Digital Commons Network^™

Media Use, Linguistic Preference And Social Capital In The Hispanic Community, Misti Mcdaniel

LSU Master's Theses

While considerable research had been devoted to the study of social capital, limited information is available assessing the connection between linguistic preference and social capital among ethnic groups. Research indicated the American Latino community exhibits levels of social capital similar to the greater United States populous. Latinos who preferred English-language media, however, exhibited higher levels of social capital than those who used Spanish-language media. Finally, Latinos who held a linguistic preference for English held higher levels of social capital than individuals who preferred Spanish.

Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity, John Shelton Lawrence, Marty S. Knepper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others …

The Agenda Setting Function Of Mass Media, Tampa, John Howard, Print Media And Public Opinion: How It All Came Together In Melbourne, Rosemary Schultz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper will explore the ways in which the rhetoric of the Australian news media – the print media of Melbourne, specifically – has the power to shape and construct public sentiment toward national issues. Specifically, the paper explores the crafting of public opinion toward asylum seekers in the country through the use of specific rhetoric in print media outlets. The paper will focus on the “Tampa” incident of August 2001 as a basis for exploring asylum seeker issues in Australia. With the Agenda Setting Function Theory of Media Communications as a research base, and through personal interviews, extensive research …

When The Trumpet Call Is Unclear: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Speech That Launched The Jesus Seminar, Mathew A. Cabot

Faculty Publications

Since the Jesus Seminar has become almost iconic in religious media coverage, it merits academic scrutiny. This article focuses on the Seminar's inaugural address given by founder Robert Funk on March 21, 1985, at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. In that address, Funk set forth the Seminar's mission and method that has guided the association ever since. The main thesis of this article is that clues to the Seminar's successes and failures may be found in Funk's inaugural address, which may be uncovered through a "text-in-context" analysis of the speech.

Lockouts, Protests, And Scabs: A Critical Assessment Of The "Los Angeles Herald Examiner" Strike [Article], Bonnie Brennen

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

This essay uses the case of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner strike, 1967–1977, to show how a critical labor perspective offers historically grounded, politically informed, and culturally situated analyses of media practices and uses. The decade-long strike analyzed here, which has been virtually ignored by media historians, highlights the devastating economic consequences for both the newspaper and the Guild. This essay focuses on the political and cultural implications of class conflict, read through the power struggle between Los Angeles Newspaper Guild members and the Hearst-owned Herald Examiner over issues of identity, work, and economics.

Bonjour Canada: A Case Study Of The 1995-2000 Louisiana Public Relations Campaign To Attract Canadian Visitors To Louisiana, Bonnie Anne Bauman

LSU Master's Theses

The research undertaken in this study explores five years of the Louisiana Office of Tourism's public relations campaign to attract Canadian visitors to Louisiana. The study considers how the campaign's organizers used the cultural bond between French-speaking Canadians and Louisiana to attract Canadians to Louisiana. The study also examines how important the public relations strategy of highlighting the cultural bond between host and tourist was in attracting Canadian visitors to the state. In addition, the study uncovers whether or not campaign organizers considered the impact their campaign would have on Louisiana's Cajun citizenry. The research method employed was the case …

Foreign News Coverage In Selected U.S. Newspapers 1927-1997: A Content Analysis, Cleo Joffrion Allen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This content analysis was designed to examine, in a single longitudinal study, trends in the quantity and kinds of world news coverage in selected U.S. newspapers during times of relative peace. Using complementary proportion and absolute-item frequencies, two constructed weeks in 1927, 1947, 1977, and 1997 in three newspapers, 168 issues in all, were analyzed. The findings indicate that the percentage of foreign news coverage compared to non-foreign coverage in the three newspapers actually increased between 1927 and 1997. The amount of foreign coverage spiked in 1947 and then started to decline. But even with the decline, coverage by proportion …

