Communication Commons^™

Standing On The Edge Of A Dream, Parto Ahmadpour Mobarake

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Standing On the Edge of a Dream delves into the intricate tapestry of lived experiences shaped by relocation, emphasizing the nuanced space that exists between reality and imagination. As an individual who has undergone the transformative journey of immigration, I recognize that the concept of relocation is like standing on the edge of a dream. This notion becomes a living structure, intricately woven with threads from our past, present, and future. My artistic exploration extends beyond my artworks, yet it remains deeply rooted in my personal narratives. The artworks in the exhibition continue to draw inspiration from personal memories and …

The Use Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy In Esol Classes, Beth A. O. Haddinger

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is organized into five distinct chapters addressing multiple aspects of learning and engagement as it relates to English Language Learners (ELLs) in the classroom. First, the problem of practice is identified and explored. We, as educators, must look closely at instructional and systemic issues, actionable elements, broader strategies of improvement, and leverage, which refers to the ability of a program to motivate students and to generate a sense of practical value in academics. The next aspect of this dissertation proposal reviews the existing research literature. This literature review focuses on the specific learning needs of ELL students. Specifically …

The Needs That Instagram Satisfies For People Seeking News & How This Displaces Time Spent With Traditional Media, Madeleine Dunn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines how the current climate of mainstream media is changing, and how this may affect journalistic norms and practices. There are many outlets for consumers to receive news, including traditional media, such as television news, newspapers, magazines, etc. There is also social media. The future of mainstream media outlets, like television stations, newspapers, magazines and radio stations, seems to depend on the growing use of social media sites for the use of getting news. This research will focus on Instagram as an alternative to traditional media, and why people prefer to use this outlet to get their news. …

The Student-Teacher Romance Film Genre: Hollywood's Historical Representation Of Abuse Of Power, Darby Gilliland

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite vast literature analyzing films that depict romantic and sexual relationships between young students and their teachers, scholarship has yet to explicitly call this category of films and television a genre. The purpose of the present thesis is to define the student-teacher romance film genre and identify patterns that make it up as a means of illuminating the genre’s exploration of abuse of power in the classroom. I use a historical-generic methodology and gaze theory as a framework to conduct this analysis. I identify three distinct eras of the genre and analyze films from each time period. The first era …

A Quantitative Examination Of The Influence Of Social And Structural Communication Variables On The Social Connectedness Of People Experiencing Homelessness, Shawn Michael Evans

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examined the influence of social and structural communication variables on the perceived social connectedness of people experiencing homelessness in the Northwest Arkansas (NWA) and Joplin, Missouri areas. This study employed the ecological perspective of communication infrastructure theory (CIT; Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001) and a communication perspective which envisions communicative interaction as constitutive of social experience. Using survey data from 166 participants, this study examined 11 research questions and hypotheses drawn from extant literature on homelessness, social connectedness, and CIT. ANOVAs, t-tests, and hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed a complex relationship between individuals and the communicative environment. This study …

The Effects Of Consumer Loan Application Formats And Advertised Terms On Consumer Borrowing Decisions, Alicia M. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers continue to demonstrate a willingness to accrue more debt. They are also more accepting of increased repayment risk via the acceptance of longer loan terms. Extant research on consumer borrowing consists primarily of experiments designed to assess consumer choices and understand how consumers evaluate loan attributes in relation to one another within consumer borrowing contexts (Kamleitner, Hoelzl, and Kirchler 2012; Ranyard et al., 2006). Thus, prior research examines consumer responses to loan information rather than the generation of loan parameters at the time of financing. With important implications for consumers, marketers of financial products, academic researchers, and federal regulators, …

Environmental Communication: Changing The Attitude-Behavioral Gap In Science Communication Utilizing Strategic Messaging, Carrie Helgeson Nelms

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

National Polls in the United States consistently find the public’s beliefs and attitudes about climate change and other environmental issues significantly diverge from those held by the science community. A communication gap between the findings on the causes and effects of environmental issues and the public’s inability to interpret or refuse to accept these findings are possible causes of this divergence. This communication gap constitutes a threat to society because of inaction to environmental problems and points to needed changes in scientific messaging that better informs and motivates behavioral change. The present research employed a strategic message design to affect …

Six Feet Apart: Relational Turbulence Theory And Coping With Covid-19 Within Long-Distance Relationships, Mia Waymack

