Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

The Mall: A World-Building Speculation On The Future Of Privacy, Hazem Asif

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a science fiction exploration of a future dystopian world where privacy becomes a dominant currency that is distributed according to social class and ranking mechanisms. It utilizes speculative world-building to study the unanticipated implications of technology on personal privacy, surveillance and social inequality on future societies. The project introduces The Mall, as a highly efficient and hyper-connected world, but also exposes its downfall as a society with heightened cultural and socio-political disparities. Inspired by past civilizations, the development of the modern nation-state as well as contemporary society, the design adapts, appropriates and reformulates existing cultures into new …

Ultrasound—Re:Viewing Bodies, Minjee Jeon

Theses and Dissertations

A medical evaluation of physical impairment imposes the additional burden of “labeling” the patient with the condition. The binary nature of the normal versus abnormal label emphasizes difference and can lead to trauma. Understanding differences, however, can lead to the generation of new forms and thus, more sensitive differentiation and representation. Tension is created by exploring different bodily forms—a dialectic between form and essence. I am designing a space that visualizes and illuminates difference as a source of trauma and amplifying the tension by comparing figures that represent varying degrees of normalcy. This forms a critique of idealized form and …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

The Player’S Journey: Ludology And Narratology In Modern Gaming, Angelica Fuchs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the evolution of gaming criticism (specifically ludology and narratology) and games as a medium of expression through the use of case studies. These case studies look at some of the core aspects of four major titles (The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, various BioWare games and Journey) and survey how these games work to effectively employ a narrative while maintaining an immersive, intuitive system for the player to interact with. Through these titles, the thesis suggests that in order to gain a full scope of a game’s intentions, studies should analyze more than …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Blurred Lines And Shifting Boundaries: Copyright And Transformation In The Multimodal Compositions Of Teachers, Teacher Educators And Future Media Professionals, J. Patrick Mcgrail, Ewa Mcgrail

Research, Publications & Creative Work

The rapid proliferation of better quality “prosumer” equipment and powerful yet inexpensive editing software have helped erode the long-standing distinction between professional media producers and amateurs. Today’s aspiring young artists can take existing film, musical works, and other audiovisual material and transform them in varying degrees to create new work that comments on the world around them and that rivals in quality much of what Hollywood and professional musicians produce. However, this assessment is from the point of view of content. The looming specter of aggressive copyright policing by a litigious creative industry still divides the haves from the have …

“Disability Is An Art…”: Disability As Discourse/Counter-Discourse, David Adelman

Theses and Dissertations

This is a multipart thesis focused on the intersection between disability and art. What does it mean as an artist to engage the topic of disability? Relatedly, how do artists, art objects, and various aspects of culture contend with or confront disability? It is my contention that many disability artworks work to produce mediations of embodied, lived experience for their audiences. In other words, this kind of art takes the concept of disability, which we might otherwise experience only intellectually, or at a remove, and make that concept material, corporeal, and sensuous – creating an object which makes power relations …

Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-Cultural Encounters In East Asian Film [Book Review], Espena Darlene Machell

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this exceptional book, Felicia Chan dives deep into the complexities of cosmopolitanism and cinema, questioning the meaning of ‘foreignness’ and aspirations of ‘belonging’ in the global context. Grounded on the premise that transnational cinema, or cinema in general, is an important platform for the production, imagination, and interrogation of cosmopolitan ideals, the book focuses on East Asian cinemas from China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, challenging notions of definitive cultural boundaries. The book offers a way to understand cross-cultural encounters that emphasises the nuances and subjectivities of cultural imaginaries that cinema itself advances and challenges at the same time. …

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …

Photography And Mourning: Excavating Memories Of My Great-Grandmother, Eva Weiner

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores how photographs have affected mourning processes in the past and how photo-technology may be able to change the way in which we mourn in the future. It includes an overview of the history of post-mortem photography and discusses the perspectives of well-known media theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. It engages with psychologists by including their perspectives on the effect that photographs have on the mourning process. A project was created to investigate how photo-technology can affect the bereaved. The project places photographs of a mother into pictures of her children taken after she had …

