Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The Ableist Gaze And Disability Trauma: How Onscreen Representation Erases The Truth, Emily Brown

Departmental Honors Projects

This project critically engages with disability representation in the media through an uncensored autoethnography of everyday ableism. In particular, it focuses on how the Netflix series Special reveals the duality of representation: being seen is validating yet (re)traumatizing. As a queer woman with Cerebral Palsy, I’ve spent my whole life trying to find myself in TV shows and movies, latching onto the few disabled and disabled-coded characters available. I never felt fully seen until I watched Special: a show about a gay man with Cerebral Palsy gaining independence through a writing internship and romantic prospects. Special allowed me to acknowledge …

#Mentalhealthmatters: Mental Health Awareness Campaigns In Media And Its Effectiveness On Stigma Reduction In Third Culture Kids, Airi Sugihara

Scripps Senior Theses

The recent amplified attention towards mental health and overall wellbeing has been accelerated by awareness campaigns in media, which are culturally and regionally tailored to encourage efficacy and positive attitude changes. Some of these mental health awareness campaigns are disseminated on the social media platform Instagram, which is contradictory to Instagram’s corporate lack of acknowledgement towards its addictiveness and negative impacts on user mental health. The aesthetic and influencer culture surrounding social media empowers its systemic problems, which is exacerbated by modern society’s media dependency. Within its discriminatory and oppressive algorithm, mental health awareness campaigns created by Instagram represent corporate …

Narrative Transportation In Documentary Film: How Immersion Into The Documentary Film Hillbilly Affects Viewers' Attitudes, Alayna G. Fuller

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

For decades, film has relied on stereotypical misconceptions to depict Appalachian people on screen. Research has demonstrated that visual narratives and the experience of narrative transportation has the power to change individuals’ perceptions about information conveyed implicitly or explicitly within a story. Presently, no empirical research has examined how viewer attitudes form based on their level of immersion into an Appalachian documentary film. To fill this gap, this study offers a quantitative approach to examine if the documentary Hillbilly narratively transports the viewer into the world of Appalachia and shifts audience perceptions of the stereotypical Appalachian persona or “hillbilly.” The …

[ ___ ] Was Here: An Exploration Of Graffiti In London, Alex Iannone

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I explore the art of graffiti through its culture and process as it thrives in London, England. I utilize footage of London as well as my own filmed performance art in order to reveal themes related to memory and remembrance that are expressed through both the creation and removal of graffiti. I seek to explain its existence and importance as it pertains to societal structures and placemaking. I delve into the topic of personal and spatial identity in relation to graffiti. This thesis works to investigate the controversies surrounding graffiti that act as catalysts for its creation …

Pensar El Límite: El Símbolo Indígena En Los Proyectos Políticos Cubanos De Principios Del Siglo Xix, Jorge L. Camacho

The Coastal Review

This article investigates the way in which Cuban literature reflected on indigenous people during the early half of the nineteenth century and uses the symbol of the Amerindians to demonstrate a moral disjuncture between them and the colonizer. In this article, I call attention to the way Cuban independentists and Spanish nationalists used this figure to support their views and thus created a split in the Cuban creole imagination. I start by pointing out that these appropriations started at the end of the 18th century when historian José Martín Félix de Arrate, and poets such as Miguel González and Manuel …

Owning Your Story: Agency, Power, And Freedom In Greta Gerwig’S Faithful And Radical Little Women Adaptation, Siobhan Cooney

Honors Program Theses

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) has an extensive lineage of film adaptations. The classic novel’s most recent film adaptation was written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig (2019). This thesis employs adaptation theory as well as visual and verbal close reading and critical analysis of the film, source novel, and popular film reviews. Gerwig’s adaptation looks, sounds, and feels like the Little Women that has been cherished for decades. The director fulfills these aesthetic expectations to subvert our understandings of sentimentalism, domesticity, individuality, and the relinquishment of childhood. An examination of art’s imitation of life, the epistolary …

Medieval Minstrels In Media: A Comparative Study Of Minstrelsy In The Robin Hood Tale, Medieval Society, And Media, Heather Sounik

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The minstrel character Alan-a-Dale, as well as other variations of the minstrel, have been effectively ingrained into the history of the Robin Hood tale through screen media interpretations. This study seeks to investigate the origins of the minstrel character in the medieval through present day texts and analyze the interpretations of these characters in a collection of the present day screen media sources that involve this character. Topics to be addressed within this survey include medieval minstrel performance practices and their overall reception in medieval society, as well as the variety of roles the on-screen minstrel characters take, both as …

America's Next Top Model Magnified, Nina Violi

Capstone Showcase

America's Next Top Model was a reality television show that aired from 2003 to 2018 and the show gave women (and men in the later seasons) a chance to become models and be trained by the best in the business. While the show looked like a positive experience from the viewers' perspective, there were many situations when the models were put in uncomfortable situations. The show is related back to the feminism theory.

Goodbye, Mr. Marshall: The Dreamworld Of Francoism, Alejandro Yarza

Teatro: Revista de Estudios Escénicos / A Journal of Theater Studies

This essay examines the symbolic use of dreams in Bienvenido Mr. Marshall (1953) by Luis García Berlanga. During Francoism, oppositional filmmakers strategically planted dream sequences such as those of Bienvenido to bypass Francoist censorship, smuggling through classical Freudian dream-work distortion—condensation, displacement, symbolization—subversive ideological and political contents. Despite their critical importance, Bienvenido’s dreams have never been adequately examined. The dreams, I argue, hold the key to interpreting a film that, due to its apparent ideological ambiguity—needed to avoid the sharp scissors of Franco’s censors—has been understood both as a conservative film, upholding Francoist fascist values, and as a subversive film, undermining …

Autorretratos: Autoimágenes De Directores, Guilherme Delgado

Teatro: Revista de Estudios Escénicos / A Journal of Theater Studies

Resumen: Este artículo sugiere la utilización del concepto de autorretrato para reflexionar sobre los significados de la aparición del director, de cine o teatro, en escena. Apartándose de las tradicionales lecturas de la autoimagen como confesión biográfica y acercándose a la construcción simbólica que los artistas hacen de su medio y de su roles sociales, el ensayo hace un análisis de trabajos de José Celso Martinez Correa, Tadeusz Kantor, Alfred Hitchcock y Jafar Panahi.

