Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Misrepresentation Of Women Of Color In Western Media, Nicole C. Schutte

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper delves into the misrepresentation of women of color in western media. From the perspective of bell hooks (1992), the commodification of the Other serves sinister societal “needs” in order to uphold the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Judith Williamson (1986) interpret this as keeping the western racial hierarchy, gender dichotomy, and capitalist markets intact. A vast majority of people believe that any form of representation in the media is a sense of inclusion when in fact misrepresentation is counterproductive and problematic. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins (1993) would agree that inaccurate portrayals …

Icons In Lyari: Resonance, Visibility, And Global Blackness In An Indian Ocean Port Town, Zehra Husain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its …

Entering The Metaverse: Considering The Implications Of A Journey Into A Virtual World For Nysca At 80 Years, John Pavlik

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

Meta’s Horizon Worlds is among the first Metaverse platforms. Through a digital ethnography, this paper examines the contours of Horizon Worlds. Drawing upon affordances theory, the paper considers the affordances of Horizon Worlds Metaverse within the context of the user experience. Findings suggest that storytelling is central to the nature of the meaning generated inside Horizon Worlds and perhaps the Metaverse in general. But it is not storytelling in a conventional sense. Stories inside the Metaverse are not linear and there is no plot. Metaverse stories do have characters, and they travel pathways and engage in activities and sequential events, …

Screen Ruptures: Disrupted Content For The Prosumer Generation, Kelsey Clark

Postgraduate

Television content has faced various forms of interruption to the viewing experience since the very beginning with the location of the television set and interruptive nature of advertising breaks. Irani et al. (2010) note that television has always been “a fixed temporal structure” and that the physical location of the television set has always had a place in the home where the opportunities for distraction and disengagement form a part of the viewing experience (p. 621). Similarly, the presence of advertising intermittently interrupting episodes of television programs quickly became a norm, which further characterises television viewing as a disrupted practice. …

Show Or Tell? A Systematic Review Of Media And Information Literacy Measurements, Daniel Schofield, Reijo Petter Kupiainen, Vegard Marinius Frantzen, Anette Novak

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media and information literacy (MIL) is a key concept in several research fields and measuring the levels of MIL is considered valuable for policy stakeholders. However, the concept is complex, and few systematic reviews of research on measuring MIL levels have been conducted. This article draws on a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies measuring MIL between 2000 and 2021. Out of a total of 4008 publications, 236 were included in the analysis, and 87 were analysed in depth. A key finding was that several studies applied broad understandings of MIL, often based on initiatives by international organisations such as UNESCO, …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Mood: A Zine Exploring The Value Of Youth-Oriented Media, Patricia K. Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Media is a constant, persistent force in human lives that informs and influences through published, broadcasted, and digitally mediated formats. Mass media industries produce and distribute content consumed by diverse audiences, though the facilitators represent only a fraction of the demographics they serve.

Youth denote one of the most frequently misrepresented groups, with very few practical opportunities for young people to make decisions about the texts available to them. A jarring absence of youth participation in media creation at all levels suggests cultural contributions through art exclude young people's authentic perspectives and desires. Moreover, media portrayals of youth cannot adequately …

Colonialism's Creation Of Machismo And Its Influence On Domestic Violence And Sexual Assault: A Film Analysis Of Telenovela Dv/Sa Anthologies, Yoselin Aguirre Perez

University Honors Theses

Using Lothar Mikos' (2014) content analysis framework, this thesis uses a Xicana feminist epistemology to conduct a film analysis on telenovela anthologies Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real (1986-2007) and Lo Que Callamos Las Mujeres (2001-today). The impact that harmful depictions of domestic violence and sexual assault, and their foundations in colonialism, is discussed throughout my writing. The cynical and racist implications that problematic portrayals of domestic violence and sexual assault within the Latinx community is analyzed. This thesis claims that popular media, while attempting to bring awareness to these sensitive and life-threatening issues, have perpetuated a culture of recrimination …

Nnuba 0h47min/Couleur. Réalisatrice : Sonia At Qasi-Kessi, Farida Aït Ferroukh

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Commodification Of Korean Culture In The West: Orientalism In The Era Of Modern Social Media, Samantha Giudice

International and Global Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

South Korea, hereafter referred to as Korea, lies within the Korean Peninsula. It currently boasts a population of 53 million people residing within 38,724 square miles and a GDP of 1.811 trillion US dollars, making it the 13^th largest economy in the world. Since the Korean War to today Korea has turned into a major economic and cultural epicenter remaining at the center of technological advancements and pop culture production. While the exportation of this pop culture has allowed the economy grow at unprecedented rates, it has also led to less favorable interactions with Korean culture by people all …

T. Hanks For Nostalgia: The Power Of Tom Hanks And Film Branding, Jacob Higgs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In March 2020, Tom Hanks announced he had contracted COVID-19 while shooting the Elvis Presley Biopic in Australia. On Instagram, he encouraged fans to take the disease seriously and be aware of how severe of a disease it was. Character brands and nostalgia have been found to foster trust in products and encourage relationships with those brands. Using the lens of nostalgia and uses and gratification to examine Tom Hanks as a character brand, the researcher analyzed five blockbuster films with Tom Hanks as the lead character. The study used narrative thematic analysis to observe Hanks and the depictions of …

Making The Subconscious Conscious - Showcasing Unresolved Childhood Trauma Through Animation, Alexis Hunter

All Theses

The focus of this work is to shed light on unresolved childhood trauma that can contribute to mental hardships - whether people are aware of its presence in their lives or not. In this paper, I will discuss childhood trauma, its impact on adult life when left unresolved, self-parenting as a method to manage it, and how it is portrayed in various media. Drawing inspiration from my research on trauma and visual storytelling, I will present a proof-of-concept for a 2D animated short film, Strongholds, which visualizes the internal mental struggles through the character dynamics of the personifications of the …

“Yellow Fever” + Pornhub Statistics: A Sociological Sickness, Patricia Plachno

Audre Lorde Prize

This essay was written to explore the complexities behind "Yellow Fever," or the fetishization of Asian women. In further understanding the origins of "Yellow Fever", shining a light on historical stereotypes and microaggressions assist in problematizing this phenomenon. Pornhub's yearly statistics provide a tangible outline of the sheer volume of participants in racial fetishization.

The Screen And Generation Z: How Media-Streaming Services Affect Curation And Environment Of Film And Television, Collin Graham

Senior Theses

This thesis focuses on Generation Z’s relationship to media-streaming services, using both analysis of academic texts and independent research consisting of a survey and a series of interviews with Generation Z as the intended audience. The analysis of academic texts focuses on the differences in viewing behaviors/consumption between streamed film/television and non-streamed film/television more generally, as well as how these behaviors factor into Generation Z’s perception of film/television and media-streaming services more specifically. The results of the survey and interviews show Generation Z’s awareness of the pressures streaming services put on viewers to watch content in an isolated and individualized …

Review Of The New York African Film Festival, Lincoln Center, May 12-17, 2022, Steven W. Thomas

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Kurdish Filmmaking In Turkey: History And Narratives, Omar Sadik

Dissertations and Theses

This research investigates the history and politics of cultural production by examining Kurdish filmmaking in Turkey. Sadik provide an analysis of contemporary films and filmmakers to explore how Kurdish cinema in Turkey is situated in broader, global political-economic structures. By examining this important case through the lens of history and memory, Sadik clarify how production and aesthetics in Kurdish cinema point to important systemic processes. Sadik uses three main research strategies in this study: a historical survey of Kurds in Turkey, an analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with contemporary Kurdish directors and an analysis of films directed by Kurdish filmmakers …

The Call Sheet: A Six-Part Podcast Interview Series On The Film Industry In Nebraska, Tanner Dykstra

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

My University of Nebraska-Lincoln Honors Thesis project is a six-part podcast interview series entitled The Call Sheet. This is classified as an Applied Knowledge project and encapsulates my interests and areas of study in Journalism, Broadcasting, and Film Studies. I sought out interviews with people who currently reside or once resided in the state of Nebraska who work in association with the film industry. This industry is broad, and my interview subjects reflected this. The six episodes comprising my project are as follows: writer/director Aliza Brugger, writer/professor Michael Svoboda, director of the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center Danny Lee …

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …

Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …

Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Joker Controversy: An Origin Story, Brandon Bosch, Lisa Kort-Butler

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The Joker has been in the Batman comics for over 80 years and appeared on small and large screen as Batman’s violent arch-nemesis. In the month prior to its theatrical release, commentary about the 2019 film Joker spurred a viral media reaction with concerns about the film inciting violence. To understand this phenomenon, we used Google Trends to trace a timeline of online media reactions mapped to events. Then, we analyzed over 200 news stories, commentary articles, and film reviews for explanatory narratives. We noted four key moments: the Venice Film Festival; an open letter by family members of victims …

Middle Savannah River: An A/R/Tographic Ecopedagogical Ethnography Experimenting With Rhizomatic Perspectives, Lisa Augustine-Chizmar

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This research is an experiment in perspective. Using the four commonplaces (Schwab, 1978), I practiced letting the Savannah River teach me what there is to know about the water, the land, the people, and the other entities that depend on ki through artistic, ethnographic, and ecopedagogical lenses. The ethnographic findings describe the social actors that depend on ki and give a voice to the River. The a/r/tographic findings display the River on a canvas map through two hundred years using paint, clay, photography, video, abstract acrylics, and fabric. Together, these methods contribute to a unique ecopedagogical journey. This word cloud …