Digital Commons Network^™

Boy Cultures And The Performance Of Teenage Masculinities, Cliona Barnes

Doctoral

This thesis is a response to negative media and public portrayals of young white working class men in Ireland It is prompted by the emergence into the public sphere of the Department of Education and Science’s Exploring Masculinities programme, a curriculum initiative designed to counter perceived problematic elements of youthful masculinity. This programme initiated a debate in the Irish media on men and boys, and gave a particular Irish dimension to the international focus on issues and questions about masculinity, social class and youth culture. My research seeks to uncover what lies behind increasingly negative and intransigent portrayals of young …

Reinventing A Level 7 Programme In Electrical Engineering And Greatly Improving On Student Retention, Eugene Coyle, Mike Murphy, Frank Costello, Leslie Shoemaker

Books/Book chapters

Following the successful implementation over a number of decades of a three-year Diploma in Electrical and Control Engineering at Technological University Dublin, the programme entered a period of extreme difficulty and uncertainty in the late nineteen ninetees and early years of the new millennium. As with many such engineering programmes, student numbers seeking to enter began to diminish. Furthermore, engagement and retention of students who had enrolled on the programme became evermore challenging, necessitating some radical moves in the formation and operation of the programme and in putting additional student support mechanisms in place. The situation hit rock bottom between …

Final Report: Critical Media Literacy In Ireland, Cliona Barnes, Farrek Corcoran, Flanagan Brian, Brian O'Neill

Reports

Critical Media Literacy (CML) is a matter of major public importance. The skill-set of CML is increasingly recognised at national and European level as essential to citizenship and to a healthy democracy. Attempts to foster Media Literacy have been a feature of Irish education for over thirty years. Extensive curriculum reform has taken place to ensure that opportunities for studying the media are available across the primary and secondary curriculum.

However, in 2007 the subject retains a low profile and provision for Media Education is uneven. The subject has a low status within the educational system and media exploration is …

The Technological Gaze In Advertising, Norah Campbell

Articles

This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through it. By drawing on television and print advertising, we can see the pervasiveness of a gaze that is technological in contemporary Western consumer culture. This article argues that, far from being a simple “ high-tech” effect, a technological gaze is a way of seeing that may be deconstructed. To this end, it will call on visual culture studies, feminism, film theory and Derridean deconstruction to highlight how high-tech images are cultural artefacts, which underscore contemporary imaginings …

Digital Radio Cultures In Europe: Progress To Date And Prospects For The Future:A Review Of Research Produced By Drace, Brian O'Neill, Stephen Lax

Conference Papers

Digital Radio Cultures in Europe (DRACE), was established in 2004 under the COST Action A20 “The Impact of the Internet on Mass Media in Europe”. The original configuration of the COST A20 group included provision for an internet and music research group but this was re-focussed following a re-organisation in which DRACE was more formally incorporated. The group comprises 14 researchers with specific interests in radio from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The objective of the research group is to be at the forefront of empirical research on changes in radio cultures …

Walking On Uneven Paths: The Transcultural Experience Of Migrant Children In France And Ireland, Rossella Ragazzi

Doctoral

This thesis foregrounds the application of anthropological documentary methods and ethnographic investigation in examining the world of child immigrants and the cross-cultural dilemmas they encounter upon entering the formal educational system of the ‘host’ country- in this case, a primary school setting in Dublin and Paris. The specificity of the primary school classroom as an ethnographic site facilitates a sustained audio-visual examination of immigrant children as they work to re-build their identities in a new and unfamiliar environment. Such a richly textured space opens up potential avenues of exploration for the researcher: what, for example, can intercultural pedagogy learn from …

Play And Technology:A Study Of Icts In Play Activities Of Irish Children (4-8 And 8-12), Brian O'Neill, Noirin Hayes, Stella Downey

Conference Papers

Defined in the Ireland’s national play policy as ‘freely chosen, personally directed, intrinsically motivated behaviour that actively engages the child’ (NCO, 2004, p.10), play now more often than not is a technologically-mediated activity. This paper focuses on the role of technology in play and explores the impact of technological change on children’s play activities. Drawing on our study commissioned by Ireland’s National Children’s Office, we present a detailed exploration of the play activities of Irish children, identifying the range of technologies accessed by children and how they are used in their daily play patterns. The project provided children with an …

Biking, Buying And Belonging: An Exploration Of How An Irish Subculture Of Consumption’S Socialisation Process Equips Its Members To Critically Filter Marketing Messages, Roger Sherlock, Geoffrey Weller

Conference papers

This paper identifies how members of an Irish biker subculture of consumption critically decode marketing messages, brands and products using a subcultural filter (peculiar to the subculture) learnt through localised socialisation. This critical filter develops through prolonged subcultural immersion and is influenced by the word-ofmouth purchase advice and product judgement of other members of the subculture of consumption; with a parallel between its development and use, and the development of the subcultural identity, from experimentation, to identification and conformity, to mastery and internalisation of both filter and identity (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995). It is internally utilised by the members to …

Maintaining A Balance At Undergraduate Degree Level In The Teaching Of Automation And Classical Control Systems, Eugene Coyle, Aidan O'Dwyer