Abstract: This article aims to use the concept of self-portrait to reflect about the appearance of the theater or cinema’s director in scene. Considering self-image as …

Seaglass: An Animated Rejection Of Narrative Permanence, Alejandra Louise Blackmore

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how popular narrative structures imply that our reality should be stagnant, thereby leaving us as viewers unprepared for the notion of change. I introduce the term “narrative permanence” as a story structure that assumes the foundations of a narrative are absolute. These stories therefore consider structural change as a threat or abnormal. I analyzed examples such as The Simpsons and news coverage of the BP oil spill to demonstrate how popular media frames change as an unnatural occurrence that must be neutralized. My thesis then culminated in an animated short about a person living in a seaside …

Why My Sister Really Left: A Narrative Film, Sarah Shively

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My Honors Project will bring awareness to some of the less positive aspects of homeschooling that some homeschool advocates tend to gloss over. I will plan and produce a fifteen-to-twenty-minute film that portrays a homeschooled teen as her efforts to discover the truth about her estranged sister lead her to a life-altering decision. In making this film, I wish to explore a homeschool coming-of-age story, as well as the effects that authoritarian parenting styles can have on the homeschool environment. My preproduction research will consist of the relationship between authoritarian parenting and parents’ reasons for homeschooling, the impact of the …

Four Perspectives On A Sustaibable Future In Nosara, Costa Rica, Greg Munno, Alvara Salas Castro, Tina Nabatchi, Christian M. Freitag

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

The town of Nosara on Costa Rica’s Nicoya peninsula is home to a vibrant community of diverse residents and is adjacent to an important turtle nesting site. However, tensions between lifelong residents, more recent transplants, visitors, and developers have increased as more of the world discovers this once-isolated haven. Climate change, income inequality, and alienation from a distant government apparatus have further complicated effective land-use planning and fractured social cohesion. Using a mixed method approach of in-depth interviews (n = 67), Q methodology (n = 79), and public deliberation (n = 88), we explored residents’ priorities for the future of …

A Pedagogical Mystique?: Lessons Of Incorporating Feminism Into Skills-Based Communications Courses, Daniela Molta, Regina Luttrell, Christopher J. Mccollough

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

It is imperative that today’s advertising, journalism, mass communication, and public relations students are prepared to engage in corporate activism and corporate social responsibility communications once in the workforce. This article explores the need for incorporating equity-based pedagogy, using feminism as one of many approaches, into skills-based communication courses. The researchers conducted 20 qualitative interviews with academics to discuss various approaches, examples, and learnings. The findings suggest that using a feminist framework to teach skills: (1) enhances the skill being taught, (2) allows students to communicate more effectively, (3) builds life skills, and (4) comes in many forms. The article …

Whose Voices Count?: Sourcing U.S. American Television News About The World, David C. Oh, Omotayo O. Banjo, Nancy A. Jennings

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists’ race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The …

The Anti-Hero Struggle: Mental Health And Addiction Overwhelming The Postmodern Protagonist, Nicholas Michael Durdan

Theses and Dissertations

Essay: The Anti-Hero Struggle: Mental Health and Addiction Overwhelming the Postmodern Protagonist -- Script 1: Shades of Death -- Script 2: Borderline -- Script 3: iSassins -- Script 4: Fake News.

The Art Of Provocative Entertainment, F. Clint Denisco

Theses and Dissertations

The art of provocative entertainment -- Jeff Doops somber greeting (bad entertainment) -- Off the cuff -- Cool counselor -- Next door on Alice Street.

Exploring Chinese Audience’S Responses Toward American Film Representations Of Chinese Culture And People, Yue Yu

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study focuses on the Chinese audience responses to Chinese media representations in American films. The goal of this project is to create a white paper that can be present to American film producers or potential movie investors who want to earn a bigger market share in China. Semi-structured focus groups were conducted among college students, addressing four research questions. Findings revealed that the participants in the focus group were able to identify and acknowledge the Chinese media representation and stereotypes in American feature films. Furthermore, most of the participants were positive towards Chinese elements incorporations and were capable …

No Beef, No Filler, Just Baloney: My Approach To Truth In Screenwriting, Bryant Alexander Loney

Theses and Dissertations

Essay: No Beef, No Filler, Just BALoney: My Approach to Truth in Screenwriting -- Script 1: Peach Beachy, Thanks for Asking! -- Script 2: Scooby-Doo: “The Wane of Whitney Woods” -- Script 3: Bob’s Burgers: “Bob’s Books, Beach Mice, and Body Scrubs” -- Script 4: LEGO Friends: “When Bricks Are for Boys” -- Script 5: Sea Breeze Academy.

If Found: Exploring Death Through Animated Media, Hannah Huffman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

If Found is a narrative 2D animated short film that explores our connection with death. The film makes use of the conventions of a Western fairy tale setting to make this difficult topic more digestible. This works in conjunction with the East Asian storytelling format of Kishotenketsu, a narrative convention focused on a conflict-less plot. Death is not something we can defeat; rather, it is a natural force with which we all must make peace. By following this traditional format, the film also explores and shows appreciation for the impacts of East Asian thought, storytelling, and animation on Western culture. …