life.” Indeed, the accumulation of advanced statistics in and through the constant evaluation, measurement, and surveillance which are inherent to video games—and increasingly seen as foundational for sport—reveals important contradictions not only in the way the embodied sport is played and understood, but also in terms of the proofs of masculinity upon which the sport is built. It then becomes clear that the building of masculinity and the empowerment of the character become one and …

Caption This: Police In Pussyhats, White Ladies, And Carceral Psychology Under Trump, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Narratives Of Miami In Dexter And Burn Notice, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In popular discourse around television, a series’ relationship with place is often marked through the suggestion its setting is “like a character in the show”, but this article argues against adopting this as a framework for analyzing television’s relationship with space and place. It articulates the relationship between this discourse of “spatial capital” and hierarchies of cultural capital within the television industry, limiting the types of series that are deemed to warrant closer investigation regarding issues of space and place and lacking nuanced engagement with place’s relationship with television narrative in particular. After breaking down the logic under which these …

I’D Rather Teach Peace: An Autoethnographic Account Of The Nonviolent Communication And Peace Course, E. James Baesler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This autoethnography narrates the story of how I taught the Nonviolent Communication and Peace course to undergraduate students at an urban university in the midst of a densely populated military region in the U.S. I describe what it feels like to be in the peace class from the student and professor’s points of view. I invite readers to consider creative options for teaching and learning about peace, including: insight meditation, cultivating peace attitudes/behavior from readings about inspirational peace people, developing nonviolent communication skills, and connecting students with their local world through a personal and creative peace project. Finally, I include …

Binge-Reviews? The Shifting Temporalities Of Contemporary Tv Criticism, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The article explores the object of the film theory and the practice of Third Cinema whose contributions are seen as a theoretical inquiry into the subject of Film Studies. Topics include the unfortunate dead-end at which the theory of third cinema has arrived, the orientation of third cinema towards openness and action in a political project, and the continued evaluation of third cinema while its status in the academy remains unchanged.

Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, And The Expanding Geography Of Television Production, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This article addresses the spatial challenges facing television laborers amid an increasingly expansive and contingent environment of local production incentives. Pushing away from the term runaway production and its limited engagement with local, spatialized dynamics of labor, I argue for a consideration of “mobile production,” wherein television series are capable of being executed in an increasingly wide range of locations—not necessarily Los Angeles—and capable of being moved should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so. Through personal interviews and analysis of industry discourse, this case study of location professionals considers how the mobility of production affects …

Veronica Mars Kickstarter And Crowd Funding, Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles Mcnutt, Luke Pebler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This conversation among Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler about the Veronica Mars (2004–7) Kickstarter campaign to fund a film assesses the implications of crowd sourcing and fan labor.

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

Agewise: Fighting The New Ageism In America [Book Review], Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Not since an eager, combat-booted pair of massive biceps attached to a deconstructionist waterbug with a PhD buttonholed me and shoved a Cultural Studies reader into my trembling matchstick arms has a single text caused me to enact as many multiple readings and to apply as many simultaneous readings as Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Agewise: Fight the New Ageism in America. Honestly, I cannot offer a review of this text. It does not need one. I am only able to respond to it, and even then with the timidity, awe and respect imbued in the above-cited recollection. To put it simply—if …

“I Know It When I See It”: Style, Simulation And The ‘Short-Circuit Sign’, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The contemporary production of “style” relies heavily on the implementation of the “short-circuit sign” and the relationship of both to the emptiness of fourth-order simulation and to the remediation of successive visual forms. In distinguishing the “short-circuit sign,” film scholar James Monaco highlights the important role of cultural codes in the naturalization and the reification of on-screen images so that signifier and signified become identical, or are perceived as such. It is the cultural codes, then, that distinguish this mode from the establishment of a sign’s iconicity, insofar as the “short-circuit sign” belongs, as it were, to the genre and …

Introduction: A Game's Study Manifesto, Jason C. Thompson, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