Why Weight? Zines As Effective Health Communication Tools Against Fat Phobia, Evelyn Gonzalez

Scripps Senior Theses

The current models for health care hold at their core a pathologization of fat bodies informed by discriminatory methods and ideologies leading to an explicit lack of quality medical care for those who fail to meet normative standards of health and size. This project is interested in examining alternative public health models that provide interventions into those systems. Specifically, this work will seek to understand how the grassroots movement, Health at Every Size (HAES), serves to interrupt current limited understandings of health and weight. HAES individualized, weight-neutral approach to health and wellness exists in seeming opposition to contemporary ideas around …

Pacing Your Fears: Narrative Adaptation In The Age Of Binge Culture, Samantha Richards

Scripps Senior Theses

Entertainment is an ever-changing medium, and television specifically has gone through many technological innovations since its bright beginnings. These innovations have consistently changed the way stories are told. Stylistic shifts in key elements ranging from shot format to the way shows are constructed can be seen especially clearly in horror which does not have the same narrative constraints as many other genres, and therefore more room to experiment. By tracking changes in the narrative formats of serialized and anthology horror shows, I define a new era of television brought about by the prevalence of streaming, and the rise of binge …

Skinny Girls Bleed Flowers, And Other Sick Lies, Isadora Steiger

Scripps Senior Theses

This short film visualizes the experiences of seven Scripps students who have or have had eating disorders, using interview audio and projected imagery to critique existing media portrayals of eating disorders, as well as humanizing those who actually suffer from them.

Tradition And Novelty: Food Representations In Irish Women’S Magazines 1922–73, Marzena Keating, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish women’s magazines, this paper provides a brief overview of Irish food culture from 1922 to 1973. It illustrates how selected texts from women’s magazines, mainly recipes, food columns, practical suggestions for cooking and housekeeping, as well as articles on food topics mirrored social, cultural, economic, and religious characteristics of a particular period. The paper discusses various culinary trends apparent in the content and style of cookery pages focusing on a paired category of novelty and tradition adapted from the quantitative research conducted by Alan Warde.

The Cinematic College Professor: Conceptions And Representations, John C. Fitch Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture …

The Beloved: A Documentary Film On The History And Aftermath Of Fremantle’S Rajneesh Sannyasin Community – And – Hidden Realities: Transcendental Structures In Documentary Film: An Exegesis, Joseph London

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This creative work and its associated exegesis examines the concept of what I have termed a ‘transcendental structure’ in relation to a documentary film form, and what outcomes, specific to a non-fiction mode of representation, result from the application of this structure. A transcendental structure in film has a long history of investigation and interpretation in narrative fiction film theory and practice, but is substantially absent from documentary scholarship. The topic appears, in different forms, in the critical writings of Zavattini (1940), Bazin (1946), Pasolini (1965), Schrader (1972), Deleuze (1985), and more recently, Perez (1998) and Minghelli (2016). All of …

The Futures Of Comparative Literature Envisioned By Chinese Comparatists, Sheng Meng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Futures of Comparative Literature Envisioned by Chinese Compara­tists" Sheng Meng and Yue Chen discuss the future of Comparative Literature from the perspective of Chinese comparatists. They argue that in response to the latest rhetoric around the crisis and death of Comparative Literature as a discipline, Chinese comparatists have fallen into four major repre­sentative groups. While the first one advocates restoring of international literary relations study of the French School, the second and the third camp see the future of the discipline lying in both the turn to translation and world literature respectively. However, the most ambitious …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of The "Death" Of The Discipline Of Comparative Literature, Peina Zhuang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of The Variation Theory In Cross-Cultural Communication, Yi Wan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Significance of the Variation Theory in Cross-Cultural Communication" Yi Wan analyzes some problems that East-West Comparative Literature, as a discipline, has encountered and discusses the significance of the development of the Variation Theory, proposed by Shunqing Cao. The author aims to explore two important points of this new platform, namely, heterogeneity and variation, and compares this new perspective to the French School, which is based on "influences" and the American School which is based on "analogies." By investigating the variations of literary texts or theories during the course of cross-civilization communication from the perspectives of imagology …