Browsing by Subject "Governmentality"
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Item Branding Environmentalism for TV: The Rise and Fall of Planet Green(2015-08) Zimmerman, HeidiThis dissertation analyzes the rise and fall of Planet Green, Discovery Communications Inc.'s short-lived multiplatform, environmentalism-themed media brand. Launched in 2008, Planet Green billed itself as "the first 24-hour network devoted to the green lifestyle."� It promised to "bring green to the mainstream"� with a full lineup of environmentalist lifestyle and reality television, environmental news and documentaries, and two websites with a wide array of eco-games and quizzes, consumer advice, DIY projects, an open-ended discussion forum, and short-form videos. But despite a huge and successful launch and a significant programming budget, by 2012, Discovery announced that Planet Green would be cancelled and replaced with Destination America, a male-targeted lifestyle network aimed at a "between the coasts crown,"� said Discovery spokespeople. With shows like BBQ Pitmasters, United States of Food, Fast Food Mania, and Epic RV's, the new channel offered a kind of macho celebration of patriotism and consumerist excess that seemed to applaud the very things that Planet Green cautioned viewers against. My dissertation argues that Planet Green's rise and fall must be understood at the place where contemporary branding meets neoliberal governmentality. It was structured by the simultaneous industrial impulses to "govern through television"� on the one hand, and to maximize profits in an increasingly competitive cable TV market on the other. When it came to branding environmentalism in particular, these simultaneous impulses were in deep conflict and generated a great deal of anxiety among industry insiders. I show that Planet Green took shape in a manner designed to ease these anxieties through branding. In the end, however, even with Discovery's extensive resources and professed commitment to the environment, Planet Green was unable to overcome the tensions between profits and planet saving.Item Idols of goodwill: caring stars and the making of global citizens(2011-11) Wilson, Julie AnnIdols of Goodwill: Caring Stars and the Making of Global Citizensprovides a new critical, historical perspective on media celebrity by tracing the emergence of stars as icons of global caring and international community. From early UNICEF educational documentaries featuring Danny Kaye to the on-going celebrity efforts to rebuild Haiti, I document how the discourse of stardom emerged as a powerful cultural technology of global governmentality by providing a material base for international regimes of development in Western contexts. Tasked with shaping global citizens responsive to international institutions and the general welfare of the world, caring stars like Angelina Jolie, Bono, and George Clooney are much more than publicity stunts for global charities, media industries, or the stars themselves. Rather, they are harbingers of global liberalism, helping to harvest the political, economic, and cultural conditions for cosmopolitan world order.Item Negotiating professional identities in a liberalized Sub-Saharan economy: A case of University of Zambia faculty(2018-08) Chipindi, FerdinandThis dissertation examines the development of professional identity among faculty members at Zambia’s flagship university, the University of Zambia (UNZA), at several epochs in the institution’s history. The study explores how faculty identities emerged, shifted and were reconfigured in response to the shifts in the political economic landscape of the country. These shifts included the movement from a strong socialist orientation in the post-independence era (1964-1991) to a neoliberal system from 1991 to the 2016. The research data was collected through close to eight months of fieldwork at the Great East Road campus of UNZA between May 2016 and January 2017. The primary instrument of data collection was a semi-structured interview I conducted with 30 academics, representing three generations of faculty at UNZA, the first generation from 1966 to 1990, the second generation from 1991 to 200, and the third generation from 2000 to the present. The findings of the study suggest that there are several identities that have emerged over the past five decades of UNZA’s history dependent on the subject positions availed by the political economy of higher education. In the early years, marked by an abundance of funding from the federal government, the faculty tended to occupy subject positions connected to the discourse of national building and the liberation of Southern Africa. This led to the emergence of nation-builder academics and liberation-scholar academic. With the overhaul of the socialist system in 1991, new subject positions opened in the 1990s as entrepreneurial motivations started to drive academic work. In this age, the scientrepreneur academics came to the fore and prided themselves for being hunter-scholars. With the further entrenchment of neoliberal discourses and practices of accountability, efficiency and competitiveness after 2000, the development of scholarly identity became a struggle to become academically alive, in an ontological sense, marked by the importance of being mentioned by other scholars, leaders in the university, as well as multilateral and bilateral donor agencies. This study concludes that there is a need for the development of policies that reduce excessive teaching and community service demands on faculty, particularly early-career faculty, and reduce the number of challenges the faculty face in negotiating their professional identities.