Graphic Desire, Michelle Belgrod

Masters Theses

Before I knew about design, I knew about desire. A desire for the new, the beautiful, the promising. A desire that lives on a surplus of surfaces. On packaging, social media, on websites. A desire that makes the job of a graphic designer an object of desire itself. A practice that prioritizes aesthetics over meaning. Expectations over reality.

In Graphic Desire, I complicate the ways that desire affects both designers and consumers. Caught up in our own need for creative fulfillment, we often overlook our impact as the arbiters of desire. Under capitalism, we create work that over-promises a …

Green Is The New Black: Exploring How A Philosophical Approach To The Fashion Industry Will Reduce Its Environmental Impact, Darion A. Gibbs

Student Theses and Dissertations

The fashion industry is the third largest contributor to pollution globally, behind only oil and agriculture. It also accounts for one-fifth of the plastic produced annually. Despite its impact, it is hard to trace accountability. For example, mega-retailers often outsource production to developing countries, without strong structures of accountability for their environmental impact. In addition, companies often claim to be environmentally sustainable, but it is easy to inflate the truth, and entities designed to protect consumers have limited enforcement. In this context, who should be held responsible for the fashion industry’s contribution to climate change?

In response, this thesis delves …

Only For The Pleasure Of Telling: Filling The Void In Pasolini's Trilogia Della Vita, Courtney Munson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Pasolini deliberately cultivated an unrecognizable and illegible public image that embraced incoherence, much of the scholarship surrounding him is plagued by contradictions and mutual exclusivity. For some, Pasolini was a utopian prophet, for others apocalyptic, but most agree that he, through his transmedial and highly self-inscribed life-work, was responding primarily to the crises of neocapitalist consumerism, especially its degenerative effects on sexual conventions and the body. Through an investigation of Pasolini’s controversial essays on film theory, the details of his biography, and the films of the Trilogia della vita, this thesis argues that it is a mistake to …

A Peeling Art, Terry Rim

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Action is greater than words, interaction is greater than viewing, and experience is greater than theory. So I came up with a way to make my art into an act of criticism toward consumerism. My art resembles colorful Pop Art on the surface but follows the defiant spirit of Dadaism at the core. It reveals the content full of dark humor and cynicism once the viewer “peels off” the appealing surface by interacting with it. The four artworks analyzed in the paper — Hole, The Twelephone and Alarming Alarm, Self-Destructive Ashtray, and Heavenly Cow — are designed …

Akan Traditional Religion And Catholicism In Dialogue: Envisaging A Paradigm Shift In The Theology Of Marriage In Postmodern Ghana, Daniel Adjei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The changing phases of religions, cultures, and world history in postmodernity call on the Catholic tradition to be religiously and culturally interreligious. The identity and mission of the Church can no longer be defined in a Eurocentric, triumphalist, or exclusivist term as in colonial times. As the Church expands to new religio-cultural and socio-political territories, the theological principles of dialogue, interculturality, listening, and inculturation must guide her mission. This dissertation, tracing the historical, cultural, and theological development of interreligious and cultural dialogue in the Catholic Church, argues that the Catholic Church of Ghana must engage religious and cultural diversity with …

The Connection Between Gen Z And Online Fast Fashion Media; Aiming To Create A Sustainable Future In Fashion., Rachel Peters

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

It is impossible to think about culture in the past two decades without referencing social media. My generation, commonly known as Gen Z (born between 1997-2010), has been on the forefront of social media development. One of the first generations to grow up with some form of unfiltered online social experience, Gen Z has been hard wired to consume media. While using social media alongside my peers, I have observed a problem that has resulted from this: mass consumption. A mass consumption of food, beauty products, home decor, and clothing in particular. On social media we see hundreds of videos …

Maternal & Spiritual Healing In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, Emily Pittman Hoste

