Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Critical and Cultural Studies Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Theses/Dissertations

Cultural Studies

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Memory And Rememory: Critically Cultivating An Appropriate Response Through A Storied Approach To Listening, Katie W. Powell May 2021

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 …

Go to article

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar Jun 2020

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

Go to article

Troubles At Coal Creek: Rhetorics Of Writing, Research, And The Archive, Sumner Stevenson Brown Aug 2016

Troubles At Coal Creek: Rhetorics Of Writing, Research, And The Archive, Sumner Stevenson Brown

Masters Theses

Digging through the past can uncover painful truths. As such, historiography that does not acknowledge negotiated spaces, cultural erasures, and flexible frameworks may fall short. It may limit both breadth and depth of the past, thereby (re)producing erasures, whereas a reflexive theoretical framework delivers not only depth and breadth, but it also adds texture and dimension to historical writing and research processes. It is for these purposes that the value of alternative methodologies is not situated at the margins of the rhetorical canons. Instead, it is embedded in the very core of the canons, defined as an element that works …

Go to article

Mashup Archeology: A Case Study In The Role Of Digital Technology In Cultural Production, Zachary Mcdowell Jul 2016

Mashup Archeology: A Case Study In The Role Of Digital Technology In Cultural Production, Zachary Mcdowell

Doctoral Dissertations

Through examining the phenomena of the musical mashup against the backdrop of the contemporary American legal and economic situations, this work explores the complicated role of digital technology in contemporary cultural production and how it helps to constitute an agency of the contemporary digital subject, oriented towards participation and access. This research comes together in four parts, first weaving together against an understanding of the cultural and technical background as well as the legal and social backdrop that helped to birth the mashup, setting the stage for understanding the different powers at play. Secondly, through considering the construction and determination …

Go to article

Rural Reality: How Reality Television Portrayals Of Appalachian People Impact Their View Of Their Culture, Ivy Jude Elise Brashear Jan 2016

Rural Reality: How Reality Television Portrayals Of Appalachian People Impact Their View Of Their Culture, Ivy Jude Elise Brashear

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

Appalachian people have faced stereotyping of their culture and region in popular culture, news media, and art for generations. For more than 150 years, images of the region have been extracted by outside media makers and disseminated widely, solidifying the “hillbilly” stereotype in the national lexicon. This study focuses on such images in reality television shows about Appalachia, and seeks to determine whether or not those images, and the proliferation of them, has an impact on the ways in which Appalachian people understand and accept their own culture.

Go to article

Preserving Identity, Empowering Children: Whale Rider, Spirited Away, Frozen, Alana Zautner Apr 2015

Preserving Identity, Empowering Children: Whale Rider, Spirited Away, Frozen, Alana Zautner

Global Honors Theses

The use of cultural studies methods such as textual analysis through diagnostic critique, to interpret and understand media culture and the political and social meanings and messages contained in film and television, offers insights into how cultures around the world are evolving into the 21st century. This paper looks at three films: Whale Rider, (New Zealand, 2002, directed by Niki Caro), Spirited Away, (Japan, 2001, directed by Hayao Miyasaki), and Frozen, (United States, 2013, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee), and analyzes representations of gender, culture, and identity, as well as the evolution, growth, and liberation of each …

Go to article