Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Public Housing Film Series, The Lender Center For Social Justice, Cornell University

The Lender Center for Social Justice

A poster for the three-part Public Housing Film Series

The Price Of Fame: Materialism, Social Media And The Pursuit Of Celebrity In The Bling Ring (2013), Irma Mosqueda Perez

Television-Radio-Film - All Scholarship

In a society obsessed with materialism and appearances, The Bling Ring (2013) by Sofia Coppola stands as a timeless reflection of the dangers of desiring fame and wealth at any cost. Through the use of slow-motion sequences and immersive cinematography, Coppola tells the true story of five California teens whose desire for wealth, fame and status drives them to commit a series of robberies targeting the homes of Hollywood’s top celebrities. Coppola succeeds in creating an atmosphere of dreamlike hedonism and euphoria through oversaturated neon colors and a pop soundtrack which transports the viewer into the minds of these teenagers …

Code^Shift: A Collaboratory For Data Equity, Community Impact, And Social Healing, Srividya Ramasubramanian

Media Studies - All Scholarship

CODE^SHIFT is a multidisciplinary “collaboratory” research space that focuses on data justice by humanizing data for storytelling, community impact, and social healing. Its goal is to address social inequalities (especially relating to race, gender, ethnicity, and indigeneity) using data, media, technology, art, and storytelling. Our activities include community-building, curriculum development, and collaborative research projects, especially focused on critical media literacies, arts-based interventions, and digital storytelling. The four main principles that guide our practice and theorizing are: collaboration, purposiveness or intentionality, actionorientation, and equity-mindedness. We see data justice as crucial to every stage: from identifying pressing social needs, to forming partnership …

Social Media Semantics: Enhancing Manipulated Media Detection Through An Artificial Intelligence Weakness, Regina Luttrell, Jason Davis, Carrie Welch

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

As fake news and disinformation continue to proliferate in digital journalism, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) analytics to identify synthetic content inconsistencies is increasingly important. This study explores trained AI analytics’ struggle to detect semantic gaps within AI-generated media. Findings reinforce human semantic capabilities and a direction for detection tools. AI analytics designed for semantic detection-related tasks are evaluated through the application of the Theory of Content Consistency, with insights for combatting social media news truth erosion.

Cultural Differences In The Use Of Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (Arsgs) Between The U.S. And South Korea: Privacy Concerns And The Technology Acceptance Model, Se Jung Kim, Yoon Lee, Tamara Chock

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ARSGs) allow users to engage in picture-taking and video recording, as well as real-time storage and sharing of pictures and videos through cloud services. Unlike smartphones, newer ARSGs resemble ordinary sunglasses, allowing for unobtrusive recording. As these devices become available on an international market, it is important to understand how different cultural attitudes towards privacy and the recording and sharing of images of bystanders could impact the acceptance and adoption of ARSGs. South Korea and the United States have vastly different culturally based perceptions of photography and recording in public. S. Korea has cultural and legal …

Masc Affect: Affective Masculinity In Video Games Research, Joshua Foust

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Source Attribution And Detection Strategies For Ai-Era Journalism, Regina Luttrell, Jason Davis, Carrie Welch

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Continued access to genuine, verified news is important in providing news audiences with information about events of social importance. Sophisticated methods of detection and attribution must be applied to counter the proliferation of AI-generated mis- and disinformation and uphold journalistic values. This study examines the complexities of transparency in journalism and AI in relation to source attribution. While various AI analytics claim performance capabilities on specific tasks related to media detection, there remains a need for a standard evaluative framework that can comparatively measure the success of these various analytics. This paper explores how the Theory of Content Consistency (ToCC) …

Toward A Combine-Style Approach To Predicting Future Esports Success, Nicholas David Bowman, Kevin Sweeney, Aaron R. Seitz, C. Shawn Green

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Historically, there has been a great deal of interest in using basicmeasures of individual difference factors to predict future success in traditional sports. For instance, the National Football League (NFL) holds a scouting combine each year prior to the NFL draft during which a host of attributes about players are measured, from basic height and weight, to sprint speed, to jumping capacity, to strength. Even among an already highly selected group of individuals (i.e., individuals skilled enough to even be considered for the NFL), such measures have been seen to have some degree of utility in predicting future performance. The …

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) By Howard Hawkes Was Ahead Of Its Time., Irma Mosqueda Perez

Women's and Gender Studies - All Scholarship

The 1953 film by Howards Hawkes “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” gives the impression that it tries to satisfy the male gaze and objectify women; but if we take a closer look, the film responds to the feminist movements that started to brew from women’s involvement in the workplace and other areas typically reserved for men following the events of World War II.

