Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Cover, Lillie Turinsky

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Full Issue, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

Hunting, Feiyang Zhuang

Masters Theses

This writing is about fragility and revelation of technological systems. It considers how brokenness, delay, and opacity are not flaws but openings—opportunities to reimagine our relationship to technology as something grounded, sensory, and continuous with the natural and material world.

Returning Into The Deep Forest--A Methodological Practice Around Memory, Asianness, And Speech, Yu Ye

Masters Theses

">">The title of this thesis is borrowed from the Tang dynasty poem Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei: “Empty mountain, no one in sight—only the echo of voices. Returning sunlight slips into the deep forest, shining once more on moss.” I feel like my essay is responding to this kind of sensation: light does not shine head-on, but folds back, glancing sideways through dense branches, illuminating what is often overlooked. In that gesture of return—quiet, angled, persistent. This thesis unfolds in three chapters, each following a distinct path—image (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes), movement (The Rings of Saturn by …

Swing Landscape, Yingwen Lin

Masters Theses

The text will consist of my self-introduction and short articles. Roughly speaking, the narrative is built upon my background and personal transformation. Geographically, I was born in Shenzhen (largest migrant city in China), lived in Shanghai (China’s largest economic center and a major international financial hub), and now reside on the East Coast of the United States, as a particle moving between different cultures, global commodities, and online media. I engage subjectively in these objective changes, with objects and events shaping who I am. I consider myself an outsider, an observer, an economic enthusiast, and a newspaper reader, participating in …

The Stream Of Life, Yitao Yuan

Masters Theses

The repetitive engagement with technological objects erases the depth of emotion by creating habits that bypass embodied and erotic pleasures and lead to a de-sexualized form of technology fetishism. The stimuli produced by machines that humans engage with are not able to convey the strength of intimacy between humans. Such virtual stimuli as the words and images produced and mediated through modern machines continuously shape conscious perception. This thesis book is split into two sections: a theoretical text and a series of images and explanations about my installation practice and process. They both seek to investigate the intersection of human …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

Maternal Melodrama, Domesticity And Female Liberation In Dekada ‘70, Laurence Marvin S. Castillo

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

The critically-acclaimed Dekada ‘70 represents one of the most prominent efforts in post-EDSA commercial cinema to narrate the experiences of revolutionary involvement in the context of the Martial Law era. The film is remarkable as an example of mainstream Philippine cinema’s mobilization of popular generic conventions to depict a politically charged narrative that touches upon the question of socio-political and personal liberation. In this essay, I revisit the film to examine how it deploys the subgenre of maternal melodrama in exploring gender and domestic relations as the springboard for the politico-subjective transformation of its middle-class protagonist under the violent milieu …

Cinema As Praxis: An Integrated Theoretical Framework For Philippine Social Advocacy Cinema, Herwin Benedictos Cabasal

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

This theoretical paper examines social advocacy cinema in the Philippines as a form of counter-hegemonic cultural practice. Drawing on Third Cinema Theory (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino), critical theory (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), and participatory communication for social change (Paulo Freire and Thomas Tufte), this paper proposes Cinema as Praxis as an integrated theoretical framework for understanding how politically driven advocacy films operate through the convergence of cultural and political production, ideological representation and critique, and participatory communication. It argues that social advocacy cinema functions through interconnected dimensions: (1) production as praxis, in which collective and grassroots filmmaking constitutes …

Covered In Snow, Katelynn M. Rogers

Masters Theses

Covered in Snow is a photographic exploration into the ripple effect of maternal loss and environmental decay in my hometown of Canton, Ohio. In the wake of a miscarriage, the woods I had grown up within began calling to me, urging me to return. Unbeknownst to me, a series of accidental deaths of women had been happening throughout these trees my entire life, their stories only coming to the surface as I looked to the trees for solace. This series of inexplicable deaths in the woods I so desperately loved began to alter my relationship to the trees, a distrust …

Fervor, Tam C. Stockton

Masters Theses

As with the light that spills from the excitement of a flame, the ideas explored within the writings of Fervor emerged as the luminous flickering of those energies which arise in spaces of worship and belief, and their image. These writings shift and contort, suggesting the necessity for a constant renegotiation of sight, casting shadows of uncertainty that seem to move of their own volition. Rather than attempt to suggest a definitive understanding of the image and its relations, this work has embraced the fragmentary nature of the photographs from which it emerges. Taking the form of an artist's dictionary, …

The Navel Of The Dream, Ella C. Baum

Masters Theses

The images in The Navel of the Dream evoke a state of groundlessness. In this body of work, photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and memories and myths. The camera is used as a means to engage with feelings of loss, and reenact the mythos of childhood, as well as the deep waters of the subconscious.

Created in Southern Sweden between 2022 and 2025, these photographs investigate the fallow winter landscape, the liminal space of deep, dark Scandinavian nights and the transformative qualities of ice, snow and …

Chasing The Sacred: A Personal Archive, Yiko Yang

Masters Theses

The relationship between humans and nature is like that of a child to a mother, or consciousness to the unconscious. The former arises from the latter, which always holds and shapes it. As human consciousness evolves, the desire to return to the unconscious remains—we are always looking back, searching for that first glimpse of the world.

Thinking back to my childhood, certain fundamental images—archetypes—come to mind. Rooted in the research of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, this concept also stems from my family’s cultural heritage and my deep, lasting connection with nature as a child. These archetypes reflect the natural …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

I Don't Want To Talk About It, Margaryta Winkler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a contradiction. It is an attempt to verbalize what words can’t capture. It asks what is lost, what is gained and what can only be said when nothing is said at all. It is a love letter to wordless visual narratives. Drawing on the work of animators and illustrators like Gints Zilbalodis, Don Herzfeldt, Shaun Tan and Sophie Burrows, as well as the author’s own explorations, it looks at the risks and rewards of wordless storytelling. It is about silence, but not absence. It is about images that refuse to be reduced to captions and stories that …

Ib-Adat, Anum Naseer

Masters Theses

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Review Of Film Noir And The Arts Of Lighting, Casey Walker

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of the book Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting (Patrick Keating)

Review Of Movie Mavens, Caitlin Cieslek-Miskimen

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of the book Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies (Richard Abel, ed).

1960s Teen Fan Magazines And The Beatles: An Exploration Of Community, Fandom, And The Beatles Narrative, Allison Bumsted

Journal of 20th Century Media History

In the 1960s, before the days of the internet, there were few places a young person could read about popular music – as a limited number of print media outlets took popular music, especially rock, seriously. In order to read about popular music (beyond the reprinting of lyrics, industry news, or promotions), one would turn to newly developed teen-type and teen fan magazines like DIG or 16 Magazine, where pages were full of artists such as Elvis, Annette, Leslie Gore, Connie Francis, and Paul Anka. In 1964, the teen fan magazine reached a new height with the arrival of …