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Among research that currently exists, no studies thus far combine elements of COVID-19, long-distance relationships, and Relational Turbulence Theory to explain how each of these elements impacts the others, if at all. Previous research does exist on each of these elements individually, although research regarding the long-term effects of COVID-19 on relationships is minimal considering the pandemic is ongoing. Long-distance relationships have been studied using Relational Turbulence Theory in previous studies within military relationships but have not been studied in connection with either COVID-19 or among college students. This study was conducted by way of qualitative, one-on-one interviews to determine …

Media Erasure: A 1904 Lynching In St. Charles, Arkansas, Mary Hennigan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As Americans grew increasingly interested in historic racial violence following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2021, select news publications chose to publish apologetic editorials and articles that addressed their failure of inclusive reporting for the last century (Lancaster, 2021; Fannin, 2020). In the theme of acknowledging past mistakes, the Printing Hate project emerged to investigate the power white-owned papers had in influencing lynching incidents in the county (Capital News Service, 2021). The present study examines one Arkansas lynching in 1904 St. Charles. The incident includes the death of 13 Black men. Findings from a content analysis of 70 original …

The Role Of Sex: An Analysis Of U.S. Attitudes Toward Climate Change, Chloe Riggs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the intersection of sex, environmental risk perception of climate change, and feminism. More specifically, with a sample size of 8,280 respondents from the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Times Series Study, this research examines the relationship between pro-environmental attitudes and sympathy for feminism, controlling for sex, as well as if a measure of sympathy for feminism influences pro-environmental attitudes, controlling for demographic (age, education, race, sex, and income) and political preference (political ideology and party affiliation) variables. Previous literature strongly supports a sex gap in risk perception, a pattern known as the White Male Effect (WME) …

The Passion Of Ken Williams: The Double Life Of A Mayor, The Newspaper That Brought Him Down, And The Story Of Journalism In America, Michael Adkison

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In November 2007, a team of reporters from the Benton County Daily Record published an expose revealing that Ken Williams, the mayor of Centerton, Arkansas, had been living a double life. In his former life as Don LaRose, he was a preacher in the Northeast, who one day vanished without a trace. His wild saga includes Satanists, truth serums, and a supposed murder. The Benton County Daily Record confronted the former reverend several times before he finally confessed to his double life. The next morning, he resigned as mayor, saying that the decisions he made were for the protection of …

Live The Local: Exploring The Relationship Between Local News Media And Cities Undergoing Downtown Revitalization, Allison Wise

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rise in suburban development has caused many downtowns across the United States to lose residents, businesses, attractions and community engagement. City officials and planners work to create policies, designs and urban development that help to revitalize downtowns. However, how do we bring people into our downtowns to live, work and play? That is where local news coverage can have an impact. The question arises: What can city officials, event organizers, business leaders do to foster a vibrant downtown? News outlets (e.g., television, print, digital) and their corresponding social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, can act as " …

Caring Against The Carceral: How Families Mediate The Social Death Of Incarceration, Jessica Claire

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Incarceration, especially in the United States, is deeply related to issues of racism, poverty, and citizenship. These particular experiences are the result of a history of biopolitical control affecting Black and brown communities and have a quintessential origin in enslavement. Those who are incarcerated are isolated, dishonored, and powerless as a result of the criminalization of race and poverty. These observations led to questions surrounding the particular impact families may have on the experiences of those who are incarcerated. Families of Incarcerated Loved ones, or FOILs, mediate incarceration through intentional socialization which has the potential to counteract the realities of …

Climate Change Frames And Emotional Responses On Reddit, Isabel Iruani Villanueva

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change remains a highly polarized topic in the United States. Research suggests that the divide in climate change beliefs is partly a result of news media’s representation of select aspects of the problem, or framing. Frames influence individuals’ attitudes, emotions, and behaviors towards climate change. Overwhelming representation of certain climate change frames has led to a lack of emotional connection to the issue, resulting in inaction or dismissal. Climate change researchers have investigated the presence and effects of frames on both news media and select social media sites, particularly Twitter. However, little research has investigated the climate change conversation …

Recovering From Substance Abuse In Arkansas: The Accessibility And Affordability Of Drug Treatment Programs, Whitney King