Conference papers

Advances in the past decade in the development and application of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Automation Systems in both high technology industrial plants and in the more mainstream manufacturing sectors, has heightened the importance of ensuring that undergraduate degree programme syllabi are designed to adequately cater for the teaching and training of students in automation. Prior to this growth in automation, delivered syllabi in Control Systems on most Electrical Engineering programmes had a theoretical rigour, reflecting the mathematical nature of the topic. A major challenge currently facing departmental lecturing staff and programme coordinators is that of the design of …

Maintaining The Identity Of Dynamically Embodied Agents, Alan Martin, Gregory O'Hare, Brian Duffy, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, John Bradley

Conference papers

Virtual agents are traditionally constrained in their embod- iment, as they are restricted to one form of body. We propose allowing them to change their embodiment in order to expand their capabili- ties. This presents users with a number of di±culties in maintaining the identity of the agents, but these can be overcome by using identity cues, certain features that remain constant across embodiment forms. This pa- per outlines an experiment that examines these identity cues, and shows that they can be used to help address this identity problem.

Dit Independent, Issue 2, 1st.-30th. Of November, 2004, Dit:Students Union

DIT Student Union

No abstract provided.

Listening Spaces: Audiophiles, Technology And Domestic Music Listening, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

This paper examines the interrelationship of technology, space and identity as exhibited in the domestic music listening practices of the audiophile. Music listening in domestic contexts provides both a physical and imaginary space of cultural consumption. The paper describes work in progress into phenomenological aspects of listening, practices of audio technology use in domestic contexts, and features of identity formation based on a qualitative study of hi-fi listeners. Technological and cultural change in the production of aural soundscapes and processes of reception provide the backdrop to the current study. Three main issues are addressed. Firstly, the promise of digital technology …

2004 - 2006 Postgraduate Prospectus, Dublin Institute Of Technology

DIT Publications

Postgrad prospectus for years 2004 - 2006, containing information on applications to studies, disability services, research funding, international student office, contact persons.

The Fair City Production Line: An Examination Of Soap Opera’S Potential Contribution To The Public Sphere, Edward Brennan

Articles

Between December 2000 and February 2001 the Irish soap opera Fair City ran an unprecedented, risky and controversial abortion storyline. This came before a looming referendum on the legality of abortion. Here, Fair City was not just offering entertainment, but provoking debate and discussion on a divisive issue in Irish society. In this case, and many others, it appears that soap opera, by promoting such discussion, may contribute to the formation of public opinion in contemporary civil society. Heretofore, most academic studies have overlooked the possible consequences of soap opera for civil society, public opinion and the democratic process. This …

On Researching Music In Everyday Life:Assessing The Musician As Producer Of Commercialised Music, Alan Bradshaw, Roger Sherlock, Pierre Mcdonagh

Articles

Adorno & Horkheimer (1998) argue that the Culture Industry generates cultural artefacts that fail to develop human consciousness and hence support the domination of the capitalist system. Steinert (2003) states that the pressures facing musicians to negotiate between the demands of the culture industry and the traditional role of the artist generates a fundamental contradiction within art which is symbolically enacted through artistic production. This study, which draws on on-going postgraduate research aims to develop a research framework that investigates how musicians negotiate this contradiction. The study considers if a more reflexive approach to art exists, typified by the Pop …

Perfecting The Match: The Visual Economy Of Egg Donation, Katherine M. Boulay

Doctoral

This thesis is a response to the absence of discussion in feminist and cultural studies of Assisted Reproductive Technology’s (ART) increasing utilisation of visuality and technology as complementary legitimating discourses. While critiques of the epistemologies and practices undergirding ART point to the fact that imaging technologies are used to reveal knowledge held in bodies, lacking in current theoretical work on ART, however, is an ethnographic engagement with how visual technologies actually produce the internal and externalscapes of these bodies, and knowledges about them. Mapping selective visual knowledges and technologies constitutive of the ART egg donation, the thesis engages with disparate …

Review Of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire And The Pedagogy Of Revolution, Ray English

Level 3

No abstract provided.

2000 - 2001: Postgraduate Prospectus, Dublin Institute Of Technology

DIT Publications

This booklet outlines the opportunities for post graduate studies offered by the Dublin Institute of Technology. Including both taught and programmes of research leading to higher level awards.

Volume 8, 2000, Ellen Hazelkorn, Nora French, Wolfgang Truetzschler

Issues

No abstract provided.

The Arts Show Audience: Cultural Confidence And Middlebrow Arts Consumption, Brian O'Neill

Articles

The arts constitute a form of cultural consumption that has been relatively neglected in recent academic discourse in comparison to the burgeoning literature of cultural studies dedicated to popular and mass media forms of culture. This emphasis within cultural studies on popular genres over traditional forms of art, what has been labelled its ‘cultural populism’ (Mc Guigan, 1992), systematically emphasises common, ordinary taste and resistant aesthetic strategies while denigrating ‘high culture’ as an elitist, middle class leisure pursuit that has little relevance to most people (Willis, 1990). Going against this populist tide, this chapter argues that an examination of popular …

Volume 4, 1994, Ellen Hazelkorn, Nora French, Wolfgang Truetzschler

Issues

No abstract provided.

Analysis And Report 1991-1992 : Dublin Institute Of Technology, Kevin Street, Dublin Institute Of Technology

DIT Annual Reports

Analysis and report for the year 1991-1992.

Academic activities and involvement with society.

Volume 1, 1991, Nora French, Ellen Hazelkorn, Wolfgang Truetzschler

Issues

No abstract provided.