In the epigraph to this collection, we return to a foundational text of the western literary canon, Homer’s Odyssey, and see in Penelope’s “bow contest” an illustrative moment in the history of game culture. Having fought in the Trojan War and having survived his ten-year trek home, the weary Odysseus cannot simply show up—the returning hero must rout the odious suitors whom Penelope has forestalled. In order to buy more time for vengeance, Odysseus disguises himself as an old beggar; in order to buy more time for deferral, Penelope creates an unwinnable game: she will marry the suitor able …

Gay For Play: Theorizing Lgbtq Characters In Game Studies, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Despite, and perhaps because of, popular press reactions to stereotypical depictions of beefy boys and busty babes in video games, the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality remains a lacuna in the emerging field of game studies. Of particular interest is the notion of performance and the ways this impacts both on gender and on game play. The combination might be expected to offer a very interesting way of approaching LGBTQ characters in digital games, especially given the recent inclusion of such characters in some popular and well-studied game franchises, including Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar 1997-present), Jade Empire (BioWare 2005-08) …

Editor's Introduction: "Making Sense Of The Senseless: A Case For The Insufficiency Of Theory And Hermeneutics", Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This issue is a wonderful compilation of truly excellent essays. I can assure readers that I have read and appreciated them. Indeed, several of them came through my inbox during various stages of preparation and it is encouraging to see such a healthy roster of scholarly contributions. I wish I were able to do them justice. Please read them. Enjoy them. The work alone should give us hope. People are thinking critically and responding creatively. This in and of itself is a good thing. What follows, then, is a call for more good things. It is part response, part self-directed …

Gaming Matters: Art, Science Magic And The Computer Game Medium [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The singular—maybe more aptly put as the pre-eminent—image that occurs when reading Gaming Matters is that of duelling dualisms. While this is a tried-and-true method of covering a topic, from the dissoi logoi to “The Owl and the Nightingale” and beyond, it is the site and the subject of these apposites that makes for an intriguing if (intentionally) unsettling read. The very title of the book makes the exercise of reading (and likely of writing) a part of and apart from this process. Gaming Matters stands as both call and catalogue. Gaming matters, most certainly, in terms of its audience, …

An Interview With Francisco Ortega, Creator Of Crossing The Bridge, Observance: The Board Game, And H1-B: The Board Game, Marc Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

Editor's Introduction: Activism And Anagnorisis, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

As I mull the current issue – a wonderful collection of open submissions and a terrific supplement on “post-9/11” developments, about both of which I feel too intellectually impoverished to write adequately – I am filled with mixed feelings, thoughts and even theoretical positions. This last is kind of inescapable given my best efforts to put theory into practice whenever and wherever possible. The two cannot and should not be inseparable, at least for anyone who claims to be even the most remotely involved in Cultural Studies. And yet, I know that this is the area where Cultural Studies fails …

Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Expertise As Knowledge And A Technocratic Generation, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This project stems from two intersecting strands. The statement, "I can always find out," neatly summarizes the intersection. Not surprisingly, it has two distinct but simultaneous meanings. The first, in which "always" means "every time," considers the ways in which the ability to find knowledge has become synonymous with expertise and examines the elements that have fostered this situation. In this regard, factors such as the range of software and hardware-from Wikipedia and FAQs to cellphones and Ipods-which anticipate or "think" for the user but also require constant updating are both rationale and outcome for their youthful consumers. When combined …

About The (W)Hoopla: A Few Pedagogical Thoughts About The Super Bowl Ritual, Tim Anderson

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In an era of fragmentation it's the only media program left that has any kind of mass ritual component. Which, of course, is not only why so many debate its contents but why and how we, as scholars, should approach the program.

Removing The Checks And Balances That Hamper Democracy: Play And The Counter-Hegemonic Contradictions Of Grand Theft Auto Iv, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Grand Theft Auto IV provides an unparalleled opportunity to consider the outcomes when textual play and game play not only intersect, but operate in concert. Indeed, the two are inextricably linked to each other and to the social commentary which contributes to the game's story, humor, and thematic unity. This article considers the modes of textual play in Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as the locations and situations when players encounter them while playing the game. It also explores the subversive of potential of textual play as it relies on and departs from game play, and attempts to …