Digital Commons Network^™

The Seductive Power Of Digital Technology: Gay (Re)Presentations And The 'Coming Out' Of Independent Film In Philippine Cinema, Roberto Reyes Ang

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Mimicking how the good cop in Filipino movies arrives on the scene just a moment before it is too late, similarly a new generation of filmmakers has emerged in The Philippines to rescue an industry in decline, equipped of late with a new weapon of choice, digital technology. An effective means by which filmmakers might combat the rising costs of producing a film without studio backing, this technology heralds a dramatic change in direction for Philippine Cinema, so much so that the industry appears to have reestablished its footing. But there would be an unexpected turn, especially in self-depictions of …

Dolls, Dreams, And Drives: Sexual Subjectivity In The Films Of Kim Kyung‐Mook, Earl Jackson, Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay will examine Kim Kyung-Mook's films to draw out the inscription of sexual subjectivity and the self-constitution of the subject as object of the Other's desire. Although the primary focus is on male-male sexuality remote from any explicit activism, the struggles for recognition within a given pairing, as well as within a subject's self-understanding, illustrate viscerally that sexuality itself is inherently political-here in its adjudication of submission, dominance, accommodation and resistance.

When Is A Gay‐Themed Film Not A Tongzhi Film? Yaoi, Bl Films And Gay Exploitation Cinema In Chinese Culture, Siu Yan Xavier Tam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Inspired by the commentaries on Brokeback Mountain, especially Chris Berry's assertion of Boys Love mimicry, and my observation of the multiplicity of Chinese "gay" films, this essay attempts to situate three modalities of "gay" film - tongzhi film, BL film and gay exploitation cinema vis-à-vis yaoi subculture and gay identification.

Review Of Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese And South Korean Filmmakers, By Kate E. Taylor-Jones, Hyon Joo Yoo

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Among the questions that should be asked regarding national cinemas outside Hollywood, but that have not yet been properly raised, is whether it is possible or necessary to establish specific conceptual frameworks for understanding different regional cinemas. While conceptual and methodological tools for regional analyses, applicable across various geographical formations, have yet to become widely available, [1] discussions of regional cinemas actually are proceeding. Regarding East Asian cinema in particular, collections of essays have appeared carving out various geographical groupings in single volumes that encompass all or select national cinemas of South Korea, Hong Kong, China and Japan. …

Contributors, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 16, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

Communities In (Digital) Space: Creating Networks For Daily Living Through Pervasive Media, Jamie Lynn Henthorn

English Theses & Dissertations

Studies of online communities often focus either on communities that produce texts or the texts with which individuals engage. This dissertation examines online communities that practice in ongoing activities, in their leisure time, often with no end goal of producing any final text. Through interviews, surveys, and community forum analysis of running, gaming, and translation communities, this study finds that place and everyday habits factor heavily into the ways that sustained online communities structure their work. “Place” can have several meanings within this context, including the communities valuing specific locations or working with specific individuals because of where they live. …

The Marine Cyanate Cycle, Brittany Widner

OES Theses and Dissertations

Cyanate (OCN-) is a reduced nitrogen compound with the potential to serve as a nitrogen and carbon source for marine microbes. Evidence from genomes and culture studies indicated that several marine cyanobacterial groups, including representatives of the globally important genera Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus, might be capable of cyanate assimilation. However, prior to this study, the distribution, bioavailability, and production pathways of cyanate were unknown in natural systems due to the absence of a sensitive cyanate assay; and the ability of organisms to assimilate cyanate on relevant timescales was unknown because we lacked a suitable tracer for measuring uptake. I developed …

Binge-Reviews? The Shifting Temporalities Of Contemporary Tv Criticism, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The article explores the object of the film theory and the practice of Third Cinema whose contributions are seen as a theoretical inquiry into the subject of Film Studies. Topics include the unfortunate dead-end at which the theory of third cinema has arrived, the orientation of third cinema towards openness and action in a political project, and the continued evaluation of third cinema while its status in the academy remains unchanged.

Introduction: Archives On Fire: Particle, Wave, And Field, W. Scott Howard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When Justin Scott-Coe and I were co-editing Water: Resources & Discourses—the multigraph for Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)—and then again, in 2007 and 2008, when I was organizing the first volumes for Reconfigurations and Appositions, I became increasingly fascinated with integrated circuits, especially the Atmel Diopsis 740 (imaged above and at the top of our TOC for this collection) [i]. I began thinking in new ways about technology and about digital media in particular, and I began asking myself new questions about relationships between content and form, figure and ground, data and interfaces, artifacts and archives. [ii] …