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After World War II, spiritual and emotional healing was needed in America, despite a dependence upon materialism and conspicuous consumption for success. J.D. Salinger’s short-story cycle, Nine Stories (1953), explores what loss and trauma look like from all sides of war—mother, child, soldier, lover—all are harmed by war. Nine Stories emphasizes the need for nationwide spiritual healing and suggests that mothers offer the necessary antidote to consumeristic America. In fact, eight of Salinger’s Nine Stories employ one of three types of mothers: the self-serving and ineffectual mother; the spiritual, often surrogate maternal guide; and the ideal mother. While the ineffectual …

A Leadership Strategy To Identify And Reverse The Effects Of Consumerism On The Commitment To The Mission And Management Of The Village Seventh-Day Adventist Church Members, Ronald Paul Kelly Jr.

Professional Dissertations DMin

Problem

Low levels of commitment have detrimentally affected many aspects of the Village Church's health and vitality. The present study was developed to see to what degree the leaders of the Village Church had imbibed consumer constructs of identity and ministry and to what degree those constructs could be changed when presented with a biblical construct of identity and ministry.

Method

A week of spiritual emphasis entitled "Built on the Rock" examined the principles of the church growth movement as manifest in the megachurch movement. By contrast, the scriptural paradigm of the church as a family was presented as a …

Auto-Exploited: Narrative Explorations Of The Commodification Of Time, Grace C. Willis Ms.

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the phenomenon of the auto-exploitation of the modern individual through and in conjunction with the commodification of time. It explores the eruption of gig-work in recent decades in the United States, and the ways in which the modern individual is both consumer and product, buying and selling her own constructions of identity in order to gain time, fiscal currency and a sense of socioeconomic worth from herself and others. Using theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Catherine Rottenberg and Byung-Chul Han, I explore the ways in which the modern individual is …

Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen

MSU Graduate Theses

By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …

Degrowth And Catholic Social Thought: Rethinking Socio-Economics For A Planet In Crisis, Chad G. Baron

Master's Theses

It is assumed within both degrowth literature and the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (CST) that socio-economic transitions and transformations are needed due to the failings of the dominant capitalist paradigm. Both bodies of thought engage with issues of socio-economic transitions by considering what constitutes globally just development, and by outlining key principles they espouse to be foundational to global justice. By highlighting these principles, and locating the affinities between the two, these theories of socio-economic development can benefit from engaging with the other’s promoted framework. What could follow is a more coherent and holistic approach to development, …

‘Surest Guaranty Of Peace’: Rhetoric, Consumer Culture, And The Popularization Of American Naval Power, 1883 - 1909, Charles B. Harris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project a cultural history of the U.S. Navy during an era of a major institutional and technological transformation. In it, I trace the ways that Gilded Age and Progressive Era naval advocates successfully pitched the idea of modernizing the U.S. Navy to the American people. These military promoters justified technological advancement as societal progress, arguing for a more pronounced presence for the United States on the world stage. Marketing experts then seized on the people’s increasing fascination with naval power to rekindle a sense of patriotism by sensationalizing militarism. Riding this wave of popularity and public awareness of naval …

Shopping For A Cause: Social Influencers, Performative Allyship, And The Commodification Of Activism, Emily Mckellar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Since the early 2010s, social media has been a powerful tool for protestors and activists throughout the world. In times of crisis and political uprisings, users have pulled out their phones and taken to platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and, more recently, Instagram, to capture “the revolution” in real time. Although originally intended for networking purposes, social media has provided people with a digital space to share their stories, disseminate resources, and broadcast live, allowing them to share their efforts with millions.

