Digital Commons Network^™

Are We Cool Yet?: A Longitudinal Content Analysis Of Nerd And Geek Representations In Popular Television, Christopher Louis Cardiel

Dissertations and Theses

This study explores the representation of nerds and geeks in popular broadcast television programs over the course of the past twenty years. A content analysis of the five most popular scripted broadcast television programs for each year was conducted in order to assess the frequency of nerd characters, as well as the social competence, physical attractiveness, and demographic information of each such character. In addition, a supplemental survey design study was employed in order to collect public opinion data regarding perceptions of nerds in general and on television. The results of these studies indicated that while the per-year frequency of …

Made In The U.S.A.: Corporate Responsibility And Collective Identity In The American Automotive Industry, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article challenges the corporate-constructed image of American business and industry. By focusing on the automotive industry and particularly on the tenuous relationship between the rhetoric of automotive industry advertising and doctrinal corporate law, this Article examines the ways that social and legal actors understand what it means for a corporation or its products to be American. In a global economy, what does it mean for a corporation to present the impression of national citizenship? Considering the recent bailout of American automotive corporations, the automotive industry today becomes a powerful vehicle for problematizing the conflicted public/private nature of the corporate …

How Milk Does The World Good: Vernacular Sustainability And Alternative Food Systems In Post-Socialist Europe, Diana Mincyte

Publications and Research

Scholarly debates on sustainable consumption have generally overlooked alternative agro-food networks in the economies outside of Western Europe and North America. Building on practice-based theories, this article focuses on informal raw milk markets in post-socialist Lithuania to examine how such alternative systems emerge and operate in the changing political, social, and economic contexts. It makes two contributions to the scholarship on sustainable consumption. In considering semi-subsistence practices and poverty-driven consumption, this article argues for a richer, more critical, and inclusive theory of sustainability that takes into consideration vernacular forms of exchange and approaches poor consumers as subjects of global history. …

Porfirismo During The Mexican Revolution: Exile And The Politics Of Representation, 1910-1920, Nancy Alexandra Aguirre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This work broadens the narrative of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) by incorporating the perspective of the supporters of dictators Porfirio Dí­az and Victoriano Huerta. I focus specifically on urban professional "Porfiristas," examining the changes and continuities in their identity over the course of the revolution. Identity formation is the central theme of this study, and I rely on memoirs, newspapers, government documents, and oral history interviews in order to analyze the motivations of Porfiristas as they fought to sustain their worldview during a decade of global conflict.

My study draws upon the frameworks of post-colonialism, feminist theory, cultural studies, migration/diaspora …

Acculturation Effects On Preference For English And Spanish-Language Tv Commercials Among Hispanic Audiences Of Mexican Descent, John Burton

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The growth of the U.S. Hispanic population and its purchasing power over the past twenty years continues to be monitored closely by corporate interests anxious to gain market share and brand loyalty of the segment that now represents the largest minority group in the country. Marketers continue to look for competitive advantages in effectively communicating targeted messages to Hispanics in order to increase revenues and profits.

This study focused on the historically dominant mass-reach medium of television and explored concepts of acculturation theory to examine the effects of acculturation sub-dimensions on TV commercial language preference and attitudes among Hispanic audiences …

Androgyny And Musical Identity: Glitz, Glamour, And Everything In Between, Tanya Yvette Flores

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Discourse of androgyny and how it functions and how it is constructed will be central to analyzing how it is utilized in popular music and how artists, particularly androgynous artists, use it to complicate their expression of identities. Androgyny is described as a mixing of both male and female genders, where there can be distinct lack of coherent gender identification. Androgyny has been revealed as an identity that neither men nor women are born with, but embody through time. It is important to illustrate a growing recognition of androgynous artists to offer us an opportunity to glimpse the spectacular evolvement …

The New Mexican Migration: Remembering Violence, Connecting, And Living In The Third Space, Uriel G. Posada

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The concept of identity has become a topic of discussion in the last few decades, especially with the growing immigration across several countries. Countries such as the United States and Canada are receiving people who arrive from different parts of the world and who are changing the composition of these countries. In this thesis I explore how a group of Mexican journalists are adjusting their identity as they live in countries outside of Mexico. Five of the journalists are now living in the United States, and one of them is in Canada. They were forced to leave Mexico after they …

Literary Imagination And Community Mental Health: A Deleuzian Analysis Of Discourse In A Fiction Reading Group, Rodney Teague

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study presents an empirical, qualitative investigation of transformations as they occurred in the participants' language during a fiction reading and discussion group in a community mental health setting. Session transcripts have been analyzed from the perspective of researcher as literary critic and through the Deleuzian lens of rhizomatic assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2005). This nonlinear, non-hierarchical and non-referential approach re-imagins the relationship among readers, texts and authors. Three themes follow from the rhizomatic perspective on transcript data.

The first of these, Assemblage, details the ways that participants engage in and with fictional story-worlds. This engagement is such that text, …