Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Preaching That Leads To Transformation At The North Street Church Of Christ In Nacogdoches, Texas, Curtis Barbarick

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This doctor of ministry thesis presents the results of a project to develop a process whereby the sermon would be enhanced for listeners at the North Street Church of Christ in Nacogdoches, Texas, so that preaching would be more effective in leading to transformation. The theology and methodology of John Wesley were utilized as a lens by which to think about and implement this practice.

The intervention involved a six-week session with a focus group that represented a cross-section of the congregation. Participants in this group were asked to engage in a lectio divina exercise on a particular text daily, …

Romanies Versus The Mafia: “Us” And “Them” In Italian Crime Reports, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Denaturalization is the act of making something appear less natural or less human which functions to “subordinate other living creatures to human beings” and “to justify denigration of certain groups of people” (Santa Ana 1999). In this study, the denaturalization of Romanies in Italy as represented in newspaper crime reports was identified and compared to the opposing naturalization of Italian crime organizations. This was accomplished through careful, multidisciplinary, scientific analysis of over 20 articles taken from Italian newspapers of assorted political tendencies from the years 2005-2010. A corpus analysis was conducted and lexical choices were categorized as denaturalization, naturalization or …

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

La Tirania De La Invisibilidad: La Necesidad De Reconocer Y Analizar La Violencia De Genero En La Argentina, Laura Mallison

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines gender violence in Argentina in the context of the historic continuum of gender inequality, with a more in-depth analysis of gender violence during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. I argue that gender violence is perpetuated and normalized by its lack of recognition as a political issue with ramifications extending to daily life. I use the construction of a collective memory of the Dictatorship as a framework for making the intricacies of gender violence more visible and provide a detailed analysis of two laws against gender violence to demonstrate its systematic nature. Ultimately, laws are not sufficient to address such …

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …

Peering Into The Discourse Of Industrial Design Training Through A Sustainability Lens, Norman M. Su, Haodan Tan, Eli Blevis

Design Thinking Research Symposium

Now well established in HCI, the lens of sustainability may be applied to educational practices in industrial design and interaction design. By sustainability, we mean to include notions of mitigation of the environmental effects of climate change. In this paper, we present an analysis of student projects in a junior and senior industrial design class dataset. Drawing from discourse analysis, we examine how the industrial design classroom serves as a space to socially construct the philosophies and goals inherent in “good” design. We then examine how the lens of sustainability is implicated into the industrial design “way” as espoused by …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Science Wars As Culture Wars: Fracking And The Battle For The Hearts And Minds Of Women, Jenrose D. Fitzgerald

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

In this thesis, I examine how claims regarding the environmental and health impacts of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” are constructed by industry advocates who promote the practice and environmental and social justice groups who reject it. More specifically, I examine the cultural underpinnings of the debate over fracking, and the prominence of gender as a central framing device in that debate. While the controversy over fracking is often presented as scientific or technical in nature, I maintain that it is as much a culture war as it is a science war. I demonstrate this by showing how both pro-fracking and …

[The Development Of Public Relations In] Kenya, Dane M. Kiambi

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

This chapter traces the practice of PR from pre-independence Kenya to the 21st century. It emerges that the practice of PR is closely tied to major national events and to social, cultural, political and economic forces. PR roles as understood by the pre-independence colonial government: keeping the public informed on government development projects, assessing public opinion and advising government, endearing government to Kenyans and building the awareness of Kenya abroad have continued to modern-day Kenya.

Maternal Perceptions Of Agency In Intergenerational Transmission Of Spanish: The Case Of Latinos In The U.S. Midwest, Isabel Velázquez

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This article examines the ways in which a group of first-generation Latino immigrants to the U.S. Midwest conceptualized their role in their children’s bilingual development. Respondents were asked to identify the individuals or institutions on which their children’s language and academic development depended, as well as household practices perceived as conducive to Spanish maintenance, and perceived obstacles to their children’s use of Spanish in the domains of home, school, and community. Discussion centers on maternal perceptions of agency because of the centrality of the mother in intergenerational minority language transmission. It is argued here that immigrant mothers’ perceptions of agency …

重讀八、九十年代的「恐怖喜劇」: 殭屍電影與香港後殖民, Yee Man, Mandy Liu

Lingnan Theses

八十年代是香港電影工業的「黃金時期」，電影的類型也可說是「百花齊放」，當中包括了一批以「殭屍vs. 道士」為結構的電影，並廣受歡迎，直到九十年代初衰落。本論文就是以這批電影為研究對象，先借助電影研究中的類型研究的框架，從體裁說明這批電影本身就能自成一個類型／次類型──「恐怖喜劇」，繼而集中分析殭屍和道士這兩個主要角色，並指出這批電影其實是呼應著香港後殖民處境複雜的中港關係。

本研究提出電影中的殭屍和道士都是來自中國的「他者」，而且帶有不同程度的「怪物 性」，因此形成了不同的「自我」與「他者」的權力結構和張力。本文借用了後殖民研究的「我──他」框架以及怪物研究的「怪物性」概念，進一步解讀殭屍和道士的獨特性。最後，本文提出整個類型其實是以香港為本位，透過「馴化」殭屍和「吸納」道士來處理不同「中國他者」所引起的情緒與張力，並在流行文化中實現了中港融和的幻想。

Eurocentrism, Modernity And Chinese Sociality : An Ethnographic Study Of Everyday Socio-Cultural Life In New-Millennium China, Tung Yi Kho

Lingnan Theses

This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of Eurocentrism, Modernity,and their impacts on traditional Chinese cultural formations. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in Shenzhen, South China and Qinghai, West China, and explores the impacts of Chinese modernization on everyday forms of sociality.