While social media has helped assemble protests, amplify marginalized voices, and educate the public, it has also become a …

Simulating America: Ludocapitalism Of The 1990s In Wall Street Kid And Animal Crossing, Emily C. Byrne

English Honors Theses

The 1990s witnessed a rapid and unprecedented growth in technology. People watched more television and film, conversed with strangers in anonymous chat rooms, messaged each other on personal pagers, and increased their consumption of video games. The 1990s mark the third decade of the video game industry’s existence. Similar to other forms of digital media, the video game industry participated in rapid technological development during the decade. Home and handheld consoles became increasingly widespread, driving players away from the arcades of the past. Genres such as the first person shooter, fighting games, and survival horror started gaining significant popularity. These …

Intimacy For Sale: The Interior Landscape Of Social Media, Sophia Michael Weiland

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Diminished Experience Of Liturgy In A Pandemic, Joseph Torti

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

This paper considers the pastoral challenge of a diminished experience of liturgy and worship during the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores the ubiquity of the digital realm and a pervasive culture of consumerism as factors in addition to the pandemic contributing to the challenge. We then reflect on the challenge through the theological perspective of Scripture, sacramental theology, Vatican II teaching and liturgical theology before proposing a pastoral plan.

Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …

Anorexia Nervosa And Bulimia Nervosa As Expressions Of Shame In A Post-Feminist, Emily Kearns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa are heavily gendered conditions affecting women to a far greater degree than men in a post-millennium Western setting. The psychologistic and medicalized approaches to studying and treating these disorders do not account for socio-cultural and epistemic preferences. This paper draws a connection between shame (as emotion and affect) and these gendered disorders. Further, this work analyzes neo-liberalism, post-feminism, and consumerism as predatory elements of Western culture especially affecting women.

The Imago Dei As A Response To Consumerism And Individualism Within The Church, Carine George

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

The pastoral problem being addressed has to do with the culture of consumerism and individualism that have influenced the culture of the Church. Within Western society, the “ism” culture, consisting of factors such as: hedonism, consumerism, materialism, secularism, relativism and individualism, has become very prominent. Christians often operate no differently than non-Christians, and this is problematic since Christians are called to be salt for the earth and light for the world (Matthew 5:13-16), a people set apart. In John 15:19, we are told that we were not made to be of this world, so we need to stop being influenced …

An Evaluation Of Sustainability In Consumption: The Behaviors Behind Purchase, Care, And Disposal Of Apparel, Ana La Rosa

Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Fashion trend cycles have become increasingly fast-paced and unsustainable due to competition and consumer demand in the apparel sector. Despite having sustainable apparel choices available, consumers seem reluctant to adopt sustainable changes in their consumption habits due in part to the market allure of rapid turnover of goods, better known as ‘Fast Fashion’. Paired with aggressive marketing campaigns that encourage increased consumption beyond need, the apparel industry keeps expanding at alarming rates around the world. Although it has been identified that consumers increasingly care about the unethical behaviors in the industry that negatively impact the environment, this feeling does not …

Nuclear Families For The Nuclear Age: Disney's Part In Creating Gender Roles In The 1950s, Carlee T. Litt

History

The 1950s was a revolutionary period for American youth culture. The Walt Disney Company played an important role in forming and conveying a new image and set of ideals associated with childhood. My paper examines the Disney Company’s messages about growing up, in particular, the gendered expectations surrounding love that revolutionized the way Americans viewed family life. For both ideological and business reasons, Disney promoted an idealized concept of the nuclear family to children. My paper pays close attention to the conversation occurring between Disney and the American public by analyzing both 1950s Disney storylines, disseminated in multiple mediums such …

Useful Beauty: Tiffany Favrile, Carnival Glass, And Consumerism At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Chelsea Grayburn

Theses and Dissertations

Commercial markets within the United States were changing rapidly in the nineteenth century as improved transportation and efficient methods of mass production made goods available to a wider portion of the population than ever before. The glass market was one of many that changed drastically from the opening of the nineteenth century and on into the early twentieth century. Iridescent art glass, whether cheap pressed glass or expensive blown glass, provides a small window into how advertising and purchasing habits changed and why. The burgeoning middle class was looking for new ways to proclaim respectability and enhance their living space. …

It’S Garfield’S World, We Just Live In It: An Exploration Of Garfield The Cat As Icon, Money Maker, And Beast, Iris B. Engel

