Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Legend Has It: Tracking The Research Trope In Supernatural Horror Film Franchises, Deirdre M. Flood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will analyze how information about monsters is conveyed in three horror franchises: Poltergeist (1982-2015), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984-2010), and The Ring (2002- 2018). My analysis centers on the changing role of libraries and research, and how this affects the ways that monsters are portrayed differently across the time periods represented in these films. These franchises, which span a number of decades, and encompass sixteen films in total, offer a good wealth of information to study because they are all films centered around monsters that haunt. These monsters, while aesthetically in opposition to each other, are all …

Binaural: Trauma And Disability Representation In Cinema, Joshua Grossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the year 2019, the film business is undergoing profound change. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have become major distribution outlets, threatening the hegemony of traditional Hollywood studios and altering the kinds of movies that receive a theatrical release. Gone is the middle budget film, replaced by franchises like Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Fast and the Furious and Star Wars based on already popular intellectual property. But that's not all. In the wake of the fallout of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and the #MeToo Movement, for the first time serious efforts are being made both outside and inside the industry …

Lo Visible, Lo Invisible Y Lo Imaginable: Neoliberalismo Y Ciudad En Las Producciones Culturales De Posguerra En Centroamérica, Maria A. Leon Umana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project researches the radical change that the peace treaty of the 1990s brought to Central American societies in connection with economic models. Specifically, it examines the way in which the implementation of neoliberal policies has transformed the cities concerning the spatial and the social; consequently, resulting in an important urban shift in regard to postwar cultural productions. I build a theoretical model organizes the investigation in three representative examples of Central American urban imaginaries (The Visible, The Invisible, and the Imaginable) so as to enlighten and/or enrich the analysis of the region’s urban social realities—examined in detail in a …

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

Race Book, Robert Dejesus

Theses and Dissertations

Race Book is a satiric animated short film about how social media influenced people during the 2020 presidential election.

Shared Resources (Contractual Obligations), Jordan Lord

Theses and Dissertations

Shared Resources (Contractual Obligations) is a feature-length documentary that seeks to understand how various kinds of debt––emotional, historical, moral, social and financial––are entangled in my family. After my dad was fired from his job as a debt collector, my parents declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy––a 5-year debt repayment plan. The film follows my parents over the course of their bankruptcy, joining observational footage of their day-to-day lives with essayistic voiceover narration, my parents’ reactions to an early edit of the film, my family members’ and my own audio descriptions of what is visible in the film, and open captions of the …

The Barriers Of Reporting Wage Theft, Jose Cardoso

Capstones

Undocumented immigrants are often victims of wage theft. There are many owners who take advantage of this because they know they won't speak up out of the fear of retaliation. However, there have been moments when immigrants have spoken up and received justice. Unfortunately, that's not the case for many as the process to report wage theft can take time and sometimes for nothing. New York City is home to 3.2 million immigrants or 37.1 percent of the population and the undocumented community stands at 5.3 percent.

https://medium.com/@cardoso.jose17/the-barriers-of-reporting-wage-theft-for-undocumented-immigrants-38aafb937215

Maternidad, Denise Cervantes

Capstones

It was a hot summer day in 1985 when my mother, Ada Reyes, left El Salvador and crossed the border into the United States. Behind her, she left her one-year-old son and a war-stricken country. I sat down with her and she told me the story of how she built a life in the United States and raised my brother and me alone as a single mother.

Link: https://denisecervantes.com/capstone

Refusing White Privacy, Olivia Dunbar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Refusing White Privacy” I look at theories in White Data and Surveillance Studies around what data is, how it is made to exist, and for whom, in order to intervene in the conceptualization of data as an inevitable residue of human life and relationship. Through this intervention, I show that the alleged crises of privacy ushered in by allegedly non-racial smart technologies (a preoccupation in WDSS) is underwritten by racializing technologies from the Antebellum era to the present.

