Visual Studies Commons^™

A Case For Empathy: Immigration In Spanish Contemporary Media, Music, Film, And Novels, Constantin C. Icleanu

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes the representations of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe in Spain. As engaged scholarship, it seeks to better the portrayal of immigrants in the mass media through the study of literature, film, and music about immigration spanning from the year 2000 to 2016. Because misconceptions continue to propagate in the media, this dissertation works to counteract anti-immigrant, xenophobic representations as well as balance out overly positive and orientalized portrayal of immigrants with a call to recognize immigrants as human beings who deserve the same respect, dignity, and rights as any other citizen.

Chapter 1 …

A Dollar A Day: Child Sponsorship And The Marketization Of Human Development, Taylor Hallett

Capstone Collection

Child sponsorship as a method of international development offers child sponsors a personal connection to the process of alleviating poverty in the global South. As a form of human development, child sponsorship is constituted by neoliberal principles of marketization and social entrepreneurship. How does child sponsorship, in this context, require us to rethink the ethics of international development in light of ongoing debates about neoliberalism? In this research, I argue that child sponsorship reifies the binary of the “developed” and “undeveloped” worlds. Through undertaking a content analysis of three organizations (Compassion International, World Vision, and UNICEF) and applying post-structural critique …

Exploring Ethnic Stereotypes Through The Production Of Five Short Films, Ines Galiano Torres

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a nontraditional thesis that combines social research in ethnic stereotypes in TV and film with the creative process of film production. This paper contains the formal step of research, in addition to the details on the production and creation of five original short films related to the issue of ethnic representations.

Petrography, The Tar Sands Paradise, And The Medium Of Modernity, Warren Cariou, Jon Gordon

The Goose

This article engages with the artistic practice of petrography, the art of creating photographic images through the action of sunlight upon bitumen, the heavy-oil material that is the source of the petroleum in the Athabasca tar sands. It presents several examples of petrographs that document the process of industrial bitumen mining itself. Further, it theorizes the ways in which both the process of producing petrographs and the act of engaging with them as a viewer require a degree of collaboration normally absent from our consumption of petroleum as the medium of modernity. A key argument of the paper is the …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary In The 21st Century By Helen Hughes, David M. Lawrence

The Goose

David M. Lawrence reviews Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century by Helen Hughes.

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

"The Falling Man" As Viewed In The Lens Of The "Public Sphere", Laura Reinacher

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Plight Of The Gameur : Inhibitors To Empathic Connection With Representation Of Suffering In Outreach Games, Kristopher John Purzycki

English Theses & Dissertations

The field of serious game studies, while growing, is still working through the variables that create the conditions for a discernible effect towards real-world player behavior. One branch of serious games I refer to as outreach games aim at informing and prompting the player to take further real-world action. However, a significant impediment to this appeal is the relationship between the player and the game. Referring to the role of the flaneur in post-colonial literature, I describe how the relationship between whom I refer to as the gameur and the outreach game is similar to the urban wanderer, eavesdropping on …

Refresh. Create. Inspire. The Mission, Vision And Values Behind The Coca-Cola Company And The Digital Marketing Strategies Of The "Open Happiness" Campaign, Sara Svendsen

Masters Theses

Due to the influence of Coca-Cola on advertising, digital marketing, and marketing strategies, the present rhetorical analysis seeks to show the many aspects of digital media in the Company's present "Open Happiness" campaign. The study of the campaign seeks to show that the Company mission statement, Company values and the vision of The Coca-Cola Company are implemented into all of the different facets of the Open Happiness campaign, and in the context of Mood Management Theory, exude the overall theme of the campaign, happiness. The parts of the campaign that were analyzed were focused on the YouTube channels of The …

'Land Of Kami, Land Of The Dead': Paligenesis And The Aesthetics Of Religious Revisionism In Kobayashi Yoshinori's 'On Yasukuni', James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

In 2005, Japanese manga artist and conservative provocateur Kobayashi Yoshinori published a graphic work entitled Shin gōmanizumu sengen special: Yasukuniron (Neo-Gōmanism Manifesto Special: On Yasukuni), which tackles the much-debated ‘problem’ of Yasukuni Shrine, the militaristic religious complex that has become a lightning-rod for debates regarding Japanese historical memory – especially with regard to the military expansionism in East Asia that led to the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45). Frequently overlooked in discussions of Yasukuni, however, are a number of complex issues related to its religious doctrines – in particular, the interpretation of Shinto presented at Yasukuni and the dominant ideology of Japan’s …

Sexuality, Exoticism, And Iconoclasm In The Media Age: The Strange Case Of The Buddha Bikini, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

Conjuring Post-Worthlessness: Contemporary Web Art And The Postmodern Context: Part 1, Brett Stalbaum

SWITCH

This article is part one of two of an analysis of the Jean Baudrillard's essay, "A Conjuration of Imbeciles". This essay compares the idea of art as a metaphor for French politics and the “uselessness” of contemporary art. A sense of postmodernism is drawn from that comparison and relates to contemporary art shared on the World Wide Web. Inevitable messages and meaning found in art will change, but economics and distribution continues to ground the economy on a global scale. Therefore, contemporary art represented on the web actively dates the practice of art, and the value of the practice is …