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is going to examine how people recover from drug addiction and see if there are any similarities due to their socioeconomic statuses at the time of recovery. This research addresses the following questions: How accessible and affordable are drug addiction recovery programs and rehabilitation facilities in Arkansas for mid- to low-income individuals? What are the social costs for people who can’t obtain drug rehabilitation services? The goal of this research is to explore whether there is a lack of affordable recovery programs in the state of Arkansas. This project utilizes survey responses as well as in-depth interviews with …

Ancestral Pursuits: A Multicultural Celebration Of Identity & Race, Charlotte Cates Castro

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using critical historical rhetorical methods along with critical race and decolonial theory, this project situates ancestral pursuits as a communication-centered discursive formation by investigating the rhetorical strategies modern biotech and genealogy companies utilize to influence contemporary discourse around identity and belonging and narrate ethnicity and genealogy as acts of consumption. Through direct-to-consumer DNA testing and complimentary services, modern day biotech and genealogy companies like Ancestry and 23andMe market personalized insights into ancestry, genealogy, inherited traits, and health data that promise to connect users to their past, as well as to situate them in present-day society, through a deeper understanding of …

Extreme Far-Right Murder-Suicide Attacks In The U.S. And Germany: A Comparative Storyline Analysis, Hayden Lucas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite increasing empirical research on suicide terrorism since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prior studies have focused primarily on radical Islamic terrorism in non-Western contexts. As a result, less is known about how murder-suicide attacks committed by other ideological movements unfold, particularly the extreme far-right in North America and Europe. Researchers have begun to theorize the social and psychological processes believed to play a role in the radicalization of suicide terrorists. However, the observable, situational processes shaping radicalized individuals when planning, preparing for, and executing suicide terrorism remain underexplored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify intervention points by …

The Jordanian Novel In Postmodern Context, Hamed Alalamat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features …

The Impact Of Media Algorithms On The Habermassian Public Sphere And Discourse, Kendal Heavner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Media algorithms are increasing in use among popular social networking sites (Geiger, 2009).Algorithms are used to sort a users’ social media feed based on relevance and interest rather than content publish time (Geiger, 2009). Widely accepted and recognized as influential in the media sector, algorithms create a highly personalized experience for the individual viewer. However, some scholars argue the specified curation of media based on a user’s personal preferences leads to a “filter bubble,” an online-based self-fulfilling prophecy in which users’ pre-existing opinions are continually reaffirmed. Because of this, this thesis will examine the intersection of algorithms and media theory. …

Memory And Rememory: Critically Cultivating An Appropriate Response Through A Storied Approach To Listening, Katie W. Powell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues for a storied approach to listening from the perspective of a white Southern woman. To do this, I carefully followed the work of two community groups. One, the Washington County Community Remembrance Project, is working to install a marker venerating Aaron, Anthony, and Randall, three enslaved people who were lynched in our area in 1856. The other, the James H. Berry United Daughters of the Confederacy, is responsible for installing a Confederate statue on the Bentonville Square in 1908 that was removed in 2020. As illustrated by the use of archival research and embedded participation in interracial …

Rewriting Web 2.0 Discourses Of The Local For Socio-Spatial Literacy Theory, Erin Daugherty

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for engaging with two spatial concepts that have been foundational to theorizing literacy across time but have often been taken for granted as passive backdrops to the social action of literacy practice: the notions of “the local” and “the global.” By interrogating the histories, both past and ongoing, of these two spatial concepts as they are interwoven into the sociocultural paradigm of literacy theory, research, and pedagogy, this project identifies new ways that literacy researchers and educators can attend to spatial concepts so as to promote and encourage literacy research and learning that …

Racialized Reality: Crime News And Racial Stereotype Framing, Warrington Sebree

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research shows that crime news is a primary mechanism for shaping public consciousness surrounding legal order, social morality, and threats present in their citizens communities. This research explores how news media influences negative attitudes towards criminal justice reform and Black identity. Utilizing Framing Theory, this study focuses on whether negative stereotypes in crime news triggers racial prejudice and bias towards African Americans. Participants of this study will consist of current students at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The findings suggest that knowing the race of a potential criminal assailant influences respondents’ attitudes towards presumptions of guilt, future criminality, and criminal …

Digital Marketing And The Culture Industry: The Ethics Of Big Data, Jonathan Michael Bowman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Instead of the steady march of the one percent growth in ecommerce as compared to total retail revenues in the last decade (to comprise about nine percent of the industry at the close of 2019), we have witnessed leaps now to over twenty percent in just the last year. Scott Galloway marks the pandemic as an accelerant not just of digital marketing posting a year of growth for each month of quarantine but as an accelerant of each major GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) firm from market dominance to total dominance (Galloway 2020). Viewing these trends from the standpoint …

Consumer Food Socialization In The School And Home, Ashley Deutsch Cermin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumer socialization literature has focused on individual socialization agents and their isolated effects. However, as John (1999) pointed out, children do not grow up in a social vacuum. Instead, the multitude of agents socializing children find their narratives interacting and their effects continually shaped and co-created. To understand how school-age children learn about food, I interrogate the complexity of socialization in three essays.