The Operational Aesthetic In The Performance Of Professional Wrestling, William P. Lipscomb Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study analyzes the relationship between professional wrestling as performance and its fans. For decades, professional wrestling has been characterized as a fraudulent sport of scams and illusion rather than actual and fair competition between athletes. Why then is wrestling so popular? I pursue the question by taking a close look at professional wrestling in four different cultural venues or sites of production: the historical archive, the live wrestling event, the televised event, and the Internet. In each site, I focus on what components define professional wrestling, how they operate, and what appears to be their purpose. Drawing on Neil …

A Study Of Information Exchange Between United States Air Force Bases And Their Surrounding Communities, Andrew C. Clewett

Theses and Dissertations

Data, information, and knowledge are exchanged daily from United States Air Force (USAF) bases to surrounding communities. The purpose of this research is to aid managers and commanders in gaining a better understanding of their information flow and bettering their information management practices. The research specifically seeks answers to the questions of where information is exchanged, why information is exchanged, and to whom information is exchanged with.

Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Retrospective, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

Communication Research Trends usually charts current communication research, introducing its readers to recent developments across the range of inquiry into communication. This issue, however, takes a different tack, looking back on the writings of Walter J. Ong, S.J., who died at the age of 90 in August 2003. Ong spent his scholarly career at Saint Louis University, where he served as University Professor of Humanities, the William E. Haren Professor of English, and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In a career that spanned 60 years, Ong published 16 books, 245 articles, and …

Did White House Reporters Defer To The President After September 11?, Jodi Kathleen Bannerman

LSU Master's Theses

This study's primary focus is to determine if the White House press corps acted more deferential to President Bush and his agenda after September 11, 2001, and if so, to see how long the period of decreased adversarial relations lasted. This purpose is accomplished through a content analysis of 37 White House press briefings, conducted by then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, examining press-briefing questions three months before, on, directly following, and three months after September 11 according to four dimensions of adversarial relations: initiative, directness, assertiveness, and hostility. Ten question design features comprise the criteria to measure each …

Keeping The Money Under The Soap : Constructions Of The English And English Migrants In Australian Nationalist Texts, Ann Rule

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Where does an Englishman hide his money?' 'I don't know. Where does an Englishman hide his money?' 'Under the soap'. This thesis interrogates representations of ‘Englishness’and by extension, English migrants, in a variety of Australian cultural texts, including film, television, newspapers and academic publications. Underlying this investigation are two major research questions: What are the factors informing the ambivalent place accorded 'Englishness' in Australian cultural texts? and What can this form of investigation tell us about Australian culture and associated national myths? I have attempted to reinterpret these national myths through the texts/ narratives of Englishness and class. One of …

Adventure Tales, Colonialism, And Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective, Christine Doran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective," Christine Doran discusses an early nineteenth-century example of Australian literature dealing with Southeast Asia. The text analysed is about Borneo, in a collection of short stories by Alexander Montgomery entitled Five-Skull Island and Other Tales of the Malay Archipelago, published in Melbourne in 1897. In the paper, Doran's focus is on Montgomery's adventure tales and she situates the texts within their literary and cultural contexts. Montgomery's writing is then analyzed in the light of postcolonial scholarship. Doran argues that in several important ways this author's work runs counter to …

Silent No More: The Voice Of A Farm Worker Press, 1964–1975, Carlos R. Guerrero

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The dissertation critically examines the content of El Malcriado , a movement newspaper published by the Farm Worker Press in Delano, California between 1964 and 1975. El Malcriado resulted from the efforts of people attempting to create a cultural space to challenge and reconstruct the asymmetrical relations of power between farm workers and California agribusiness. Within the pages of the newspaper, its articles, cartoons, featured news stories, and editorials convey a narrative that points to the struggle of defining a farm worker position in opposition to the status quo of California agribusiness.

A discourse content analysis of the newspaper between …

Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: Bridging The Divide Between The Jesus Seminar And Its Opponents Through A Burkeian Approach, Carol Melissa Hopson-Sparks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study employs a Burkeian cluster-agon analysis approach to analyze the rhetoric of four members of the Jesus Seminar; namely, Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong as well as that of two of the Jesus Seminar’s critics; Luke Timothy Johnson and N. Thomas Wright. Specifically, this study sought to discern the orientations or perspectives held by each of the examined rhetors in an effort to locate common ground or similar foundations within two seemingly disparate points of view. In doing so, this study creates a third perspective, or corrective, based on the orthopraxis approach of …

Selected Bibliography Of Textual Analysis In Cultural Studies, Xianfeng Mou, Urpo Kovala

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Historical Account Of Difference: A Comparative History Of The Literary Cultures Of Latin America, Mario J. Valdés

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America," Mario J. Valdés addresses the well-recognized limitations of literary history as historical research. Valdés outlines the theoretical thinking that has guided the editors of The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures to plan, organize, and complete the first history of literary culture of Latin America. The project is comparative, recognizing the radical diversity of the continent while at the same time it is an open-ended history that informs but does not attempt to provide a totalizing account of more than …

Ua68/8/1 History Alumni Newsletter, Wku History

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by the WKU History Department regarding activities in the department, students and alumni.

Media And Religion, Paul A. Soukup

Communication

This survey will examine three broad strands of communication research on media and religion. First, it will review some emerging frameworks for studying media and religion and see how current scholars situate the topic. Second, it will look at how people have studied the relation of different media to religion, focusing on journalism (especially the coverage of religion), the entertainment media (both the content and the critique), and the information media (primarily the Internet). Finally, this survey will examine the Christian reflection on media, occurring in what some term Communication Theology (Plude 2001: 3).

On The Comparison Of Interliterary Configurations, Armin Paul Frank

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations," Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources. This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From …

Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography, Marietta Messmer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Twentieth-Century American Literary Historiography," Marietta Messmer analyzes the ways in which contemporary histories of American literature -- members of a discursive formation that has traditionally privileged a nationalist paradigm -- position themselves in the context of current debates on constructions of post-national cultural identity. Concentrating on the changing conceptualizations of the term "American" employed in these literary histories, Messmer traces briefly the major shifts in historiographical negotiations of American interliterary and intercultural relations throughout the twentieth century. Messmer discusses the ways in which American histories of literature move from an earlier -- albeit reductionist -- interest in …

A History Of Public Radio In An Urban Community: Its Impact Upon Education, Culture, Public Opinion And Policy, Barry K. Graham

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Education

In a relatively short history, Public Radio in Hampton Roads has emerged as a most important cultural and educational asset to the urban community. The dynamic growth of the Hampton Roads urban infrastructure is the result of several political, economic, and cultural factors. Public Radio has been one of these factors and has served as a catalyst for change and growth in the community. This case study focuses upon Public Radio stations WHRO-FM and WHRV-FM and the elements which brought about their historical development.

The study presents a history of events that marked the beginning of Public Radio in Hampton …

Comparative Literature And The Culture Of The Context, Jan Walsh Hokenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Comparative Literature and the Culture of the Context," Jan Walsh Hokenson poses a series of interrogatives around the question of what, as comparatists, we have learned about "literature in the context of the culture it represents" (Mario J. Valdés). She argues that in theoretical terms, culture has become the new vessel for the old wine of sources and influences, and that global intercultural contexts will change the analytical categories for comparatists in the coming millennium. In Hokenson's opinion, if comparative literature is to survive it must regain the panoptic view, and if it is to thrive as …

Theory, Period Styles, And Comparative Literature As Discipline, Slobodan Sucur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Theory, Period Styles, and Comparative Literature as Discipline," Slobodan Sucur attempts to answer the following question: Can a rapprochement be brought about between various, often antagonistic, literary-theoretical views and the concept of comparative literature itself, which requires accord, consensus, agreement, etc., for it to function as a concrete body and discipline? Sucur attempts dealing with this question in three parts of the paper: First, he establishes a relationship/link between the theoretical discord of today (humanism, formalism, deconstruction, etc.) and the high theorizing which began during the Jena-Berlin phase of Romanticism (Shelling, Hegel, F. Schlegel, etc.); secondly, he …

A Student's Guide To The History Of Public Relations And An Inquiry Into The Use Of Public Relations History In The Classroom, Christine Dunnington

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to compile a PR student-friendly history of public relations, as well as learn how several university PR programs include public relations history in their curriculum. Literary research and interviews provided the information required for this study. Most universities teach public relations history within an introductory course, providing a historical background for the methods used by practitioners today. Discussions with professors found that most would like to have the resources to go into greater detail about the roots of this relatively young profession.

Adult Childrens' Communication And Closeness With Parents, Diana Decuir

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This writer reviews some of the most influential factors found in studies of adult childparent relationships, including divorce, surrogate parents, coresidency, caregiving, proximity, family size, and gender. Focusing on the "feminine tilt" in family relationships, research reveals explanations such as caregiving, kinkeeping, and gender identity issues. The author proposes the possibility that the female bias in parent-child relationships has more to do with subjective thought process than biological sex. An analysis was conducted on mailed-in-surveys for 264 Kentucky adults, ages 30 to 49, who completed questions pertaining to their communication and closeness with their parents, and one fourth of the …

The Making Of Ai Matai: A Cautionary Tale In Fijian Historiography And Publishing, Doug Munro

Pacific Studies

Ai Matai is the official history of the Fiji military’s participation in the Malaya Emergency, written by Tevita Nawadra. What ought to be a milestone in Fijian historiography in fact has had little public or academic impact. Publication in the Fijian language and poor distribution have created a small readership that is largely local. Further official military histories are currently being researched in Fiji, and the experience of Ai Matai provides useful lessons and warnings about how to and how not to go about such projects. This article attempts to identify the difficulties in the writing of history in Fiji …

A Historical Study Of Payola: Advertising And Public Relations Or Bribery, Christina Guadagno

Theses and Dissertations

Payola helps get songs played on radio stations. Decades ago, it involved record company promoters giving cash, marijuana and other inducements to disc jockeys so they would add a new song to their playlist. The courts always found the disc jockey at fault.

Then in 1973, the courts began to go after the record companies. This caused the record companies to seek a middleman – independent promoters. Independent promoters helped record companies get songs added to the playlist so record companies did not have to deal with radio stations directly.

Some independent promoters gave large amounts of cash, harder drugs …

The Changing Role Of The Physician As A Consequence Of The "Gag Clause" In Managed Health Care Contracts, Emily Riley

Theses and Dissertations

In November 1995, at a meeting of the Managed Health Care Congress, Harvard Medical School professor and physician Dr. David Himmelstein, delivered a presentation that included a slide of what he called the "gag clause" in his U.S. Healthcare contract. Dr. Himmelstein explained that he was being restricted in what he could say to his patients - three days later, U.S. Healthcare terminated his contract.

This event, coupled with Dr. Himmelstein's appearance two weeks later on the Donahue Show, sparked a flood of media attention and, in turn, a public outcry. Managed health care, designed to regulate and curtail growing …

Cultural Influences And Negotiation: Chinese Conflict Resolution Preferences And Negotiation Behavior, Xiao-Ling Sheng

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

As international trade between China and the United States has increased markedly in recent years, negotiation behavior between Chinese and Americans has become a timely issue. Most research conducted in this area discusses the fundamental cultural differences between East and West, as well as the difficulties Westerners have in negotiating with the Chinese. Little was written on the actual negotiation behavior itself. This paper is focused on the negotiation behavior between Chinese and American business people. Following a review of relevant research, the author found that both Confucian philosophy and Taoistic philosophy continue to provide the foundations of Chinese cultural …