Institutions Against Art Music-Curation, Rehearsal, And Contemporary Art, G. Douglas Barrett

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The [Object, Me, Symbiote, Other] In The Machine: Insights From Video Game Psychology For Teleporter-Robot Relations, Nicholas David Bowman, Jaime Banks

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Avatars serve as embodied representations of user agency in physical, digital, and mixed realities, extending our physical, cognitive, and perceptual abilities into those spaces. From this perspective, there is a tendency to presume that as users assume control of an avatar, they necessarily psychologically merge with and identify as that entity. Borrowing from video game psychology research into player-avatar relations (PAR) and player-avatar interactions (PAX), we present an argument for considering a broader range of sociality regarding user relations with avatar robots: Seeing avatar robots as Object, Me, Symbiote, and authentically social Others. We extrapolate from PAX measurements to tentatively …

The Code^Shift Model: A Data Justice Framework For Collective Impact And Social Transformation, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Mohan Dutta

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we present an alternative framework that resists hegemonic social sciences within data-driven communication theorizing through a culture-centered approach (CCA). Building on the CCA in co-creating voice infrastructures at the margins, we argue that data justice requires transforming interpretive data framings, disrupting the hegemonic registers of knowledge production constituted around data, and working with/through data to challenge the structures of capitalism and colonialism that circulate the practices of exploitation and extraction. We build upon community-engaged projects emergent from the CCA in/with/from the Global South to propose the CODE^SHIFT Model, grounded in principles of equity-mindedness, collective impact, purposiveness, and …

It's All Personal - A Study On Consumer Attitudes Towards Data Collection And Usage, Publishers Clearing House, Tiffany Johnson, Daniela Molta, Evan Shapiro

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Quarantined Across Borders: Theorizing Embodied Transnationalism, Precarious Citizenship, And Resilience For Collective Healing, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Aisha Durham, Joëlle M. Cruz

Media Studies - All Scholarship

Embodied transnationalism is characterized by intimate experiences of human-made political borders that define, limit, and restrict flows of the “Other.” In the Quarantined Across Borders collection, contributors from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds address the material and discursive differences in how they experience the pandemic in terms of a public health crisis and public policy response that intersects racialized gender, class, citizenship status, and profession.

How Citizens Want To "See" The State: Exploring The Relationship Between Tranasparency And Public Values, Sabina Schnell, Jiho Kim, Greg Munno, Tina Nabatchi

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Although transparency is recognized as an important public value, few studies examine how citizens see the relationship between transparency and other public values. To empirically investigate this relationship, we distinguish among five types of transparency and explore their associations with different views of “good” government and other public values. Using survey data and Q methodology, we find that citizens see transparency as an important value, albeit not the most important one. We also find that people give different weight to different kinds of transparency and that this depends on individual characteristics and on their overall value orientation or conception of …

Four Perspectives On A Sustaibable Future In Nosara, Costa Rica, Greg Munno, Alvara Salas Castro, Tina Nabatchi, Christian M. Freitag

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

The town of Nosara on Costa Rica’s Nicoya peninsula is home to a vibrant community of diverse residents and is adjacent to an important turtle nesting site. However, tensions between lifelong residents, more recent transplants, visitors, and developers have increased as more of the world discovers this once-isolated haven. Climate change, income inequality, and alienation from a distant government apparatus have further complicated effective land-use planning and fractured social cohesion. Using a mixed method approach of in-depth interviews (n = 67), Q methodology (n = 79), and public deliberation (n = 88), we explored residents’ priorities for the future of …

A Pedagogical Mystique?: Lessons Of Incorporating Feminism Into Skills-Based Communications Courses, Daniela Molta, Regina Luttrell, Christopher J. Mccollough

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

It is imperative that today’s advertising, journalism, mass communication, and public relations students are prepared to engage in corporate activism and corporate social responsibility communications once in the workforce. This article explores the need for incorporating equity-based pedagogy, using feminism as one of many approaches, into skills-based communication courses. The researchers conducted 20 qualitative interviews with academics to discuss various approaches, examples, and learnings. The findings suggest that using a feminist framework to teach skills: (1) enhances the skill being taught, (2) allows students to communicate more effectively, (3) builds life skills, and (4) comes in many forms. The article …

Whose Voices Count?: Sourcing U.S. American Television News About The World, David C. Oh, Omotayo O. Banjo, Nancy A. Jennings

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists’ race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The …

Do Media Literacies Approach Equity And Justice?, Paul Mihailidis, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Melissa Tully, Bobbie J. Foster, Emily Riewestahl, Patrick Johnson, Sydney Angove

Media Studies - All Scholarship

It is often assumed that media literacy serves to protect and uphold democratic practice and that media literate citizens are the best safeguards for democracy. However, little attention is paid to defining this practice and its relationship to ongoing inequities within democratic societies. In this essay, we argue media literacy operates from three core assumptions; media literacy creates knowledgeable individuals, empowers communities, and encourages democratic participation. The first assumption draws out an individual’s skills and critical thinking in media literacy practices. The second assumption focuses on the community aspect of media literacy, specifically which communities are best served by media …

The Trauma-Informed Equity-Minded Asset-Based Model (Team): The Six R’S For Social Justice-Oriented Educators, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Emily Riewestahl, Shelby Landmark

Media Studies - All Scholarship

This paper describes the Trauma-informed Equity-minded Asset-based Model (TEAM) framework for social justice-oriented educators. We draw on trauma-informed approaches to illustrate how systemic racism as systemic trauma and normative whiteness as dominant ideology are embedded in the U.S education and media institutions. From an equity-minded perspective, we critique notions such as egalitarianism, colorblind racism, neoliberal multiculturalism, and abstract liberalism. Using an asset-based model, we urge educators to avoid deficit ideologies to frame marginalized communities. The TEAM approach offers the following “Six R’s” as strategies: (1) Realizing that dominant ideologies are embedded in educational systems, (2) Recognizing the long-term effects of …

Crossing The Threshold: An Analysis Of The Hero's Journey, Megan C. Hulings

Theses - ALL

The Hero's Journey is well-known amongst storytellers the world over as a useful structure to create compelling characters and engaging plots, though many see its use as derivative and uninspired. After its explosion in popularity in the 1970s, audiences have come to expect stories to hit every step of the Hero's Journey beat-for-beat.

This thesis will explore the history of the Hero's Journey, from its conception to its modern interpretation. It will examine the individual parts that can elevate this simple structure into a complex narrative. By navigating the works of both Christopher Vogler and John Yorke, this thesis will …

Tale As Old As...Feminism? The (Re)Making Of Beauty And The Beast, Cara Doreen Hardman

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I investigate Disney's positioning of the live-action Beauty and the Beast as feminist. Up to this point, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast has both been hailed as presenting audiences with an empowered princess and criticized for the Beast's aggressive behavior and the positioning of Belle as a woman meant to propel the Beast's story forward. I provide an assessment of the gender politics depicted in Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast, and I problematize the tendency to classify texts as either entirely feminist or utterly antifeminist. As a whole, this thesis provides an in-depth analysis of …

Media Use During Covid-19: An Investigation Of Negative Effects On The Mental Health Of Asian Versus White Americans, Jessie M. Quintero Johnson, Muniba Saleem, Lu Tang, Srivi Ramasubramanian, Emily Riewestahl

