The Politics Of Fear: Exploring Diversity And Representation In The Modern Horror Genre,
2025
Claremont Colleges
The Politics Of Fear: Exploring Diversity And Representation In The Modern Horror Genre, Abbie Oh Arroyo
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores the horror films and how they have been politicized in the context of modern day poiltics (2017-2021). Works suchs as Jordan Peele's Get Out, Jayro Bustamante's La Llorona, and Nia DaCosta's Candyman are used as case studies that analyze how these films may have been shaped by the political happenings of their time as well as how these films are used as a medium of advocacy and for social commentary.
The Kids Aren't Alright: "Indie Sleaze Revival" And The Commodification Of Subcultures On Social Media,
2025
Claremont Colleges
The Kids Aren't Alright: "Indie Sleaze Revival" And The Commodification Of Subcultures On Social Media, Lauren Mar
Scripps Senior Theses
In 2012, the “indie sleaze” subculture is accepted to have “died” — the same year Facebook bought Instagram. Named retroactively by social media in 2021, the “indie sleaze” subculture and its “revival” online provides a rich ground for investigating how and why social media converts subculture into aesthetics. Drawing on Dick Hebdige’s 1979 theory of subculture, this project considers new understandings of the political, aesthetic, and affective relationships between digital media and subcultures. In examining the evolution of “indie sleaze” from its origins and manifestations in an escapist party scene of the aughts to its online simulations from 2021 to …
"Girl, So Confusing": Tiktok Tweens, Technology, And The Authentic Self,
2025
Scripps College
"Girl, So Confusing": Tiktok Tweens, Technology, And The Authentic Self, Emily R. Dietrick
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis examines the American tween as a postfeminist subject within the context of youth cultural production on TikTok, responding to the recent resurgence of concern about the young girls’ body in popular discourse. The first chapter will explore the origins of the tween as the marketing industry category previously known as the subteen, particularly through the lens of tween media culture and postfeminist narratives of choice and authenticity in identity formation. The second chapter will analyze the current technological facets of TikTok with attention to the For You page, algorithm, user-generated content, and influencer self-branding. This will demonstrate how …
Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: Unpacking Gender Roles In Social Media Performances Of "The Good Life",
2025
Claremont Colleges
Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: Unpacking Gender Roles In Social Media Performances Of "The Good Life", Lauren Mar
Scripps Senior Theses
What do JD Vance, tradwife influencers, and the “sprinkle sprinkle” movement have in common? They all have something to do with the increasing popularity of an apparent return to traditional gender roles. This thesis is an intersectional investigation of women’s gender roles in relation to class and race as they appear in different performances of “the good life” on social media. Through a series of personal essays, this thesis explores how these media examples represent a deeper political unhappiness with present conditions. This thesis takes the time to unpack the different sides of discourse surrounding each subject, and counters the …
Reckoning With The Cowboy: Justice, Trauma, And The Myth Of Freedom In Be The Cowboy,
2025
Claremont Colleges
Reckoning With The Cowboy: Justice, Trauma, And The Myth Of Freedom In Be The Cowboy, Abbie Oh Arroyo
Scripps Senior Theses
Be the Cowboy interrogates the romanticized myth of the cowboy as a symbol of justice and freedom through the lens of racialized and gendered trauma. Centered on two Korean American sisters, the film explores the aftermath of a sexual assault and the ensuing quest for justice, highlighting the emotional and ethical tensions between retribution and healing. Drawing from postcolonial, trauma, and feminist theory, the project critiques the cowboy archetype’s historical entwinement with white patriarchy, colonial violence, and the aestheticization of marginalized suffering. By reimagining the Western genre through a racialized and gendered perspective, Be the Cowboy challenges dominant cultural narratives …
You Must Really Love Your Mother,
2025
Claremont Colleges
You Must Really Love Your Mother, Eliet Lee Williamson-Diaz
Scripps Senior Theses
My thesis, You Must Really Love Your Mother, is a documentary that explores the relationship between my mother and grandmother living together on my grandmother’s factory pig farm in rural North Carolina. I was motivated to create this project to document and memorialize a unique chapter in my mom’s life—leaving her career and community in New York City to spend invaluable time with her mother. This documentary takes place a year after both my mom’s step-mom and biological mom were in the ICU at the same time. My mom’s step-mom, Carol, passed away, while her biological mom, Judy, survived …
Finding Futures: Refusing Canva And The Homogenization Of The D.I.Y. Political Post(Er),
2025
Scripps College
Finding Futures: Refusing Canva And The Homogenization Of The D.I.Y. Political Post(Er), Cassidy Bensko
Scripps Senior Theses
