Browsing by Subject "Ideology"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Mind over media: Conscious and unconscious responses to media messages(2012-09) Brehe, Stephanie KathrynHuman response to media images is a product of both conscious and preconscious processing, involving structural mechanisms within the brain as well as individual self-concepts, issues of identity, ideological beliefs, and relevance. Visual and auditory processing incorporates both conscious and preconscious mechanisms, which influence reception and integration of incoming data. Depending upon the goals or physiological cues relevant to the subject, specific data are absorbed from the media and passed on to the higher cognitive functions in the brain. Once in the conscious mind, attitudes from the conscious and unconscious may further filter incoming data. The remaining concepts and information are used as a platform for action and response in social situations. The resulting ideological platform also informs the pre-conscious mechanisms, creating a constantly evolving cycle of relevant information filtering. Recommendations are provided for a methodological approach to media research that incorporates cognitive function, identity, and ideological platforms. Key words: Media, processing, conscious, pre-conscious, ideology, identity, social cognition.Item Pedagogies, ideologies, and secular Jewish identities in U.S. Hebrew Schools(2014-12) Schneller, Renana SegalAlthough heritage language teachers' processes of identity formation have been studied in recent years (e.g., Milner, 2007), much of the work on heritage languages has explored foreign language teachers' beliefs (e.g., Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992; Williams & Burden, 1997) and pedagogies. Overall, the context behind these heritage language pedagogies, specifically ethnic, religious, and national identities has been under-researched. Addressing this gap, this study explores Hebrew language teachers' beliefs, practices and ideologies and the way these ideologies relate to teachers' Jewish identities. Hebrew language teachers have various beliefs about their roles as teachers and about what needs to be taught in their Hebrew classroom as part the process of fostering students' Jewish identity. These beliefs relate to teachers' lived experience as learners (e.g., Alvine, 2001). Teachers' beliefs and practices suggest teachers' Hebrew language ideologies (e.g., Woolard, 2010), which are affected by teachers' Jewish identity (e.g., Avni, 2011). During a year-long study that included a semester of classroom observation and numerous semi-formal as well as informal interviews, three participating teachers from two schools were observed and classroom documents were collected. Guided by the theoretical framework of imagined communities (Anderson, 2006), data was analyzed and interpreted. Findings suggest that Hebrew teacher beliefs about themselves as learners relate to their beliefs about themselves as teachers. These beliefs map onto classroom practices most of the time. All three of the teachers share similar ideologies about how knowledge of Hebrew and knowledge about Israel are essential for fostering Jewish identities.Item Queer texts and the Cold War: how nationalism shaped U.S. lesbian and gay writing, 1945-1960.(2009-06) Galik, Angela E.This dissertation explores the impact of mainstream discourses of nationalism, gender, sexuality, race, and class on the development of lesbian and gay identities and communities in the United States in the early Cold War period (1945-1960) by analyzing the literary productions of several lesbian and gay writers. Placing neglected and forgotten texts alongside works by authors considered "canonical," I show how these writers responded in different ways to the dominant, anti-homosexual discourses that characterized the era. During this critically under-examined period in U.S. LGBT history, paranoia about Communist expansion led to the conflation, in the national imagination, of homosexuals with enemy agents, and government, mass media, the self-help establishment alike promoted the suburban nuclear family headed by a married heterosexual couple as an important line of national defense. Simultaneously, the 1950s saw the formation of the first public gay and lesbian rights organizations in the U.S., the publication of the country's first nationally-distributed lesbian and gay magazines, and an unprecedented flurry of novels published by gay and lesbian authors, ranging from high art to pulp paperback romance. In these conditions of seeming contradiction, of heavy state repression combined with optimism and new possibilities for self-expression, lesbians and gay men participated, through published writing, in a broad national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality. Gay and lesbian writers wrestled with the question of what it meant to be homosexual in the early Cold War United States, contested exclusionary and discriminatory understandings of the homosexual's place in society, and challenged the validity of rigid gender roles - as well as the United States' moral authority as the self-declared protector of democracy. The ways in which each individual author interacted with and responded to these hegemonic national discourses depended, to a great degree, on the author's specific social positioning within the interlocking hierarchies of privilege based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as their larger ideological perspectives and political commitments. My dissertation teases out these specificities, illuminating previously unrecognized contributions to the national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality, examining the ways an author's multiple points of reference often led to the reproduction of competing ideologies within a single work. This project contributes to the work, within the field of LGBTQ Studies, of reclaiming and expanding the boundaries of a queer U.S. literary tradition by re-examining the textual productions of an era usually seen as a "dark age" between the social upheavals of World War II and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, by placing the discursive processes by which the meanings of homosexuality were negotiated during this period, highlighting the state of flux itself, my analysis makes it impossible to refer to a unitary gay, lesbian, or "homosexual" experience, viewpoint, or identity.Item Spanish-language print media in the United States: A critical social semiotic exploration of ideological representations(2013-05) Strom, MeganAs of 2010, there were 50.5 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin in the United States (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas and Albert, 2011, p. 2). Although substantial work has been carried out on the linguistic aspects of Spanish spoken in the United States in some cities, there is still much left to be discovered, especially with regards to the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of print Spanish. Furthermore, the analysis of discourse about Latinos as a minoritized group is typically carried out on texts produced by majority groups (cf. de Beaugrande, 2008; Martín Rojo and Gómez Esteban, 2005; Martín Rojo and van Dijk, 1997). In other words, while critical discourse analysts know a great deal about the discursive construction of minoritized groups in discourse created by majority groups (e.g., how the United States mass media represent Latinos), it is not known how such groups create their own discourse (cf. Delbene, 2008; Strom, 2013). Finally, although a handful of multimodal analyses have addressed Spanish as a semiotic system (cf. Crespo Fernández and Martínez Lirola, 2012; Strom, 2013), almost nothing is known about the semiotic characteristics of Spanish-language media in this country. The current study consists of a critical multimodal social semiotic analysis of ideological representations in Spanish-language print media in the Midwest of the United States. The goal of this study is to shed light on how ideology is expressed visually, verbally, and across the visual and verbal modes in Spanish as a minoritized language, as well as the potential for these ideologies to challenge mainstream ideologies. The methodological framework consists of three stages of analysis. A critical discourse analysis based on Teun van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach (1998, 2008) and Norman Fairclough's dialectal-relational approach (2001) focused on the verbal expression of ideology. The data represent 24 local news articles from two local Spanish-language newspapers, La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota and La Conexión Latina, in the Midwest of the United States. A critical multimodal analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996, 2001) social semiotic approach focused on the visual expression of ideology. The data comprised 15 images that accompanied the news articles used in the verbal analysis. Lastly, an analysis of intersemiotic complementarity (Royce, 2007), or the comparison of ideologies across text and image, considered the representation of ideology across the verbal and visual modes in 15 text-image combinations. Verbally, the newspapers provide Latino immigrants an opportunity to learn necessary sociocultural information about the United States while maintaining their own epistemic community. The visual mode represents Latinos both as victims of maltreatment by the majority group and as agentive social actors who stand up to injustices committed against them. Although most text-image combinations analyzed challenge ideologies found in the mainstream English-language press, those text-image combinations with the greatest potential to lead to change are those that verbally underscore negative actions committed against Latino immigrants, but visually represent Latinos as standing up to and fighting against these injustices. These results underscore the potential for Spanish-language media to lead to positive changes for Latino immigrants in the United States.