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Critical and Cultural Studies

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Environmental communication

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez Nov 2018

Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1) How do multispecies engagements rhetorically reconfigure the human, the shark and, to some degree, the ocean? and 2) How do such multispecies engagements refigure value relevant to conservation? These questions are explored within a framework of shark conservation as a field of biopolitics exploring the tensions inherent in the project of transforming sharks from killable enemies to valuable, living selves and the constraints and potentials that come into view when new relational possibilities emerge. Conservation practices, especially biodiversity conservation practices, are not merely management choices; they are political choices that shape future …


Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari Nov 2014

Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari

Doctoral Dissertations

This project broadly examines articulations of the “primitive” emerging from various sites of popular cultural production, considering their operation within the wider “semioscape”– defined by Thurlow and Aiello (2007) as “the globalizing circulation of symbols, sign-systems, and meaning-making practices.” Taking my lead from Kurusawa (2002, 2004), Torgovnik (1991, 1998), Chow (1995), and Di Leonardo (1998), who have demonstrated the importance of the “primitive” as an interpretive discourse, I add to this body of thought by extending its scope into the realm of popular media and cultural production, examining cases within film, television, advertising, sports, and associated lifestyle commodities. I pose …