American Popular Culture Commons^™

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

Violence In Popular Culture: American And Global Perspectives, Rob Tench

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Web Archives At The Nexus Of Good Fakes And Flawed Originals, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[Summary] The authenticity, integrity, and provenance of resources we encounter on the web are increasingly in question. While many people are inured to the possibility of altered images, the easy accessibility of powerful software tools that synthesize audio and video will unleash a torrent of convincing “deepfakes” into our social discourse. Archives will no longer be monopolized by a countable number of institutions such as governments and publishers, but will become a competitive space filled with social engineers, propagandists, conspiracy theorists, and aspiring Hollywood directors. While the historical record has never been singular nor unmalleable, current technologies empower an unprecedented …

Speculative Futures And Futurism In Appalachia, Liz Pavlovic, Jamie Banks, Nicholas D. Bowman, David Smith, Baaria Chaudhary, Ben Babbitt, Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, Daniel Boyd, West Virginia University Press

Exhibit Panels

What if we thought of Appalachia as futuristic? Could the mountains be the setting for imagining better, maybe weirder, futures? Artists, writers, and game designers have been asking just those questions, speculating through science fiction, fantasy, and magic realism to rethink the ways cultural traditions in wildly creative ways. From folktales to videogames, cryptozoology to underground highways, this section asks what a future Appalachian utopia (or dystopia) might look and feel like?

Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …

The Evolution Of Sunset Magazine's Cooking Department: The Accommodation Of Men's And Women's Cooking In The 1930s, Jennifer Hoolhorst Pagano

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that …

Batman's Animated Brain(S), Lisa Kort-Butler

Department of Sociology: Presentations

Much of the analysis of Batman’s brain – whether by scholars, writers, or other comic characters – focuses on his psychological make‐up. That is, what makes Bruce Wayne psychologically motivated to be The Batman? His childhood trauma is often poised as the answer, the tireless pursuit of “justice” in an attempt to regain control from the trauma of his parents’ murders (Sanna 2015). The same could be said for his nemeses. Madness, psychopathy, and insanity are centered in the corrupted minds of Gotham’s ghastliest, some of whom have also had psychological or physical traumas (Langley 2012; Lytle 2008). A psychological …

The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This thesis explores the feminist legacy that the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007, 2016) built during its original airtime and how its later revival diminished that legacy. Gilmore Girls’ main characters are three generations of women within the Gilmore family, providing a unique opportunity to analyze their feminist identities and characterizations relative to different iterations of feminism. This paper examines how the youngest Gilmore, Rory, is influenced by her mother’s and grandmother’s embodiments of feminism. Their expressions of femininity and sexuality, their approaches to motherhood, and their behaviors in their romantic relationships throughout the series correlate with the predominate feminism …

The Influence Of Individualistic Ideas On American Mobility, Markus Magiera

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

In this paper I showcase the influence of individualistic thinking ranging back as far as Age of Enlightenment on the development of mobility in America since the eighteenth century. My goal is to identify the factors that shaped the evolution of travel. In order to do so I start by analyzing texts from the early nineteenth century, where travel by foot was the common thing. Next I focus on new means of mobility; first the bicycle, and later on the automobile. I aim to convince that modernity's main instigator was the change in thinking brought forth in the Age of …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Cultures And Politics Of The Global Drug War [Urban Studies/English], Justin Rogers-Cooper

Open Educational Resources

This staged and high stakes Urban Studies assignment was developed in conjunction with two Center for Teaching and Learning Seminars at LaGuardia Community College: “The Pedagogy of the Digital Ability” and “The Next Generation ePortfolio.” All Urban Studies courses at LaGuardia are writing intensive, and all are designated for the college’s Global Learning Core Competency and the Written Communication Ability. Urban Studies courses exist on different points of many programmatic curriculum maps for Liberal Arts majors, but students usually take it as a midpoint course. Dozens of different majors completed this assignment and take Urban Studies courses more generally, including …

Tinker, Robert Rush (Fa 1149), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1149. Student folk studies project titled “Playground Language: [Newburg, Kentucky]” which includes survey sheets with a brief description of playground rhymes in Newburg, Jefferson County, Kentucky. Sheets may include rope skipping rhyme, group game, informant’s name, and text classification.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the fight for justice, equality, and true liberation, African American organizations and institutions have often acted as a voice for the African American community at large focusing on common issues and concerns. With the civil rights movement being broadcast across the world, there was no better time for African American community and civil rights organizations to take a role within the movement in combatting the oppression, racism, and discrimination of white supremacy. Often left out of this history of the civil rights movement is an analysis of black-owned private businesses, also giving shape to the African American community. Black …

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …

Archbold, Annie And Barbara Dubczak (Fa 379), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 379. A reel-to-reel audiotape recording of a program titled “Documents in Sound: A Sample in Folk Arts,” which was sponsored by the Barren River Regional Arts Council with funds from the Kentucky Folklife Foundation. According to the tape summary, the program includes five separate features, which can be played as individual vignettes or as a full 29-minute program. Features include traditional artists and cover topics such as woodworking, broom making, basket making, weaving, and drawn work.