I conceive of Eurocentrism foremost as an Ontology, a mode-of-being grounded in a cosmology about the nature of reality and human being-and-becoming in the world. I argue that because Eurocentrism is an ontology predicated on materialism and individualism - “matter” being the basis of reality and the “individual”, the fundamental unit of society, respectively - …

Made In Germany: Integration As Inside Joke In The Ethno-Comedy Of Kaya Yanar And Bülent Ceylan, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

As the largest “foreign” population in Germany, Turkish immigrants have been the primary target for concerns about integration and the impact of immigration on German culture. Since the founding of the first Turkish German cabaret in 1985 by Şinasi Dikmen and Muhsin Omurca, the misconceptions and one-sided expectations associated with integration have been played, parodied, and satirized by Turkish German performers. As producers of contemporary ethno-comedy, Kaya Yanar and Bülent Ceylan appeal to mass audiences with a new approach, inverting questions of integration by creating communities through laughter in which audiences are at once in on the joke and its …

Duck, Duck, Oops!: A Content Analysis Of The Crisis Surrounding Phil Robertson, Sarah Malinda

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to apply Benoit's theory of image restoration to apologetic discourse offered by those involved in the crisis surrounding Phil Robertson following his January 2014, GQ Magazine interview. This content analysis applied the theoretical framework to a collection of news segments, articles, and letters that contained apologetic discourse and analyzed them to identify the strategies of image restoration used. The results indicated that the most prevalent strategy used was transcendence- placing the act that caused offense in a different context. Robertson and those involved in his image restoration directed the audience's attention to higher moral …

Undergraduate Instructor Assistants (Uias): Friend Or Foe, William J. Seiler, Jenna Stephenson Abetz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Undergraduate students have been and continue to be employed as instructor assistants (UIAs) in a variety of courses across disciplines. However, relatively little empirical research has been published regarding the educational merits for them or their students. The present essay extends such research by focusing specifically on UIAs’ perceived value of the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) on their learning and personal growth. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with six former UIAs and employed a qualitative thematic analysis of their responses. Perceived benefits that emerged from the analysis include, for example, learning how to balance many different roles and responsibilities, …

Communicatively Managing Religious Identity Difference In Parent-Child Relationships: The Role Of Accommodative And Nonaccommodative Communication, Colleen Warner Colaner, Jordan Soliz, Leslie R. Nelson

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Guided by Communication Accommodation Theory, we examine the communicative management of religious difference in parent-child relationships. Using survey data from emerging adults (N = 409), we found that religious difference is associated with decreases in relational satisfaction and shared family identity. Further, parents’ religious communication has the potential to promote relational well-being. Accommodative communication (religious-specific supportive communication and respecting divergent values) was associated with increases in relational satisfaction and shared family identity. Two forms of nonaccommodative communication (inappropriate self-disclosure and emphasizing divergent values) were associated with decreases with relational satisfaction and shared family identity; giving unwanted advice was associated …

Parental Socialization Of Ethnic Identity: Perspectives From Multiethnic Adults, Audra K. Nuru, Jordan Soliz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Participants (N = 113) who indicated that their parents had different ethnic or racial backgrounds provided retrospective accounts of parental messages they perceived as influential in the development of their ethnic identity. Three themes of parental messages concerning ethnic identity emerged from the participants’ responses: (a) parental messages of encouragement/egalitarianism, (b) parental messages of preference, and (c) lack of explicit parental messages/silence. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding multiethnic identity development, and future directions for research are put forth.

Discursive Struggles Animating Individuals’ Talk About Their Parents’ Coming Out As Lesbian Or Gay, Diana Breshears, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The goal in the present study was to understand the discourses that animate children’s talk about having a parent come out and how these discourses interplay to create meaning. Data were gathered through 20 in-depth interviews with adults who remembered a parent coming out to them as lesbian or gay. One discursive struggle animated the participants’ talk about their parents’ coming out: the discourse of lesbian and gay identity as wrong vs. the discourse of lesbian and gay identity as acceptable. Analysis of participants’ talk about their familial identities revealed a range of avenues for resisting the negative discourses regarding …

Theory And Research From The Communication Field: Discourses That Constitute And Reflect Families, Kathleen M. Galvin, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

From the disciplinary perspective of communication studies, we review theory and research in family communication, including a brief history of the family communication field; the contributions of a family communication perspective; and 5 theories of family communication: communication accommodation theory, communication privacy management theory, family communication patterns theory, narrative theor(ies), and relational dialectics theory. We then illustrate the concept of discourse dependence in family communication processes and discuss current trends in family communication research. We also suggest emerging directions for family communication scholarship.

"This Is Exactly Why We Sweep Things Under The Rug:" A Polite Approach To Abc's Modern Family, Andrea Fasciano

Masters Theses

The sitcom has remained a popular choice for television viewers since its inception. They have evolved in their methods of entertaining their audiences, often depicting unlikeable characters engaging in antisocial behaviors. This study examines one such sitcom, Modern Family, through the lens of Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, and related concepts contributed by other theorists. These theorists maintain that a primary motive behind any interaction is the presentation and maintenance of a chosen identity or "face." Those actions that fail to maintain face, for either participant are called "face-threatening acts." This study attempts to determine if the characters behave in …