Requiems, Reports, Resurrections: Archives And The Alchemy Of Historical Inquiry, Tayana L. Hardin, Paul M. Farber, Grace L. Sanders-Johnson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Writing at the "limit of the unspeakable and the unknown" in her 2008 article "Venus in Two Acts," literary critic Saidiya Hartman demonstrates how the "scandal and excess" of literature productively disrupts and unfailingly reifies the status of the archive as the exemplar of historical knowledge. [1] For Hartman, the facts and fictions of history bear traces of power and violence that are evident in what can and cannot be said about historical subjects like Venus, "the emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world." Despite her ubiquity in "the archive of Atlantic slavery," Venus nonetheless …

Archimorphosis, Brigitte Ouvry-Vial, Yannick Estève

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Computers now offer opportunities to grasp, store, and explore huge corpora in a matter of weeks or months, and in a proportion ten years ago barely conceivable to scholars in the Humanities who would not have taken up the task of arranging such corpora with traditional archival and documentation tools, less committing themselves to a lifetime of work. Recent algorithms and hardware also allow computer scientists to develop new software tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, in order to emphasize inconspicuous links between data contained within very large archives, while such archives are composed by structured …

The Archive Is Not An Archives: Acknowledging The Intellectual Contributions Of Archival Studies, Michelle Caswell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I want to begin by discussing archives that are actually on fire. On August 25, 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo was targeted by Serb nationalist forces, shelled, and set ablaze. Over three days, more than two million volumes of books, archival records, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and journals were burned to a crisp, despite brave attempts by the people of Sarajevo to rescue them. As librarian Kemal Bakarsic described,

"The fire lasted into the next day. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, …

Affordances And Possibilities Around The Personal Portable Library In Art And Research, Henry Warwick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Personal Portable Library is basically a very simple device. It is a hard drive or USB memory stick filled with files. What kinds of files depends on curator or librarian's interests. Many people have hard drives filled with music, and they share drives, USB sticks, CDRs and DVDRs filled with music. In fact, according to the RIAA, Offline File Sharing exceeds online file sharing of music. [1] Music files, like font files, are small and easily transferred from one machine to another. Video files are another issue. A film can be 2 or more gigabytes in size …

Programming (Bi)Cultural Memory: Remembrance, Reinvention, And Commemorative Vigilance At The Film Archive, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Simon Sigley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In Sites of Memory (1984-1992), French historian Pierre Nora argues that a nation's identity is rediscovered as a result of reconfiguring the rationality that makes up its 'memory realms'. Nora's work was shaped by the idea that memory today no longer functions as it once did. In premodern times, memory was spontaneously hailed, with ancestors remembered in 'the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom' (1989: 7). Today, however, a historical sensibility has replaced such a rapport. History reconstructs from the remnants of material and symbolic culture what is no longer closely remembered. Memory sites emerge because …

Part 5: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender And Queer Community In Hampton Roads, Center For Economic Analysis And Policy, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

A 2012-2014 Gallup Poll reported that 4.4 percent of the population of Hampton Roads is LGBTQ in orientation. Available data suggest that LGBTQ women fare relatively better economically speaking than LGBTQ men. Norfolk and Virginia Beach are viewed as the region’s friendliest cities for members of the LGBTQ community.

Effects Of Temperature, Irradiance And Pco2 On The Growth And Nitrogen Utilization Of Prorocentrum Donghaiense, Zhangxi Hu, Margaret R. Mulholland, Ning Xu, Shunshan Duan

OES Faculty Publications

Environmental factors such as temp erature, irradiance, and nitrogen (N) supply affect the growth of Prorocentrum donghaiense, but the interactive effects of these physical factors and the effects of atmospheric CO₂ (pCO₂) on growth and N uptake have not been examined. We compared growth kinetics of P. donghaiense grown on 4 different N substrates (nitrate [NO₃ -], ammonium [NH₄ +], urea, and glutamic acid [glu]) with respect to temperature, irradiance, and pCO₂. Temperature (15 to 30°C) had a positive effect on growth (max. growth rates: 0.17 to 0.65 d …

Brochure: 38th Annual Literary Festival, 2015: A Place To Stand, Shara Weber

38th Annual Literary Festival at ODU: October 4-8, 2015

No abstract provided.

Pedagogy At Play: Gamification And Gameful Design In The 21st-Century Writing Classroom, Danielle Roney Roach

English Theses & Dissertations

The language used to discuss play in current academic spaces tends to center around formal games (and computer games in particular in the 21st century classroom). Scholarly conversations tend to distort the actual practices that occur in classrooms and subsequently limit the scope of any investigation of the pedagogical function and outcomes of those practices. This project explores the use of play and games in the classrooms of nine composition instructors. From these stories, this project begins to map out a taxonomy in order to begin building toward a pedagogy of play for 21st century writing classrooms. Using a multiperspectival …

Economies Of The Internet I: Intersections, Kylie Jarrett, Julia Velkova, Peter Jakobsson, Roderick Graham, David Gehring

