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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Disproportionate Discourses: Analyzing The Media’S Coverage Of Police Brutality, Tatyanah Santiago Apr 2023

Disproportionate Discourses: Analyzing The Media’S Coverage Of Police Brutality, Tatyanah Santiago

Honors College Theses

This thesis examines how the media covers fatal confrontations between minorities and the police. Since the media is a primary vehicle for interpreting events as they unfold, it is important to recognize the ways news coverage frames these violent encounters. This paper focuses specifically on the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August 2014 and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, MN in May 2020. News articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and CNN were analyzed to see how authority narratives, witness narratives, and character depictions were reported. Three theoretical lenses (Critical Race …


Rey-Ifying A New Heroine: Interrogating The Curriculum Of Femininity In Star Wars Films, Rebekah S. Morgan Jan 2020

Rey-Ifying A New Heroine: Interrogating The Curriculum Of Femininity In Star Wars Films, Rebekah S. Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Star Wars film trilogies are a cross-generational phenomenon. Due to its powerful and pervasive nature, the messages within Star War’s films must be problematized. As a cultural artifact, Star Wars was used to explore the representations of women across time and three generations. Using a conceptual framework based on cultural curriculum studies and feminist theory, this study explored the significance of Star Wars as gender text by interrogating the representations of women in the Star Wars film saga and what these representations teach about gender and femininity. By focusing on the themes of agency, empowerment, and identity, this work …


Adolescent Male Behaviors As Portrayed In The Disney Sitcom Hannah Montana, Erin T. Maurer Nov 2019

Adolescent Male Behaviors As Portrayed In The Disney Sitcom Hannah Montana, Erin T. Maurer

Honors College Theses

This research project uses content analysis to examine themes related to toxic masculinity and misogyny in the sitcom Hannah Montana. In particular, the sitcom’s child character Rico Suave is shown to be misogynistic when interacting with women. There is little literature on the topic of representation of toxic masculinity as shown in child characters, but there are many examples in modern media, such as the trope of the child being attracted to the babysitter, the lifeguard, and the friend of an older sibling. Using similarly-formatted transcripts from seasons two, three, and four, I pulled all lines of dialogue and stage …