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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Nation Brand, National Prestige, And The Social Imaginaries Of The Advanced Nation In South Korea, Jung-Yup Lee Apr 2021

Nation Brand, National Prestige, And The Social Imaginaries Of The Advanced Nation In South Korea, Jung-Yup Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focused on how the discourses and institutions of nation branding and public diplomacy reshaped the social imaginary of the nation. Following the trajectory of the nation branding discourse in South Korea in the first fifteen years of the 21st century, I examined different moments of the re-imagining of the nation by multiple agents with regard to nation branding and public diplomacy. Firstly, I examined how the news media played a crucial mediating role in importing and disseminating the globally emerging discourse of nation branding in collaboration with private and public think tanks in the early and mid 2000s. …


The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein Jul 2020

The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein

Doctoral Dissertations

The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk. On one level, I …


Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden Nov 2018

Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …


Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich Jul 2018

Property, Postsocialism, And Post-Yugoslav Identity: A Feminist Communication Performance Ethnography, Jennifer Zenovich

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how women in the postsocialist former Yugoslavia perform gender in the transition from socialism to capitalism by considering their material and symbolic relationships to property. Using performance ethnography to theorize the relational, embodied, and discursive ways in which identity has been mobilized in the former Yugoslavia, the central question is how insights from the postsocialist world can critique notions of the individual as well as global capital. Through the prism of postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theory and performance studies, I focus on three contexts: women’s feminized labor as sustaining the tourism industry in Montenegro, my rape and …


Strangers In A Strange Land: Foreign-Born Mangaka And The Future Of The ‘Japanese’ Comic Industry, Michele Fujii Jul 2018

Strangers In A Strange Land: Foreign-Born Mangaka And The Future Of The ‘Japanese’ Comic Industry, Michele Fujii

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses the phenomenon of the recent success of foreign-born mangaka in the Japanese comic industry. One in a long line of foreigners who have written about Japan, Swedish mangaka Åsa Ekström is a representative example whose success has been facilitated by a set of circumstances brought on by the influence of the international manga market, socio-economic policies stemming from the unique challenges presented by Japan’s declining birthrate and rapidly aging population, and changes in the landscape of the Japanese publishing industry. Drawing upon themes and excerpts from Ekström’s popular comic essay series, Nordic Girl Åsa discovers the Mysteries …


Acculturation Stress, Psychological And Sociocultural Adjustment, And Development Of American Adolescents: A Qualitative Study Of Newton High School Exchange Students In China, Binbin Zhu Nov 2016

Acculturation Stress, Psychological And Sociocultural Adjustment, And Development Of American Adolescents: A Qualitative Study Of Newton High School Exchange Students In China, Binbin Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

Theories from the extant acculturation literature functioned to categorize international students’ adaptation experiences and predict their acculturation outcomes. Also, relevant studies focused mainly on students at the tertiary level. For adolescent students seeking self-development toward independence and autonomy, how they negotiated their identity challenges and tensions in a cross-cultural context, and how surrounding others in their socialization impacted on their psychosocial adjustment process and transformative experiences have not been actively explored. This qualitative study approached adolescent students’ acculturation as an integrated development and learning process to explore the effects of developmental and cultural factors on their cross-cultural adaptation, especially examined …


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 …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …