Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

A Qualitative Content Analysis Of Nigerian Popular Music Genres: A Culture And Heritage Approach To Nation Branding, Cecilia Ashibel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the potential of Nigerian popular music as an approach to nation branding. The study employs qualitative content analysis to analyze select Nigerian music genres to examine how Nigeria is portrayed to international audiences and the economic benefits that can be derived from this form of branding. The analysis focuses on narrative themes of “the value of hard work,” “ethnic pride,” “lavish lifestyle,” and the impact of differences which were derived from the data. Findings indicate that Nigeria is globally reckoned for its musical prowess and rich cultural heritage. In highlighting the role of music in Nigeria’s political …

Contexts Of Transformation And Integration In Palestinian Media Institutions In The Digital Age, Osama Abdallah, Ahmad Hamouda

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

In this study, we sought to provide an accurate and detailed diagnosis of the transformations witnessed by Palestinian media institutions in light of the new environment of communication, and to know how Palestinian media institutions can establish a new communication model within their organizational structures in line with the new environment of communication in the digital age. It also discussed the mechanisms used by professional journalists in traditional Palestinian media institutions to deal with the contents produced by citizen journalists. In this context, we posed the following problem: What are the contexts of transformation and integration of traditional Palestinian media …

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 …

7th Annual Chapman Staff Art Exhibition Program, Chapman University Staff

Library Displays and Bibliographies

The Leatherby Libraries Hall of Art was established to showcase the creativity of the Chapman community. It was dedicated for this purpose in 2014 although the space has been available for staff and student exhibits since 2011. While past staff art exhibits featured work by Leatherby Libraries staff members only, this is our fifth year opening up the exhibit to any interested staff member of Chapman University.

The 21 artists represented here demonstrate the wide variety of talent at our university. From photography to painting, mosaics to film, the works you see here provide a unique opportunity to view and …

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 …

The Allegory Of United States Settlers V. Native Americans In Wes Craven's The Hills Haves Eyes (1977), Blue Van Alst

University Honors Theses

The year 1977 saw the release of Wes Craven’s second major production, The Hills Have Eyes. A film that sits within a filmic library of Craven that works to use the horror genre to reflect on and critique the American society that he lived in. The Hills Have Eyes employs the stereotypes that the films of John Ford helped to solidify in U.S. society. He does this in order to explore the tense historical relationships between Indigenous and United States settlers during the time of westward expansion. Using the white middle class Carter family to serve as settlers, and …

A "Misfit" Revision: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable And Transitional Stardom In Postwar Hollywood, Emily Carman

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

Director John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) was one of the most volatile productions of his career, with its ensemble cast headlined by a trio of screen icons: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. Drawing on new archival research, I argue that The Misfits illuminates the transition from old to New Hollywood in terms of its behind-the-scenes star negotiations of Gable and Monroe, who had varying levels of creative control to appear in the film. My analysis of their respective deals underscores how The Misfits anticipates the shift from the female driven star system of Classical Hollywood to the male …

A Meditation On Afrosurrealism, Black Gender, And The Non-Human, Logan K. Shanks

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Quotidian Black life is characterized by our ability to alchemize violence into generative life-sustaining properties of matter. In this paper, I will measure Black matter based on anything produced and engaged by Black collectives. While Black existence is not tied to white violence, descendants of enslaved Black people enter our worlds of worlds greeted by a white captor. It is not until we consciously recognize that we are in his dream that we can work to escape the white captor’s circadian rhythms. Through this paper, I will tease out the contradictions of our Black living-unliving. I will employ an anti-methodological …

Hemingway In Hollywood: From Page To Screen, Hayden Hendricks

University Honors Theses

Little attention has been paid to how film adaptations affected Hemingway’s popular reputation (and vice versa). This thesis traces Hemingway's celebrity through the case studies A Farewell to Arms (1932), The Killers (1946), and The Old Man and the Sea (1958). It details their production histories, analyzes the changes made from page to screen, and discusses the contextual motivations behind such divergences. Finally, it considers the ways in which the filmmakers adapted texts of different lengths to fit feature length runtimes and, in doing so, found cinematic equivalences of literary form.

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 …

Becoming George Lucas: From Avant-Garde, Auteur, Independent Artist To Studio Executive, Ryan Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the unprecedented popularity of Star Wars, George Lucas, the creator of the multi-media franchise, is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. What makes Lucas’s relationship with Star Wars unique is that because the franchise has continually been exploited rather than left as a single unchanging, static text, its artistic value, along with Lucas’s legacy, is in constant flux and is often misunderstood. In other words, depending on Star Wars’s position in the public zeitgeist at a given time, Lucas is either revered, detested, or considered incompetent as a filmmaker. While there is no denying …

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 …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

Haramed And Dangerous: A Thematic Examination Of Muslim Women’S Representation In We Are Lady Parts, Reham Bohamad

Dissertations

Since the early days of Western media, Muslim women have been portrayed in a negative way. From belly dancers to oil-rich horny sheikhs to voiceless passive wives of terrorists. This image has led the Western spectator to associate Islam and the Muslim women’s headscarf (Hijab) with backwardness, extremism, and oppression. In recent years, there has been a positive shift towards a more inclusive and authentic representation of Muslim women. This shift is the result of the post-network era which provides on-demand media outlets that challenge the dominant hegemonic production system and provide diverse and inclusive images that cater to niche …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

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

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, Jess Shane

Theses and Dissertations

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is a 4-part creative non-fiction podcast that problematizes the use of personal stories in the documentary industry and examines the power dynamics between documentary-makers and their subjects. The series features a story within a story: it follows me, documentarian Jess Shane, as I craft short documentaries about four individuals’ lives— individuals who have applied to participate in my project by responding to an online ad. It also dives into the behind-the-scenes decisions required to tailor individuals’ life experiences to conform to industry standards of what makes a “good story.” In tandem, these two narratives— of me producing …

Off The Beaten Path - A Podcast Interview Series, Shaun Holmes, Jason D'Mello

Honors Thesis

For my Honors Senior Thesis, I created a short podcast series entitled "Off The Beaten Path". My podcast delves into the lives of individuals who have who have been unafraid to grab life by the horns and choose a less traditional path in pursuit of bringing their passion or their own new creation to life. My interest in interviewing these types of individuals stems from my own life story, as well as my own desire to learn from the insights of people who have succeeded in these types of endeavors before me.

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 …

Review Of Tolkien (Movie), Kutter Callaway

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Tolkien, by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, directed by Dome Karukoski, starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins. Century City, California: Fox Searchlight, 2019.

Review Of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story Of C. S. Lewis (Movie), James A. Motter

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis, by Max MacLean, directed by Norman Stone, starring Max MacLean and Nicholas Ralph. New York City, NY: Fellowship for Performing Arts, 2021, 1 hr., 13 min.

Libby In Limbo, Moriah Claire Hall

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Libby in Limbo is a scripted narrative podcast that follows Libby as she moves back to her small hometown, gets a job as a librarian, and learns to navigate life in a small, tight-knit community. This podcast serves two main purposes: to create entertainment media about a library that does not promote harmful stereotypes about libraries and to create awareness and accessibility of scripted podcasts.

Into The Spider-Verse: Cultural Identity In Spider-Man Media, Anika Gonzalez

Whittier Scholars Program

Superheroes have become a popular genre that is becoming more successful at creating box office records. As the superhero genre becomes more popular, more superheroes have been created as symbols that reflect the increase of cultural identity representation in contemporary media. Spider-Man is a superhero that also reflects these cultural identities by offering more diverse and relatable variants of the Spider-Man character that allow him to normalize and address their presence in media. This paper aims to analyze the different cultural identities that Spider-Man media can connect to and how this connection can lead to a greater understanding of cultural …

Nightmares And Hand Grenades: Dreams As A Storytelling Tool, Olivia Felber

All Theses

Dreams and nightmares feature prominently in art, story, and religious practice and tradition throughout history. In this paper I will discuss their prominence throughout these facets in daily life, and the various ways that we, as humans, have tried to elucidate meaning from them. I will study the nature and definition of dreams and nightmares through a scientific, cultural, and historical approach. I will also discuss folklore and the interpretation of nightmarish imagery in the context of an otherworldly adventure through a nightmare. These topics and themes will be shown, explained, and discussed through the methodology of my project- a …

The Disintegration Of Marriage In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’S Happy Hour (2015), Afra Nariman

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

By using Happy Hour as a case study, this thesis argues Ryusuke Hamaguchi's approach to the Japanese home drama genre presents a changing perspective on the institution of marriage in contemporary Japanese society, reflecting shifts in gender roles and the growing trend of singlehood amongst Japanese youth. This perspective contrasts with the values portrayed in Ozu's films, which emphasize the vitality of marriage and the necessity of forming a family for happiness. The thesis analyzes the thematic and narrative elements of Happy Hour, focusing on the portrayal of marriage as a source of alienation and loneliness. It also discusses the …

Representations Of Time In Time-Based Media: An Exploration Of The Human Experience Of Temporality In Film And Tv, Nelea Fong

Honors Thesis

Time is an aspect of the human experience that fascinates us but eludes our understanding. Humans have turned to science, philosophy, and theology in our endeavor to understand time, but our shared love and history of storytelling drives us to explore temporality through visual medias that have a structural foundation in time. Expanding our understanding of the human experience of time through time-based media such as movies and TV can point us toward comprehending various forms of time and how each person can perceive said time differently. Using film and TV theory, informed by scientific and philosophical explorations in the …