Film and Media Studies Commons^™

From Voice To Noise: Accented Speech, Constructed Languages, And Subtitling Practices As Markers Of Difference, Alice Alonso Limongi

Course Work

This monograph explores three main strategies of vocal exotification in Anglophone film: representations of accented speech, inclusion of constructed languages, and non-subtitling of snippets of other languages. Using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework, I approach these practices as rhetorical devices that both construct and are constructed by the complexity of our social landscapes. Portrayals of accented speech, constructed languages, and subtitling practices form a gradient of abstraction, where the denotative meaning of words gradually loses importance to the sonic characteristics of the voice. Combining broader cultural scholarship from Edward Said, sound studies writings on power and language from Nina Sun Eidsheim …

Transversal Storytelling | Wintersession 2026 Syllabus, Patrick Buhr, Movement Lab

Course Materials

What does "story" mean? How can stories help us understand what appears profoundly different from us? How might seemingly unrelated elements converge in poetic resonance?

A “transversal line” cuts across worlds — moving through unexpected spaces, ideas, people, and moments. In this course, we explore how such crossings can inspire new forms of expanded storytelling and technique, looking at vivid examples from animation, film, coding, and performance. The students will choose contrasting elements (stories / characters / places) from their personal experience and together explore artistic ways of creating meaningful transitions and intersections.

The class will culminate in the development …

Transversal Movement Framework, Patrick Buhr, Movement Lab

Personal Work

"Every type of art can be understood as performance, and every performance involves movement. Every movement has a mover, and every mover relies on something through which to move…." – Patrick Buhr

Shameful Susan: Bending The Binary In The Big Combo, Katie Stebbins

Staff & Administration

An essay written for Ignite Films 4K restoration and physical media release of the 1955 film noir The Big Combo, directed by Joseph K. Lewis. One of several essays written for its booklet, this one focuses on the character of Susan Lowell, played by Jean Wallace.

Hierarchy And Ideology Antagonism: Artificial Intelligence In Ridley Scott's Alien, Grace Anastasia Pula

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the objectively threatening structure of artificial intelligence (AI) in the narrative plot of Alien and how it exerts control over the humans. Using a structuralist approach with Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), I will examine the character relationships and how an android, Ash, enforces a patriarchal, hierarchical system. Drawing on Mark Coeckelbergh’s AI Ethics and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, I will outline broader fears that technology will surpass human intellect and serve a destructive function within an oppressive system. Analyzing two examples of AI characters, the film showcases capitalist ambitions through technological identities and their …

Pathos, Winter 2026, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

Procedural Rhetoric And Prosociality: How Game Mechanics Shape Altruistic Decision-Making, Elijah Emory-Muhammad

CMC Senior Theses

This study investigates how different prosocial video game designs influence subsequent altruistic behavior, specifically comparing interactive narratives with procedural rhetoric. While prior research demonstrates that prosocial games can prime helpful behaviors, less is known about the underlying mechanical structures driving these effects. Fifteen participants engaged with either an Interactive Narrative Game (ING) or a Procedural Rhetoric Game (PRG) before completing a resource allocation task (Dictator Game). Results revealed no statistically significant differences between the two conditions in promoting sacrificial altruism or satisfying basic psychological needs. Instead, participants across both groups demonstrated a strong adherence to an equality-seeking norm, consistently choosing …

Rodcon, Flier, 2026, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Free Admission
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RodCon
Saturday April 11, 2026
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Rod Library

rodcon.uni.edu

Join us for fun, games, costume contests, Kidzone, artist alley and much more!!!

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2026, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--- Welcome to RodCon
--- Locations
--- Events Schedule
--- What's That?: Event Descriptions
--- Additional Info
--- Vendors
--- Artist Alley
--- Thank You Sponsors

The Absent Monster: Personal And Cultural Fears Through Kiyoshi Kurosawa’S Pulse, Gracie J. Huras

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Do The Oscars Move Markets? Best Picture Recognition And Public Equity Responses, Avi Dayani

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines when culturally salient events become financially material by testing whether Academy Awards recognition is reflected in public equity markets. The central question is whether Best Picture nomination announcements and wins generate abnormal returns or abnormal trading activity for the publicly traded parent firms linked to nominated films, and whether those responses depend on the firm’s exposure to filmed entertainment. I study Best Picture nominees from 2000 through 2024, map each film to the public parent of its primary distributor, and construct a firm-by-Oscar-year sample of 119 observations. Using an event-study framework, I calculate abnormal returns as firm …

Eurovision As A Platform For Cultural Diplomacy In Times Of Conflict, Lucy Meza

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how states utilize the Eurovision Song Contest as a platform for soft power, focusing on the conditions under which cultural performance translates into reputational gains. Drawing on Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, Biasioli’s theory of songwashing, Zamorano’s typology of cultural diplomacy, Anholt’s competitive identity framework, and Feklyunina’s analysis of identity and narrative, it argues that Eurovision’s effectiveness as a soft power platform is fundamentally contingent on the alignment between a state’s cultural narrative and dominant international perceptions of its legitimacy. Through a qualitative comparative case study approach, the thesis examines two nations whose Eurovision participation during …

Nonesuch Road, Allie Goolrick

Screenwriting and Film Studies Theses (MA/MFA)

Ambitious TV news producer Lex is killing the game at work but on the brink of failing when it comes to parenting her 6-year-old son, Sawyer. Her life in a high-pressure newsroom—defined by urgency, metrics, and relentless tragedy—has made her forget what is really important in her real life.

A bad call that puts her son directly in the path of some serious gun violence forces her to take a professional break and retreat to her family’s farm in Virginia to regroup. There, she reconnects with her no-nonsense Aunt Mel and a cast of characters from the past and is …

Between Brushstroke And Cut: Editing Leon Golub's Persona In Kartemquin's Golub (1988), Frauke Thielecke

Mendel Sato Research Award Projects

The documentary collective Kartemquin Films was founded in 1966 in Chicago and dedicated itself to bringing critical social issues onto the big screen. Early movies such as Now We Live on Clifton (1974), which dealt with inequality and displacement in Chicago neighborhoods, The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976), calling out the forced closure of an important women's healthcare unit, and The Last Pullman Car (1983), which followed the conflict between labor unions and corporations at the Pullman railroad car factory, show Kartemquin's commitment to portraying pressing issues. Their movies often focus on a single protagonist and follow them over sometimes …

Science Fiction Cinema And The Technological Sublime: Spectacle And The Infinite From Early Cinema To Digital, David Jackson Dr.

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines how science fiction cinema constructs and reimagines the technological sublime in the twentieth century: the experience of awe, terror, and admiration provoked by human-made power and scale. Drawing on the philosophical foundations of the sublime in Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant and extending through Leo Marx’s and David E. Nye’s theorization of the technological sublime, I propose an aesthetic mode in which representation inflected with affect translates technological spectacle into examinations of humanity’s role and agency in the face of overwhelming technologized worlds and in some cases, even the universe itself.

Through three distinct historical periods …

“A Couple Days In The Life Of What It’S Like In Washington Heights:” The Representation Of Latine Immigrants In Lin-Manuel Miranda’S In The Heights, Natalie M. Bowen

Undergraduate Research Posters

The United States of America is a nation built by and made up of immigrants, being home to one-fifth of all migrants across the world. Anti-immigrant prejudice and xenophobia have long defined the American people and national policy, but the target demographic is constantly changing to reflect current narratives and fears. In recent years, Latine immigrants have been a prominent topic of concern in American politics. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2021 movie musical In The Heights aims to celebrate the existence of immigrants in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City. Using peer-reviewed scholarly sources and movie reviews, this comprehensive literature …

Horror Film And Soviet Identity: The Specter Of Soviet Imperialism, Alex Dyatkevich

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The thesis looks at how Soviet imperialism–the extension of Soviet Russia’s power over the other Soviet republics—is reinforced and used as a source of terror in Soviet horror film. I argue that while Soviet Russian horror movies from the creation of the USSR in 1922 to the end of Brezhnev’s Era of Stagnation in the mid 80s reinforce an imperialist Soviet identity, the horror movies released by non-Russian Soviet republics after the increase in freedom of expression during perestroika position imposed imperial Soviet identity as a source of terror.

The first chapter examines how USSR-era horror cinema was used as …

Speculative Morphological Assemblages From Canhedonia’S Wetlands: A Queer Ecology Within The Animated Film The Spire™, Darren Tynan, Brenton Rossow

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This practice-enabled research presents a series of stills from the authors’ forthcoming experimental, generative AI film, The Spire™. Set in the not-too-distant future realm of Canhedonia, a polluted wetland bleeds into the edges of an industrial megacity. Within this eroding wetland–city threshold, morphological assemblages blur ontological distinctions of human and non-human, nature and culture, and animal and object. Human-made artefacts, flotsam and detritus from nearby industrial excess, combine with microbial life, plastic pollution, animal and human DNA, proteobacteria, and cultural paraphernalia to form fused and agglomerated entities.

Spilt Milk, Fatima Kaleem

Theses and Dissertations

Spilt Milk explores how institutional discipline is rehearsed across the Pakistani home, school, and television soap opera. These seemingly domestic spaces converge at the military-industrial complex, where media propaganda (ISPR) and consumer commodities collaborate to manufacture a unified national identity.

Through an installation of school desks and re-fabricated cereal boxes, this project examines the ‘cereal/serial’ as a site of ideological consumption. By refabricating these boxes with embroidery, drawing, lace, and synthetic hair, the work subverts state-mandated narratives. These material interventions replace assembly lines with spills of hair and sweat to highlight the vulnerability of the body under surveillance. This project …

Film For Jeanette, Brice Goldberg

Theses and Dissertations

Film for Jeanette is an experimental documentary concerning grief, memory, and what remains of those who have left this physical plane. The film paints the portrait of my late sister, Jeanette Lee Goldberg, who died in a car accident when she was 19. What begins as a memorial becomes a celebration of her life and an exploration into the complexities of her character that led to her death. Jeanette’s story is told through interviews with family members, while the visuals, created with various alternative 16mm film techniques, depict my own journey through the filmmaking process. I was only 3 when …