Mechanical Kingdoms: Sound Technologies And The Avant-Garde, 1928–1933, Lauren Rosati

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against accepted histories of the historical avant-garde, which have elevated artistic production in traditional media while suppressing sonic practices, this dissertation argues that artist-engineers working across Europe and the United States independently, if simultaneously, turned their attention to emerging sound technologies as new media for creative experimentation by the early 1930s. This spectrum of activity demonstrates the significance of sound in avant-garde practice, and indicates a wide-ranging artistic engagement with technological devices intended for mass audiences. While the common understanding of the relation between art and technology in this period amounts to one of mere enthusiasm for the novel formal …

The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify an over looked subset of racial identity as seen through film narratives from the 1930’s through the 1950’s pre-Civil Rights era. The subcategory of racial identity is the necessity of passing for Black people then identified as Negro. The primary film narratives include Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Lost Boundaries (1949), Pinky (1949) and Imitation of Life (1934). These images will deploy the troupe of passing as a racialized historical image. These films depict the pain and anguish Passers endured while escaping their racial identity. Through these stories we identify, sympathize and understand the needs of Black …

Existentialmd.Com: Building Towards An Embodied Internet Aesthetic, Natasha Ochshorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ExistentialMD.com is a website that aims to treat the body as an emotional and social subject in an online space that is purposefully bodied and fleshy. The website contrasts original creative nonfiction essays with a formal structure that alludes to the medical website WebMD. Mimicking WebMD’s symptom checker, which asks users to locate their discomfort with increasing specificity before suggesting conditions they might be suffering from, ExistentialMD uses a similar structure to yield results that are more exploratory than diagnostic, and which envision the body as a site of experience and emotionality. Form and content combine to create an …

Direct Action Housing: Exploring The History Of Tenant-Led Housing Struggles—On Film—In Nyc, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

This independent research project dives into the history of tenant-led housing struggles in New York City with a particular focus on using film archives and documentaries to highlight key moments and case studies when housing activism opened up new political imaginations, intersections and possibilities in the city.

As outlined in the Direct Action Housing zine, I curated and hosted four public events in the spring of 2019 on different aspects of housing struggles documented through archival film records. This series of housing history films was a starting point and catalyst to think about the role of and for the home …

Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.

Cs0 News Literacy Lecture 1, Sissel W. Mccarthy, Oer Office

Open Educational Resources

The digital age has created the need for a new kind of literacy-a literacy that empowers news consumers to determine whether information is credible, reliable and truthful. This is not just a skill; it is a new core competency for the 21st century. So-called “fake news” is hard to spot and spreads easily, leading to disagreements over basic facts. The antidote to the growing challenges posed by this digital revolution is news literacy. This mini news literacy course includes two three-hour sessions that will teach anyone to become a more critical consumer of news.

Telling The Good News, Allyson R. Escobar

Capstones

In light of recent clergy abuse scandals, cover-ups and leadership shake-downs, it is a divided time in the Catholic Church: but this isn’t the whole story. My final capstone project is a critical essay of how Catholicism (and religion overall) is represented in mainstream media--particularly in secular news publications and entertainment (horror films) in the United States. By examining the coverage and how conversations differ within members of the Catholic Church--from journalists and critics to active Catholics, religious men and women--this project calls for greater accountability, fairness, faith representation in all media, and the overall claim that there are Catholic …

The Representation Of Asians In Hollywood, Michelle Li

Publications and Research

Hollywood has a long history of failing to represent America's diversity. This is especially pronounced in its lack of representation of Asian Americans. According to The Hollywood Reporter, in 2017, only 4.8 percent of the 4454 speaking characters were Asian. The industry works in biased and prejudiced ways towards Asians, restricting them from truly revealing their true selves instead of how they are portrayed by stereotypes.

Postcolonial Indian Nonfiction Cinema: The Documentaries Of Satyajit Ray, Muzahid Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), one of the great masters of world cinema has directed five documentary films, other than his 29 feature films, in his long four decades of career as a filmmaker in India. He constructed his cinematic language and style with neorealism and a very distinct humanist approach to celluloid. Ray made his films in Bengali, English, Urdu and Hindi; his films depicted the complexity of human relationship, conflicts and interactions in contemporary Indian societies with great details and different levels of interpretations. Western and international audiences are mostly familiar with Ray’s fiction films, though his documentaries were well-acclaimed …

The Revolution Of Plastic, Marine Brun-Franzetti

Theses and Dissertations

The Revolution Of Plastic is a fiction film about the overconsumption of plastic in our everyday lives. Leo, a ten year-old girl who loves dolphins, rebels against her father Mister Risso, the Manager of Detergents at Willy Supermarket.

Luncheon, Tomasz Gubernat

Theses and Dissertations

Documenting the apparently prosaic activities of nearly two hundred Polish immigrant senior citizens, “Luncheon” is an observational portrait of a place that seems foreign and significantly removed from its New York City surroundings. For this dwindling demographic, daily activities and commemorative performances provide a way to revivify collective memories and maintain individual identities that are still deeply connected to a place far removed in both space and time. “Luncheon” is an exploration of how memory and identity are constructed and maintained, nationality imagined, and communities preserved.

The Pond & The Sauna, Kaija Siirala

Theses and Dissertations

Combining interviews, observational footage, animation, archival images, video and film, The Pond & the Sauna examines the construction of home and family through an intergenerational collection of memories. Drawing on oral history traditions, the project traces the foundational threads that run through the lives of an extended family from past into the present. How do the values we learned as children manifest in our lives now? How do we negotiate our place within a wider social context? How are we moving through the cycles of life and what do home and family mean to us now?

"It's Like They're Right There Next To You": Maintaining Girls' Camp Friendships Via Mobile Media, Elise Bragard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how a group of adolescent girls uses mobile and computer-mediated communication as a resource for social and emotional support from their friends. In the midst of widespread public panic about teenage social media use, this study finds nuanced and positive ways that technology is being used in girl culture. Within the context of a technology-free summer camp, adolescent girls form close relationships, which continue throughout the school year. The girls construct a virtual-symbolic camp space using mobile-emotive communication to stay connected with their friends. As a result, they recreate the intra- and inter-personal benefits they experienced at …

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of her collaborations …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

How Lucille Ball Fought The Patriarchy, While Lucy Ricardo (Indirectly) Contributed To Second-Wave (White) Feminism, Anam Rana Afzal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Author Stephanie Coontz argues that our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms. In actuality, the happy, homogenous families that we “remember” from America in the 50s were a result of the media’s denial of diversity. Also, women’s retreat to housewifery after working during WWII was in many cases, not freely chosen. In his study of sitcoms, Saul Austerlitz claims that once television arrived in American cities after the war’s end, its impact was immediate and incontrovertible, and no sitcom caught America’s eye as …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

For An Afghan Minority Us Involvement Has Been A Blessing And A Curse, Sharif Hassan

Capstones

My capstone is about, Hazaras, an ethnic and religious minority long persecuted in Afghanistan. But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, they made remarkable progress in education, politics, economics, art and culture. That success did not go unnoticed by militant groups. Hazaras are increasingly becoming the target of deadly attacks. Over 350 of them have been killed and more than 750 wounded in at least 13 targeted bombings since June 2016. And these attacks forcing Hazaras to flee the country to Europe. They were massacred and forced from their lands throughout the 19 and 20^th centuries in religious and …

Mask On: How Fashion Erased The Politics Of Streetwear In 2017, Frances Sola-Santiago

Capstones

This year, fashion embraced streetwear in the highest echelons of luxury. From a Louis Vuitton and Supreme collaboration to Gucci’s support of Harlem designer Dapper Dan’s store reopening, streetwear was catapulted into the fashion zeitgeist— hoodies, do-rags, sneakers, and chains included. But fashion’s history of temporary blackness questions the industry’s ability to deal with the politics of criminalization, discrimination, appropriation, and inequality that come with this trend.

In an era when white supremacy lives within the mainstream conversation and African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately targeted by police and criminal justice, it’s clear that what we wear and the culture …

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …