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Articles 1 - 30 of 72
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Framing Fanart, E J. Nielsen
Framing Fanart, E J. Nielsen
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation, “Framing Fanart,” broadly theorizes media fanart, a form of transformative work that is enormously popular, transnational and transcultural, and at its heart an engaged response to a piece of media. Through physical and digital archival research, discourse analysis, and qualitative research methods, I consider specific examples of how fanart functions within these different framings. This work is some of the first to consider fanart broadly as both a lens through which to view patterns of cultural production and a discrete artefact which merits serious consideration as artwork in its own right.
Online Fan Communities: Welcoming Behavior, Brand Community Markers, And Multiple Identities In Sports Fandom, Blaine R. Huber
Online Fan Communities: Welcoming Behavior, Brand Community Markers, And Multiple Identities In Sports Fandom, Blaine R. Huber
Doctoral Dissertations
Online fan communities have revolutionized the way sport consumers engage with fellow fans and the sports product. The traditional regional boundaries that once characterized sports fandom have been mitigated by the emergence of new media, social media platforms, and online fan communities. This dissertation explores the non-geographically bound nature of contemporary sports fan communities, examining the evolving dynamics of fan behavior in the digital age. In Study 1, an interactional perspective is employed to explore online fan socialization. The focus is on how new fans' self-presentation influences acceptance within NFL team-specific Reddit communities. Utilizing data mining, textual analysis, and qualitative …
Reconfiguring Digital Citizenship: Civic Hacking, Data Activism, And Democracy Platforms In South Korea, Danbi Yoo
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation focuses on ‘civic tech’, the global phenomenon of tech-based voluntary action of citizens emerging with the rise of the culture of openness and sharing and initiatives of open government data. What does the ‘civic’ of civic tech mean? And what makes civic tech democratic and democratizing? These questions have been rarely asked or conveniently understood with Western-based theories and cases of tech-oriented civic actions. Combining critical studies of technology and civic engagement with the emerging scholarship of digital citizenship, I use the concept of digital citizenship as a heuristic tool to examine how digital and data technologies intervene …
Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz
Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the relationships between capital, cultural production, and creative labor. Essay one theorizes the basis for the intensification of pop music stardom following the introduction of on-demand streaming technology. Prior to the emergence of on-demand streaming, record labels and broadcasters had a mutualistic relationship, wherein the near cost-free music provided by record labels formed the basis for radio broadcasts, which in turn formed the basis for the consumption of that music. Following the emergence of on-demand streaming the mutualistic relationship was ruptured. Broadcasters, in the form of streaming platforms, transitioned to the cost-efficient cultivation of masses of highly …
Productive Women: Gender, Sex, And Labor In The Digital Cultural Economy, Kavita Nayar-Jablonka
Productive Women: Gender, Sex, And Labor In The Digital Cultural Economy, Kavita Nayar-Jablonka
Doctoral Dissertations
Explicit sex and sexuality have come to figure more prominently in mainstream media and popular culture in recent years, sparking public concern and scholarly debate on how the “sexualization” of culture particularly affects women. Against this backdrop and amidst digitally reconfigured circuits of media production and consumption, ordinary women participate in, and potentially profit from, the commodification of sexual interactions and relationships. This study compares women’s practices in cultures of cam modeling and sugar dating in order to better understand their meanings and contexts. Whether performed in tandem with romantic dating scripts and roles, as is common in sugar dating, …
Enacting A Critical Media Production Pedagogy, James D. Swerzenski
Enacting A Critical Media Production Pedagogy, James D. Swerzenski
Doctoral Dissertations
This project draws upon earlier calls—particularly in the critical pedagogy, critical media literacy, and cultural production fields—to outline a teaching approach that balances technical media production practices and critical media studies. I refer to this synthesis as critical media production pedagogy. This blending of critical analysis and technical skill, I argue, is especially important at the university level where my research is focused, as students in these courses will likely enter industry fields in which they can influence culture on a mass level. Creating opportunities for a media theory/production synthesis enables students to translate critical ideas beyond the academy and …
Native America Speaks: Blackfeet Communication And Culture In Glacier National Park, Eean Grimshaw
Native America Speaks: Blackfeet Communication And Culture In Glacier National Park, Eean Grimshaw
Doctoral Dissertations
This study is a description and interpretation of a Blackfeet (Amskapi Piikuni) discourse of identity as expressed by Blackfeet presenters as part of the Native America Speaks (NAS) program in Glacier National Park, the longest-running Indigenous speaker series in the National Park Service. The study is based on what Blackfeet identify as being important parts of Blackfeet identity within this particular scene, as well as how they participate in that scene. Primary data include a corpus of 30 Blackfeet programs recorded during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Data were analyzed in response to an overarching research question which guides …
Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi
Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi
Doctoral Dissertations
I explore the ideologies of gender, language and education in conservative, Christian Nationalist, and White nationalist mothers groups. I draw on my own family history, as well as on two years of blended ethnographic research in online right wing communities and one year of fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, to look at homeschooling, online schools, and public teachers’ social, linguistic, and educational practices -- what I call Alt-Education. Alt-education is of course a play on alt-right, and refers to the far-right ideology; but it also refers to an alternative to mainstream education, and to education through a broader range of …
Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin
Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …
“Stick To Sports”: Fan Moral Reasoning Strategies And Subsequent Psychological Well-Being In Response To An Athlete’S Controversial Political Associations, Stephen Warren
Doctoral Dissertations
With athletes actively protesting on and off the court, as well as sports organizations embracing activism efforts like Black Lives Matter, the importance of understanding how sports fans respond to athletes engaging in or being associated with politics is increasing, as well. If part of the draw for watching sports and identifying with teams is the potential to increase psychological health, what happens when fans are presented with political viewpoints within sports that they disagree with? This dissertation uses two studies to explore how fans of the New England Patriots responded to reading an article about a rookie Patriots player …
Aloha Media: Negotiating Kānaka Maoli Representation And Identity In Television, Film, And Music, Colby Y. Miyose
Aloha Media: Negotiating Kānaka Maoli Representation And Identity In Television, Film, And Music, Colby Y. Miyose
Doctoral Dissertations
In her work on research and Indigenous communities, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) points out that academic research is a site of contestation, struggle, and negotiation between the West and Indigenous people, and lays the groundwork for Indigenous researchers to write from a cultural perspective that serves their home community. Hawaiian cultural protocols serve as guidelines for my research. This dissertation, then, is simultaneously a critique of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and on screen, and as Foucault (1980) puts it, “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” (p.81)—an act of decolonial, Indigenous, and anticolonial thought. In this dissertation I argue that …
Makerspace Models And Organizational Policies For Technological Inclusion, Christine Olson
Makerspace Models And Organizational Policies For Technological Inclusion, Christine Olson
Doctoral Dissertations
In the early part of the 21st Century, discourses about the “Creative Economy” rose to prominence resulting in educational, economic, and policy initiatives supporting what became known generically as “makerspaces.” As interdisciplinary sites where arts, technology, design, and entrepreneurship meet, makerspaces were heralded as transformational organizational models for learning and innovation. This dissertation explores the social arrangements opened and foreclosed by makerspaces through ethnographic case studies of how different institutions introduced and adapted makerspace models from 2013-2019. Using a communicative ecology approach (Foth & Hearn, 2007), this study interrogates the structures and practices that shape participant experience of these …
Nation Brand, National Prestige, And The Social Imaginaries Of The Advanced Nation In South Korea, Jung-Yup Lee
Nation Brand, National Prestige, And The Social Imaginaries Of The Advanced Nation In South Korea, Jung-Yup Lee
Doctoral Dissertations
The dissertation focused on how the discourses and institutions of nation branding and public diplomacy reshaped the social imaginary of the nation. Following the trajectory of the nation branding discourse in South Korea in the first fifteen years of the 21st century, I examined different moments of the re-imagining of the nation by multiple agents with regard to nation branding and public diplomacy. Firstly, I examined how the news media played a crucial mediating role in importing and disseminating the globally emerging discourse of nation branding in collaboration with private and public think tanks in the early and mid 2000s. …
Military-Themed Video Games And The Cultivation Of Related Beliefs And Attitudes In Young Adult Males, Greg Blackburn
Military-Themed Video Games And The Cultivation Of Related Beliefs And Attitudes In Young Adult Males, Greg Blackburn
Doctoral Dissertations
Military themed games have been broadly critiqued as ideological vehicles that support western military institutions and militaristic attitudes. At the heart of these critiques is a concern for the potential influence these games may have on their audience, yet little empirical evidence exists to either support or refute that concern. Using cultivation theory as a general framework, this study investigates whether associations between playing military themed video games and military-related thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes can be found in an online, national survey of 410 young adult men. Consistent with cultivation theory’s predictions, significant associations between the use of military themed …
The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein
The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein
Doctoral Dissertations
The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk. On one level, I …
The Effectiveness Of Point-Of-View-Video Modeling On Improving Social And Communication Skills, Beyza Alpaydin