Senior Projects Fall 2019

No newspaper comic character enjoys a larger international audience than Garfield. While newspaper comics have been infiltrating the homes of readers in the United States since the 1880s, Garfield has made more of an impact than any other. Brought into existence by Jim Davis in Muncie, Indiana in 1978, Garfield has now gone world-wide. Breaking Guinness world records for most syndicated newspaper comic strip, Garfield has made over 800 million dollars in comic sales alone, making it the largest grossing newspaper comic strip to date. Recognized globally, Garfield is an international icon. Despite these laudations, there has never been an …

Tanks And Tinsel: The American Celebration Of Christmas During World War Ii, Samantha Desroches

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

“Tanks and Tinsel: The American Celebration of Christmas during World War II” is an examination of the American celebration of Christmas during World War II. As the first comprehensive investigation into the most well-known holiday in Western culture and its role in shaping Americans’ experience and understanding of the war, it contributes to historical scholarship in three ways. First, it continues the trend of blending analyses of society into military-focused narratives of the war, and it expands the scope of this by fusing the literature of War and Society with that of Holiday History. Second, it challenges traditional views of …

Everybody's Happy Nowadays: A Depth Analysis Of The Consumer Paradigm, Yonah Sichrovsky

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Consumerism provides a complex and worrying philosophical dilemma. In this paper I try to look at contemporary discussion and ramifications concerning mass consumption, as well as the theoretical roots of the phenomena. Through such an exploration I seek to make clear the idiosyncratic understanding and pervasive role consumerism has today. I will look at the serious affronts to selfhood and society that such a manifest phenomena entails and see precisely why these problematic abstractions occur.

The Real Winner Of The Second World War: Patriotic Consumption And The Formation Of A Society Of Spin, Jordan T. Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The unique circumstances in the United States during the Second World War allowed for business to continue as usual on the home front. Advertisers, public relations experts, and big business all worked for the government to promote the war effort. For a period of time major companies in the United States were producing advertisements that persuaded citizens to support rationing, buy war bonds, hate the enemy, and keep their brand names in mind in the post-war years. Companies who supported the war effort had their brands connected with ideas of patriotism and enjoyed the success of brand loyal consumers in …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Dying To Be Modern: Cataraqui Cemetery, Romanticism, Consumerism, And The Extension Of Modernity In Kingston, Ontario, 1780-1900, Cayley B. Bower

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston, Ontario, is one of many garden cemeteries that were constructed in the nineteenth century as a marker of modernity and civility. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the changes to interment customs, spaces, and services that occurred in cemeteries like Cataraqui were key to the creation and expression of modernity in emerging Canadian cities. Garden Cemeteries not only provided more beautiful and healthful burial spaces, they gave expression to new configurations of the human relationship with the natural world, and provided new means of communicating spirituality, and respectability. Through the application of Romanticism and the …

Advertisements And Social Appeal: Reshaping Of The Twentieth Century American Woman, Janet L. Tumpich

Senior Theses

Americans have been exposed to products and information through various mediums of advertisements. During the early 1900s, American advertisements (ads) increasingly overwhelmed the western world and could be seen in thousands of publications. The early ads featured imagery that depicted the everyday lives of American women, men, and children with the goal of selling products and services. Since women were identified as the primary consumer of the family, product ads often featured imagery of women as homemakers and in circumstances that portrayed them as feminine, and concerned with their appearance or pleasing their man. As the century progressed, and women …

Andy Loves Richard: The Revelations Of Vote Mcgovern (1972), Amelia Hobson

All ETDs from UAB

In 1972, Pop artist Andy Warhol was asked by the Democratic National Convention to design a poster for the campaign of George McGovern in his race against presidential incumbent Richard Nixon. The final print was produced in an edition of 250 prints and sold at auction with the proceeds donated to McGovern’s campaign. The work commands almost immediate attention as it depicts not George McGovern, as might be expected, but his opponent President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s head consumes the greater portion of the print and looms over the scrawled text, “VOTE MCGOVERN.” Nixon’s eyes are yellow and his face green …