Cederquist, Nancy (Fa 378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

FFinding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 378. Multiple interviews with Mrs. James Hall conducted by Nancy Cederquist on 22 February 1985, 1 April 1985, and 22 April 1985. Hall, a resident of Bowling Green, discusses her passion for quilting, her preferred patterns, fabric care, and her experiences with a local quilting group.

Conaster, Victoria (Fa 377), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 377. Interview with Joe H. Page conducted by Victoria Conaster on 3 April 1993. Page, a resident of Lewisburg, discusses his childhood memories of growing up on a tenant farm. Topics covered include tobacco harvests and sales, pest control, traditional farm lore, home remedies and religious life.

Allen, David (Fa 368), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 368. Interview with Annie Duvall conducted by David Allen on 16 April 1998. Duvall discusses her personal experiences growing up in Muhlenberg County. Topics covered include dating, marriage, gardening, family vacations, religion, women’s rights, and changes in modern technologies.

The Purloined Letters: A Collection Of Mail Robbery Reports From Ohio Papers, 1841-1850, Marc Cibella

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Marc Cibella’s essay introduces and explains why nineteenth-century Americans got excited about newspaper reports of mail robbery.

The Rise Of Trump And The Death Of Civility, Keith Bybee

Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media at Syracuse University

According to supporters and opponents alike, Donald Trump has been an unconventional candidate and president. In this article, I evaluate the relationship between Trump’s unconventional behavior and the requirements of civility. I provide a definition of civility, and I explain why it makes sense to relate Trump’s actions to civil norms. I then discuss how civility is enacted, I examine criticisms of civility’s triviality, and I explore the ways in which civility may repress dissent and maintain hierarchy. Although I consider the degree to which Trump’s actions are strategic, I ultimately argue that Trump’s incivilities should be understood as an …

Ua1c6/8 Exhibit Photos, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Images of exhibits at Western Kentucky University.

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

Female Cyclists: Two Essays From The 1869 Hancock Jeffersonian, Paige Zenovic

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Paige Zenovic introduces and explains two nineteenth-century essays from the Findley, Ohio Hancock Jeffersonian on the subject of women riding bicycles from the time when they were first being introduced to Ohio.

“Well, Don’T Walk Around Naked... Unless You’Re A Girl”: Gender, Sexuality, And Risk In Jamtronica Festival Subcultural Scenes, Kaitlyne A. Motl

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

The purpose of this study was to explore emerging issues surrounding gendered fear, threat, and violence perpetration at music festivals – particularly events that feature a synthesis of jam band and electronic dance music acts – a genre termed jamtronica by its fans. Though gendered violence perpetration and prevention have been widely studied within other party-oriented settings (i.e., sexual violence perpetration on college campuses), very little research exists to address how wider disparities of gender and sexuality permeate a community whose members frequently claim the scene’s immunity from external inequalities.

In this three-year multi-sited ethnography, I incorporate participant observations, group …

Tom And Jerry: Performative Queerness In Action, Cade M. Olmstead

Undergraduate Student Work

This presentation’s theoretical focus is a return to the performative dimension of identities and social life. Its vehicle for doing such is Tom and Jerry, a series of animation shorts. This American “cat chases mouse” series produced hundreds of shorts and has become a classic in American media memory. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s queer theoretical work and a justification from Eve Sedgwick, a selection of episodes has been subject to analysis. This analysis lays out basic descriptions of performative gender identity in the series while making a normative assessment of their effects. Ultimately, I claim that through ironic detachment, the …

Comedian Hosts And The Demotic Turn, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Podcasting is a showcase for what cultural studies scholar Graeme Turner coined “the demotic turn” or the increasing visibility of the "ordinary person" in the today’s media landscape. Collins argues that the emergence of a particular breed of podcasts – comedian-hosted interviews with celebrities – function in an “off-label” manner as a form of self-help or vicarious therapy. The emergence and rapid growth of this genre can attributed to three main factors: a confessional culture, the triumph of experience over expertise, and the democratization allowed by the form’s technology. She explores the link between emotional intimacy and comedy, and analyzes …

No Laughing Matter: Failures Of Satire During The 2016 Presidential Election, Jamie Noelle Smith

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 2016 presidential election was so full of unusual characters and unprecedented scandals, that media outlets, from the nightly news to late-night, had to adjust to this new normal in politics. Indeed, not even the jokesters on the handful of political satire shows on television were immune to the necessary changes that all the media had to take in covering Donald Trump. Given how many people tuned into to these shows each week, it is no surprise that the role that political satire television may have played in the election results was fodder for those giving post-election hot takes. Many …