The Effectiveness Of Point-Of-View-Video Modeling On Improving Social And Communication Skills, Beyza Alpaydin
Doctoral Dissertations
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurobiological disorder with symptoms that affect individuals’ social interaction capabilities, their verbal and nonverbal communications, and the repertoires of activities and interest. These deficits in social and communication skills directly or indirectly influence the individual with ASDs’ lives. Therefore, many interventions have been developed to increase social and communication skills for individuals with ASD. Video modeling (VM) is one of the effective interventions in teaching social communication skills for children with ASD. There are multiple variations of VM interventions. One of the forms of VM intervention is point-of-view video modeling (POVVM) that has …
The Coyolxauhqui Process Of A Scholar Unbecoming An Enemy Of Youth: A Performative, Embodied, Self-Decolonizing Story Of Transformation And Hope, Carmen G. Hernández Ojeda
The Coyolxauhqui Process Of A Scholar Unbecoming An Enemy Of Youth: A Performative, Embodied, Self-Decolonizing Story Of Transformation And Hope, Carmen G. Hernández Ojeda
Doctoral Dissertations
Scholarly work may be used to foster colonizing processes upon people of color whether scholars are aware of it or not. That is the case of the study of youth bullying in the United States, an old issue that, however, became a central social concern in the United States in the late 1990s. Building upon scholars’ framing of youth bullying, a combination of moral panics on youth unfolded, fostering a law-and-order regime in schools that expanded the application of zero-tolerance policies. These policies fed the school-to-prison pipeline that funnels youth into the criminal justice system, a form of internal colonization …
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi
Doctoral Dissertations
This research project examines the operation of development discourse in popular culture, how it is reproduced, contested and how alternatives are imagined. It is a post-development study of the production and consumption of Ghanaian hiplife music videos and culture. It explores how hiplife makers challenge development discourse and advance alternative ideas of social transformation. Considering the enduring (and damaging) legacies of colonialism, hiplife as a site of relative freedom of expression is fertile for the potential production of a decolonial vocabulary to heal colonial wounds— undoing colonial sensibilities imposed on the colonized. The project reveals that mainstream male hiplife stars …
Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers
Gaming For Life: Gaming Practices, Self-Care, And Thriving Under Neoliberalism, Brian Myers
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation frames gaming practices in relationship to thriving, an area of inquiry that has received little attention within the fields of video game studies and cultural studies. It argues that video games can be used by audiences as a tool for thriving, provided we define thriving outside of the framework of success and failure established by a neoliberal political rationality. Using survey data from 70 video game audience members, textual analysis, and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methodologies, this dissertation first describes how video game audience members define thriving by distinguishing it from a related term, self-care. It then moves to …
An Examined Life Of A Language Teacher Of Chinese: An Autoethnographic Investigation Into Agency, Ying Zhang
An Examined Life Of A Language Teacher Of Chinese: An Autoethnographic Investigation Into Agency, Ying Zhang
Doctoral Dissertations
There is a paucity of research about and done by L2 Chinese educators regarding the theoretical construct of agency. It is also noted that the qualitative inquiry is marginalized in L2 Chinese research field, let alone the narrative study of the agency of experienced by L2 Chinese-teachers. In this dissertation research, I aim at filling in the gap by conducting a longitudinal autoethnography which captures over a decade (1997-2017) of my personal and professional development with an agency perspective. The highly personalized autoethnographic accounts open up my personal and professional life as an experienced, college-level, transnational, early 40’s female native …
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation analyzes the relationships between mediated labor activism and the formation of counter-hegemonic forces in contemporary China. As China becomes a seemingly ideal model to justify the normalization of global capitalism, this study seeks to demonstrate how resistance from disenfranchised groups can challenge hegemonic power. Rural-to-urban migrant workers, who have been among the most disadvantaged groups since China’s economic reform of the 1980s, suffer from institutionalized discrimination, economic exploitation, and social exclusion. Approaching the analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, I explore the politics and possibilities of working-class resistance in searching for a just and equal China. Based on …
“You Can Be A Good Romanian, But Not A Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Romanian History Textbook Narrative, Razvan Sibii
“You Can Be A Good Romanian, But Not A Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Romanian History Textbook Narrative, Razvan Sibii
Doctoral Dissertations
Employing a version of the Critical Discourse Analysis methodology that privileges close textual readings, I examine in this dissertation the manner in which contemporary Romanian history textbooks put forward an essentialist view of ethnonational identity by tracing through history the development of a putatively homogenous “proto-Romanian” entity. I seek to show how the “Getae-Dacian” and “Daco-Roman” identity categories acquired their thing-ness and their boundaries as a result of deliberate rhetorical work performed by Romanian historiographers with the help of such heuristics as “Romanization,” “ethnogenesis” and the nation-as-family metaphor. I also scrutinize how the textbooks treat the two ancient texts that …