In the first essay, I take an ethnographic approach to investigate the interactive effect peers and adults, namely service workers, have on children’s food socialization in a public-school lunchroom. By combining a Loseke’s (2007) layered narrative model …

Immigration And Crime In The News, 2014-2018: Do Focusing Events And Policy Windows Affect Framing?, Abigale Rongey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although an abundance of literature demonstrates that immigrant populations are less crime-prone than the native-born population, the majority of Americans believe that immigration inherently threatens the security of the United States. Because Americans are not well versed in the complex issues of immigration and crime, public opinion is undoubtedly influenced by media outlets’ crafted narratives that simplify circumstances and events into easily digestible material. The current study examines how media behavior changes and responds to social and political events by examining “frames” utilized in articles that produce narratives about immigration and crime. Using content analysis of over 1,700 articles published …

Beauty Is Not Black And White: A Content Analysis Of Black Women’S Body Image In Television Media, Alexis Hubbard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are few bodies of literature that look at Black women’s body image in television media. When Black women were studied most research (Falconer & Neville, 2000; Jhally & Kilbourne, 2010; Smith, 2014; Shearon-Richardson, 2011;) compared them to White ideals. However, this study did a content analysis of Black women in predominantly Black or ethnically diverse television shows using qualitative studies that suggest a Black ideal. The researcher examined lead character(s) body shapes, comments about their body, hair texture and comments about their hair. This research looked at protective factors (aspects Black life that allow for more body satisfaction) like …

Far-Right Extremism In America: A Geospatial Analysis Of Incident Distribution, Meredith Leann Lerma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been little empirical research on the spatial relationship of violent far-right extremism. Previous studies have only focused on portions of far-right violent incidents, such as homicides, or amalgamated all far-right extremist activity, including legal incidents. This study uses data from the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in a temporal frame of 2000 to 2018 to test the relationship of violent incidents against geographic and social factors. The goal is to explore the relationships between macro-level factors and violent far-right extremist incident. The research determines that the presence of hate groups, higher immigrant populations, …

New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror And Cinema As Catharsis In The Age Of Technology, Sarah Henry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a critical analysis of a specific group of films that combine the subgenres of cyberpunk and body horror which I call New Flesh Cinema. Films of this subgenre counter fears and anxieties of technological advancements by re-imagining the rise of technology and its societal effects as a transitional process through the illustration of literal and visceral depictions of the necessary alterations people will have to undergo in order to transition successfully into the new world. To contradict apocalyptic fears of advancing technology, these films offer a vision of a “New Flesh.” I argue the films share three …

Instagram And Eating Disorders: An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Instagram On Disordered Eating Habits Among Young Girls, Katherine Wayles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have studied the relationship between body dissatisfaction and social media use, particularly focusing on young women as vulnerable consumers. Many studies concentrate on the amount of media consumed, rather than the specific activities and behaviors associated with feelings of low self-esteem or poor body image. It is important to determine exactly what behaviors and social media engagements contribute to disordered relationships with food, assessing a user’s pre-existing weight/body concerns in relation to the amount and type of media they consume. Instagram in particular is included in this study, as it is an image-based social networking site where users can …

Sex, Stress, And The Supreme Court: Verbal And Vocalic Analysis Of Brett Kavanaugh’S Senate Confirmation Hearings To The Supreme Court, Alexandra Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzed the relationship between verbal and nonverbal vocalic communication patterns exhibited by Brett Kavanaugh, now a sitting Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, during his Senate confirmation hearings in 2018. Additionally, the relationship between verbal statement types: attempt to define reality, personal narrative, policy positions, attacks, acclaims, and defenses, and the nonverbal vocalics of sighs, sharp intakes of breath, and sniffs were evaluated together to see which statement types would elicit higher physiological stress responses during both the 16-minute speech given at the end of the Day One hearing and the 45-minute testimony during the sexual assault hearing. …