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

The internet has increasingly been conceptualized as a space of economic activity. This contemporary imaginary has been particularly influenced by insights from the school of Autonomist Marxism in the foundational work of Tiziana Terranova and through the dominance of Christian Fuchs’ application of Marxist economic concepts. While this has generated great insight into the political economy of the internet, and in particular allowed for the conceptualization of user activity as labor, this approach is only one paradigm for considering the economic activities and implications of the internet. For internet research, there is also the need to move beyond the long …

Bhutanese Counselors' Experiences With Western Counseling: A Qualitative Study, Susan V. Lester

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Following centuries of independence from the rest of the world, the remote and fast-developing Kingdom of Bhutan has recently opened its doors to outside influence. Bhutan has invited the profession of counseling to aid in responding to growing mental health problems, social and family issues, and school and career guidance needs. This study employed the methods of phenomenology to investigate the experiences of Bhutanese counselors with Western counseling in order to understand the intersection of the culture of Bhutan with the culture of counseling. Eleven participants were interviewed and four themes were identified: Conceptualization of counseling, Bhutanese culture, Bhutanese counseling, …

The Art And Science Of Literary Study, Jamie Carr

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value—particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and …

Contributors, Hervé Regnauld, Alan Ramón Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 3 of Reconstruction.

From Ethnographic Surrealism To Surrealist Ethnographies, Anja Schwanhäußer, Stefan Wellgraf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In his famous essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" James Clifford describes it as a research perspective shared by anthropologists and artists in Paris during the 1920s and 30s (Clifford 1981). The ethnographic-surrealist perspective focused on the marvelous and the poetic of the everyday instead of its rule- and norm-boundedness. It was characterized by a fascination for the exotic as well as by a playful view toward its own culture and operated with techniques of collage and montage through which disparate elements were artfully combined. While we acknowledge James Clifford's argument that Ethnographic Surrealism is not a scientific program in …

The Role Of Diversity On Team Effectiveness In A Multinational And Multicultural Military Environment, Mustafa Utoglu

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The trend of deploying multinational coalition or alliance forces to respond to emerging threats in the past two decades has become a conventional approach. Beyond the advantages presented by coalitions and alliances, the literature suggests that multinational forces have raised a new set of challenges in achieving their mission: managing the demographic, functional, and cultural diversity introduced by the individuals from various nations that compose the coalition/alliance.

A large number of researchers have considered diversity a "double-edged sword" as they discovered that diversity could pose risks, as well as benefits, to teamwork. Although extensive research effort has been dedicated to …

Work Across The Generations: Communication Narratives Of Stay-At-Home Fathers In Early And Middle Adulthood, Alice L. Jones

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

The notion of work whether it is done inside or outside the home represents a complex and shifting pattern of social relationships, gender role identities, and ideologies. For an increasing numbers of men, who represent the population of fathers labeled as "stay-at-Home Dad" [SAHD] or "stay-at-home father" [SAHF], these changes have created special challenges, controversies, and raised questions about cultural expectations concerning the transition from that of a stigmatized role to that of a "new, involved father" (Eranta & Moisander, 2011; Rochlen, 2008). Increased participation by men in roles that challenge traditional and long standing gender role norms and expectations …

Contributors, Man-Chung Chiu

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

‘Is It A Teen Film?’: Girl In Hong Kong Cinema, Chui-Ping Iris Kam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Teen film as a genre is never a spotlight in the Hong Kong cinema, nor does it receive any extended critical attention in film analysis and financial investment. In light of this failure to acknowledge the full significance of the imaginary of young people on screen, it is important to ask how the imaginary of young people is used to communicate ideas about the relationships between mass culture and the everyday life of young people. Most of the gender and cultural studies in Hong Kong have examined the role of social institutions, such as the labour market, education, …

Playing With Food: Practices Of Consumption Cuisine And Embodiment In Video Games, Zachary Graham Hill

English Theses & Dissertations

The implementation of food in video games is extremely common to the medium, yet its function and placement within the cultural paradigms of video games remain unexamined. The purpose of this thesis is to examine games where culinary practices and foodways are brought to the forefront, making them either a key element to gameplay, or the only element of gameplay. By critically examining the various usages of food in game-spaces, this thesis examines the embodied relationship in video game spaces between players and their avatars through their encounters with food in these spaces. The relationships between player, avatar, and food …

Contributors, Matthew Ryan Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 1 of Reconstruction.

'Not Much Power In A Dead Man's Voice': Perfected Memory, Configured Ideology, And The Representation Of Self In Kawabata Yasunari's Jyurokusai No Nikki, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Contrary to its title, the 1968 Nobel Laureate for Literature Kawabata Yasunari's early diary Jyurokusai no nikki (Diary of a Sixteen Year Old) is anything but an unassuming chronicle of a single year in a young man's life. The complicated structure of reality in this work is constituted by homologous realities belonging to several distinct discourses which when read together co-signify something that none separately could. Certainly, we become privileged readers who, as we read, share a quest not just to perfect the mandate of self-knowledge but also to perfect the language of memory, identity and culture as the privileged, …