Improving Chinese Mothers’ Health Literacy: A Wechat Intervention, Qiong Chen
Improving Chinese Mothers’ Health Literacy: A Wechat Intervention, Qiong Chen
Doctoral Dissertations
The health literacy and eHealth literacy of women during the reproductive age is crucial, as it can affect their health and the health of their children. Promoting health literacy is essential to achieve mothers’ empowerment by improving access to and capacity of using health information effectively. However, functional, interactive, and critical health literacy and eHealth literacy have never been assessed among Chinese women. The first study during this dissertation assessed functional, interactive, and critical health literacy and eHealth literacy among 421 of Chinese mothers with children under 3 years old. The results revealed overall less than optimal level of health …
Framing The Crisis In The Merrimack Valley: The Opioid Epidemic, White Despair And Authoritarian Populism On The New England Borderlands, Gyuri Kepes
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines how discourses and ideologies about the opioid crisis were framed, produced and constructed in the geographic specificity of the Merrimack Valley in the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Applying the theoretical and methodological frameworks offered by the cultural studies tradition, this dissertation project attempts to map out the complex interplay between the news media, law enforcement, policymakers, and citizens in producing, circulating, amplifying, framing and sustaining public anxiety about the opioid crisis in the Merrimack Valley and beyond. Employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative forms of inquiry, including interpretation of data collected through …
Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs
Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs
Doctoral Dissertations
This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …
Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang
Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang
Doctoral Dissertations
Navigating controversial topics on the Web encourages social awareness, supports civil discourse, and promotes critical literacy. While search of controversial topics particularly requires users to use their critical literacy skills on the content, educating people to be more critical readers is known to be a complex and long-term process. Therefore, we are in need of search engines that are equipped with techniques to help users to understand controversial topics by identifying them and explaining why they are controversial. A few approaches for identifying controversy have worked reasonably well in practice, but they are narrow in scope and exhibit limited performance. …
Television And Perceived Control: A Longitudinal Study Of The Cultivation Of Powerlessness Among Millenial Adolescents, Fernando Rodriguez
Television And Perceived Control: A Longitudinal Study Of The Cultivation Of Powerlessness Among Millenial Adolescents, Fernando Rodriguez
Doctoral Dissertations
Cultivation research has observed the long term subtle contribution of television mediated storytelling on the perceptions and beliefs of American viewers for fifty years. Early criticisms of cultivation argued the associations of viewing amount and fear of victimization were spurious and explained away by personality traits such as perceived control or authoritarianism. This project frames perceived control as a cognitive assessment of the personal ability to cope with life challenges. As a cognitive assessment, perceived control is assumed to be in constant revision. From a life-course approach, the symbolic cultural environment (which includes television) is seen as providing context and …
‘A Better Country To Die In’: Self-Determination, Drugs, And The Limits Of Medical Assistance In Dying In Canada, Wendy Pringle
‘A Better Country To Die In’: Self-Determination, Drugs, And The Limits Of Medical Assistance In Dying In Canada, Wendy Pringle
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines Canada’s legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAiD). Specifically, it focuses on how the debates surrounding the legalization process, the cultural history of euthanasia drugs, and the ethical dimensions of disability shaped assisted dying outcomes in the country in the period between the precedent-setting February 2015 Carter v. Canada Supreme Court case and the legislation, passed in June 2016, that enacted legalized MAiD. This mixed methods project uses discursive analysis of media texts, pharmacological history, and rhetorical analysis of first-person testimonies. The first analytic chapter, “Self-Determination, Euthanasia, and the Right to Die,” considers how the shift toward …
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …
Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez
Fearing, Tracking, And Loving Sharks: Ocean Conservation And The Material Rhetoric Of Human-Shark Entanglements, Camille Martinez
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1) How do multispecies engagements rhetorically reconfigure the human, the shark and, to some degree, the ocean? and 2) How do such multispecies engagements refigure value relevant to conservation? These questions are explored within a framework of shark conservation as a field of biopolitics exploring the tensions inherent in the project of transforming sharks from killable enemies to valuable, living selves and the constraints and potentials that come into view when new relational possibilities emerge. Conservation practices, especially biodiversity conservation practices, are not merely management choices; they are political choices that shape future …