Media Studies - All Scholarship

The role of media use on mental health distress is particularly concerning during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The vulnerabilities to and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States are greatly influenced by racial/ethnic inequalities. The COVID-19 pandemic may present unique mental health challenges for Asian Americans because of racial targeting and limited access to and engagement with mental health care. This present investigation examines whether the association between media use and mental health distress is more pronounced for Asian Americans for whom media messages that document and promote anti-Asian racism are likely to be especially salient and influential. …

Media Literacy, Social Connectedness, And Digital Citizenship In India: Mapping Stakeholders On How Parents And Young People Navigate A Social World, Devina Sarwatay, Usha Raman, Srividya Ramasubramanian

Media Studies - All Scholarship

Media Literacy, Social Connectedness, and Digital Citizenship in India: Mapping Stakeholders on How Parents and Young People Navigate a Social World

Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultrual Communication And Media Effects Through Power, Intersectionality, Context, And Agency, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Omotayo O. Banjo

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, we advance the Critical Media Effects (CME) framework as a way of bridging two major subfields of communication that seldom speak to one another: media effects scholarship and critical cultural communication. Critical Media Effects is situated within the dominant mode of social scientific theorizing within media effects scholarship and draws on four key interrelated concepts from critical cultural communication: power, intersectionality, context, and agency. Critical Media Effects advocates for greater reflexivity, rigor, and nuance in theorizing about media effects to better respond to the complexity and dynamicity of emerging global sociopolitical mediated contexts. Recommendations, salient examples, and …

The Power And Importance Of Women In Television And Film, Rachael Mackinnon

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Glazed, the pilot episode of a situation comedy series, is just beginning to explore what the world of television has in store for women in 2018. At a time like now where women across the nation are feeling the important effects of entering the Fourth Wave of feminism, there is no time like the present to celebrate the beautiful mind that is that of a woman.

For far too long, women in television have been just something to merely look at. More often than not, the crew would be comprised of mostly men: the strong-willed directors, the scandalous producers, …

Framing The Syrian Refugee Crisis: A Comparative Analysis Of Arabic And English News Sources, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Caitlin Miles

Media Studies - All Scholarship

The mass exodus of millions of Syrians from their country due to worsening war conditions has become a serious global humanitarian crisis. As the number of displaced refugees rises, so does the number of those living in inhuman conditions. This content analysis examines how popular news discourses shape the geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis. We use framing theory to explore the main frames that emerged in a comparison of 10 Arabic news sources with seven English news sources in their coverage of the crisis. Based on a systematic random sample, 278 Arabic news stories and 210 English news stories …

Forensic Linguist Tej Bhatia On The Hunt For The Unabomber, Tej K. Bhatia

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

From article: [Editor’s note: Discovery Channel’s new 8-part series MANHUNT: UNABOMBER is about the FBI investigator Jim Fitzgerald who identified the Unabomber as Ted Kaczynski based on his writings–pioneering the use of what is now called forensic linguistics. The series stars Sam Worthington and Paul Bettany, and also features Chris Noth, Elizabeth Reaser, and Brian F. O’Byrne. Science & Film commissioned Syracuse University linguistics professor Dr. Tej Bhatia to write about the case. The series is available via Netflix and Amazon.]

"All I Ask Of You": A Feature Film, Margaret Siciliano

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

All I Ask of You is a dramatic feature film script that showcases the dynamics between people who struggle with types of dementia and their friends and family. Although most stories that cover dementia focus on the victim, this story chooses to focus on the people closest to those victims. The story takes on tough decisions that those closest to the disease have to make due to the debilitating affect it has on victim. The medical community doesn’t know very much about dementia. We know there is a particular dementia gene that is hereditary, but we don’t know how to …

How Comedy Television Is Written And Developed., Douglas Holloway

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this analysis, I plan to describe how I developed and wrote three episodes of a comedy web series. In the beginning of my paper, I will discuss the importance of my cultural background and how it shaped my appreciation of a wide variety of artistic expression. I then will discuss the contrast of art I experienced in my academic compared to my domestic life. I will then focus on the importance of television and film in my life. Specifically, I will discuss how I was influenced by popular television at a young age. I will discuss viewing sinister films …