The convergence of corporate technology and subversive political expression is not new. Canva, like Xerox, is but another made-for-the-office technological innovation employed to political ends. Its ease-of-use has made it a staple tool for students, office workers, event planners, and political organizers alike. However, it is easy to use because it eliminates the need for creative decision-making, empowering users to quickly and easily produce designs that all look the same. This paper asks: Is the homogenization of D.I.Y. political posters, a medium that has historically been characterized by design elements that are as subversive as the politics they represent, indicative …
Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power,
2025
Scripps College
Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power, Rorie Johnson
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," …
Find My Friends: Location-Sharing Ideologies And Peer Surveillance Practices,
2025
Claremont Colleges
Find My Friends: Location-Sharing Ideologies And Peer Surveillance Practices, Nayla Dayal
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis investigates the use of Find My Friends in the context of the Claremont Colleges. Students choose to location-share under initial rhetorical justifications of social reciprocity, and community-orientedness, and peer-safety. Drawing from ethnographic interviews conducted with users at the colleges, I argue that the infrastructure of Find My Friends in conjunction with the social and physical proximities of the Claremont environment creates a distinctive condition where users are subject to what I term as a “virtual, neoliberal, and participatory panopticon.” Here, users are seemingly empowered through the application’s neutralizing collapse of reciprocity and hierarchy that are seen in conventional …
Bait, Code, And Censor- Queer Representation In Animation Through Queercoding, Queerbaiting, And Effects Of Censorship,
2025
Arcadia University
Bait, Code, And Censor- Queer Representation In Animation Through Queercoding, Queerbaiting, And Effects Of Censorship, Link Bertrand
Capstone Showcase
This paper talks about how queerness has been portrayed in media, with a specific focus on animation. This paper includes discussions on queer theory, and the ideas of censorship and representation. Creative themes include film history, animation, and show production. The shows mentioned in detail as examples are The Owl House, Voltron: Legendary Defenders, and Gravity Falls, with other mentions of DeadEnd: Paranormal Park and Heartstopper.
Cultural Differences In The Use Of Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (Arsgs) Between The U.S. And South Korea: Privacy Concerns And The Technology Acceptance Model,
2025
SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Cultural Differences In The Use Of Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (Arsgs) Between The U.S. And South Korea: Privacy Concerns And The Technology Acceptance Model, Se Jung Kim, Yoon Lee, Tamara Chock
Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship
Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ARSGs) allow users to engage in picture-taking and video recording, as well as real-time storage and sharing of pictures and videos through cloud services. Unlike smartphones, newer ARSGs resemble ordinary sunglasses, allowing for unobtrusive recording. As these devices become available on an international market, it is important to understand how different cultural attitudes towards privacy and the recording and sharing of images of bystanders could impact the acceptance and adoption of ARSGs. South Korea and the United States have vastly different culturally based perceptions of photography and recording in public. S. Korea has cultural and legal …
Masc Affect: Affective Masculinity In Video Games Research,
2025
Syracuse University
Masc Affect: Affective Masculinity In Video Games Research, Joshua Foust
Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Source Attribution And Detection Strategies For Ai-Era Journalism,
2025
Syracuse University
Source Attribution And Detection Strategies For Ai-Era Journalism, Regina Luttrell, Jason Davis, Carrie Welch
Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship
Continued access to genuine, verified news is important in providing news audiences with information about events of social importance. Sophisticated methods of detection and attribution must be applied to counter the proliferation of AI-generated mis- and disinformation and uphold journalistic values. This study examines the complexities of transparency in journalism and AI in relation to source attribution. While various AI analytics claim performance capabilities on specific tasks related to media detection, there remains a need for a standard evaluative framework that can comparatively measure the success of these various analytics. This paper explores how the Theory of Content Consistency (ToCC) …
Toward A Combine-Style Approach To Predicting Future Esports Success,
2025
Syracuse University
Toward A Combine-Style Approach To Predicting Future Esports Success, Nicholas David Bowman, Kevin Sweeney, Aaron R. Seitz, C. Shawn Green
Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship
Historically, there has been a great deal of interest in using basicmeasures of individual difference factors to predict future success in traditional sports. For instance, the National Football League (NFL) holds a scouting combine each year prior to the NFL draft during which a host of attributes about players are measured, from basic height and weight, to sprint speed, to jumping capacity, to strength. Even among an already highly selected group of individuals (i.e., individuals skilled enough to even be considered for the NFL), such measures have been seen to have some degree of utility in predicting future performance. The …
The Rescue Of Wahutedew’Á And The Epistemological Reforestation: An Analysis Of Time In A Terra Dos Mil Povos, By Kaká Werá Jecupé,
2025
University of Georgia
The Rescue Of Wahutedew’Á And The Epistemological Reforestation: An Analysis Of Time In A Terra Dos Mil Povos, By Kaká Werá Jecupé, Ivo Cruz
The Coastal Review
It is estimated that in 1500, the year the Portuguese arrived in America, there was a population of 2,431,000 inhabitants, according to historian John Hemming (1978), who occupied the lands that we now know as Brazil. These peoples had their own culture whose cosmology was destroyed and erased over time by a violent process of colonization. Even though entire groups were decimated, much of their influence is still alive in Brazilian culture. This influence can be found in vocabulary, cuisine, and even religious practices. With the aim of rescuing ancestral narratives and knowledge of various native peoples, Kaká Werá Jecupé …
Light And Darkness For Aesthetic Pleasure: An Exploration Of J.M.G. Le Clézio’S Early Writings And Jun’Ichiro Tanizaki’S In Praise Of Shadows,
2025
Sorbonne University
Light And Darkness For Aesthetic Pleasure: An Exploration Of J.M.G. Le Clézio’S Early Writings And Jun’Ichiro Tanizaki’S In Praise Of Shadows, Kenichiro Otani
The Coastal Review
Building upon comparative principles, this semantic reading of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows and J.M.G. Le Clézio’s early writings illustrates how both the Franco-Mauritian author and the Japanese writer problematize modern Western perception laden with concepts stifling flexible imagination through the mysterious worldview of light/darkness. They also simultaneously express the hope that another way of life leading to liberation is possible. Delving into the spiritual confinement of the subject, they demonstrate how keeping rich creativity within one’s heart can be an escape from a stagnant society. Albeit in very different mediums, Tanizaki and Le Clézio assert that the …
Conceptualizing And Problematizing Inclusion Porn In Education Scholarship And Practice,
2025
Old Dominion University
Conceptualizing And Problematizing Inclusion Porn In Education Scholarship And Practice, Justin A. Haegele, Anthony J. Maher
Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications
Discourses of inclusion are currently used without clear and consistent meaning and multiple and varied interpretations exist, therefore stunting our ability to enhance or utilize the concept in social justice and education scholarship and practice. In this article, we argue that the ambiguous, conflicting, and contested features of inclusion have opened a door for nondisabled policy makers, academics, practitioners, and other stakeholders to exploit the concept of inclusion by crafting the logics and taken-for-granted assumptions that become associated with it. Accordingly, these nondisabled stakeholders gain social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the fields that they operate, while (some) disabled students …
Voices To Faces: The Midnight Cowboy’S Picaresque Journey,
2025
Portland State University
Voices To Faces: The Midnight Cowboy’S Picaresque Journey, Dave Patterson
Anthós
John Schlesinger’s 1969 film, Midnight Cowboy, tells the story of Joe Buck, a Texan who dreams of working as a hustler in New York. Schlesinger’s resulting tale follows the framework of the picaresque, wherein a naive rube ventures to the big city to pursue a better life and exposes societal ills along the way. In this article, Patterson reveals how Joe Buck’s internal tension derives from his materialism, symbolized as disembodied voices, and his devaluing of human connection and empathy, symbolized as faces. The voices from his radio’s advertisements and game shows reinforce his flawed assumptions about life. A midpoint …
Pathos, Winter 2025,
2025
Portland State University
Pathos, Winter 2025, Portland State University. Student Publications Board
Pathos
Editor: Adriana Stanzione
East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon Film Pitch Deck,
2025
The University of Akron
East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon Film Pitch Deck, Micah Anderson
Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects
A pitch deck to present an idea for a film adaptation of the fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." The deliverables include a 3-5 minute animatic of a single scene (complete with placeholder audio), the script of the scene, storyboards used to map out each action, at least one model sheet for each major character, and rough sketches of all 30 characters. They are to be presented in an exhibition with the animatic on loop on a TV, a public presentation in the Myers auditorium, and a written paper on the details regarding the medium …
