Browsing by Subject "Media Studies"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Art, Activism and Sundarbans: A case study of Musical Environmental Movement through Film
    (2021-07) Roy, Elja
    Art, Activism and Sundarbans: A case study of Musical Environmental Movement through Film is a case-based study of ecocinema. Ecocinema studies involves the ecocritical reading of films with or without overt environmental messages. Scholars in the relatively new, yet the burgeoning field of ecocinema studies primarily critique fictional and documentary films. However, I am among a subset of scholars (Seymour, 2014; Pedelty, 2017) who are bringing a more directly engaged, field-based, and production-oriented focus to ecocinema studies and environmental communication. My research in the Sundarbans (India-Bangladesh) involves artists-activists who use music and performing arts to communicate ongoing environmental issues. I used a field-to-media method to film, study and analyze an environmental movement that advocates for the mangrove forest. That work is presented and framed partially through writing, but more fully through the documentary film, Musical Mangrove. The written sections of this dissertation are in conversation with ecocinema scholars such as Rust, Monani and Cubitt (2012), von Mossner (2014), Macdonald (2004, 2012), and Ingram (2005) to suggest a more collaborative and production-based approach to the study of ecocinema. Additionally, this work points out the need for similar participatory approaches to environmental communication and starts a dialogue between ecocinema studies and environmental communication. Ultimately, my goal is to bring together production-based experience as a field researcher with the broader field of film criticism, especially in terms of environmentally themed film and film studies, for sake of making a distinct, experimental, and integral contribution to ecocinema studies, media studies, and environmental communication more broadly.
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    Being Written While Writing: Crafting Selves in the Persian Blogosphere
    (2018-05) Shiva, Amirpouyan
    This dissertation examines how people change in the process of creating through the prism of a particular creative site of material production—the Persian blogosphere. In Iran, blogging is a popular means for producing self-centering narratives—i.e., written accounts centering around one’s lived experience—, making Persian one of the top 10 blogging languages. As it deploys ethnographic research to explore blogging, a medium enabled by the coming together of technology, language, and people, this project questions the received ideas of what media do. The findings of this research challenge conventional ideas of media that center on symbolic representation instead of material creation. This ethnography explores the intervening processes, material techniques, unintentional creations, and creative accidents that go into the making of blogposts and bloggers’ inner selves. This study also shows that local traditions and understandings inform writing practices in the Persian blogosphere. As it uncovers the processes through which people gain new understandings of the world, this ethnography examines not only the uniquely Iranian qualities or uses of the Internet, but also how singularities in this specific field of cultural forces led to the birth of these qualities and functions. This research, moreover, explores how writing blogs helps Iranian become autonomous subjects, which in turn changes the dynamics of power at a micro level. This project is not, however, either another anthropocentric account of self-fashioning of an autonomous subject acting as the sole source of its own authority, nor a representational study of the subject’s narrative. As it takes its scrutiny beyond the realm of meaning, narratives, and stories, where the already-constituted individual has an ontological privilege, this research shows that the seemingly autonomous selves, in their self-fashioning projects, depend upon the materiality of the technology and that of written words. Although ultimately about identities crafted online, this ethnography therefore underlines an understanding of fashioning selves that concerns itself with the negotiation of alterities rather than the formation of identities. In its contributions to the anthropology of the self, media, technology, and writing, this research shows that identities crafted through media are made possible because of those alterities.
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    Black Cyborgs: Blackness Narratives in Technology, Speculative Fiction, and Digital Cultures
    (2020-06) Gunn, Caitlin
    This project draws from the deep well of Black science fiction, original interviews with Black science fiction authors, and popular media case studies and analysis to generate new discourses about Black people and technology. Exploring the ways Black people have taken up both science fiction and technology, I argue that Black feminist thinkers can use both as blueprints for survival, joy, and community-building. Seeking to find strategies for effective communication within our shared political and technosocial lives, this project advances speculative fiction and cyborg theory as dynamic tools which we must utilize to build the future of feminist studies, Black studies, and digital political organizing. Beginning with Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” and expanding to recent explorations of the cyborg from women of color theorists like Joy James and Jasbir Puar, I situate Black feminist cyborgs in the current field of feminist cyborg theory. I offer a “part-time” Black feminist cyborg theory, a practical aesthetic which aids Black people’s movement and theorizing in digital spaces, chronicled by hashtags and characterized by the fast-paced nature of digital communication. To illustrate the possibilities of such an aesthetic, I engage Chicana philosopher Maria Lugones’ theory of traveling to the metaphorical “worlds” of other women. I extend her work, envisioning a part-time Black feminist cyborg optimized for travel to and through the digital worlds of social media like Facebook and Twitter, asking how Black people arrive in these worlds and what they experience once there. Illuminating a tradition of technological engagement by Black communities and calling attention to dreams of futures free of oppression, my interdisciplinary project shapes the future directions of Black feminist theory, digital organizing, and political resistance to entrenched and renewed white supremacy.
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    Gender Rolls: A History of Gender, Identity, and Nostalgia in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
    (2022-06) Fitzsimmons, Kristin
    Since the mid-1970s, tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs), epitomized by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), evolved from a niche hobby into a profitable, transmedia phenomenon. Two moral panics involving children’s entertainment media—the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and the news media’s reaction to the Columbine High School shooting in 1999—solidified the public image of the gamer as a White male who was vulnerable to suggestions of violence or self-harm in games. Historically, White men and boys were the assumed audience for TRPGs. This dissertation puts the lived experiences of women and nonbinary gamers from several generations into historical context. It argues that changes to gaming culture have been changes to visibility and accessibility of and for marginalized gamers.
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    Lessons in the Labors of Love: Situation Comedies and Family Governance in the 1980s
    (2012-05) Leppert, Alice
    This dissertation examines family sitcoms in the context of the Reagan era's perceived "crisis in the family" and gendered shifts in domestic life. Through a combination of Foucaultian and feminist theories, I ask how television sitcoms shape family life. I look at popular long-running programs like Who's the Boss?, Full House, and Family Ties as pedagogical texts that offered guidelines to viewers struggling with competing ideas about family, gender, parenting, and domestic labor. While providing lessons in household governance, these sitcoms simultaneously enact liberal feminist fantasies of work and domesticity. By bringing together historical analysis of the television industry during the late-network era with a look at policy and political objectives, I show that networks were seeking to appeal to upwardly mobile "career women," thus the proliferation of sitcoms dealing with non-nuclear families and the reorganization of housework arrangements.
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    Palestine and the Middle East in the Popular Filmic Imaginary: Historical Memory, Grievable Lives, and Encountering the Other in Film
    (2022-07) Bennett, Stephen
    This study explores how American audiences encounter Palestine and the wider Middle East through popular films, and how our collective memories of conflicts in the Arab world are constructed in media. Taking into account how the discourse of film critics often prime audiences to understand films as realistic and historically accurate, this project takes an incisive critical look at how films that are framed as sympathetic and progressive actually deny Palestinians and Arabs agency, and render their lives as disposable and ungrievable. In framing films as a motivated public memory project and analyzing the textual elements and narratives of popular movies, this study also uncovers how the cities and spaces of the Middle East are presented merely as sites of danger and trauma for American and Israeli protagonists. It also delves into the work these films do regarding the malleability of collective national memory and how they rewrite conflicts of the past to help maintain senses of militaristic masculinity and the ideology of exceptionalism. This study also expands on the concept of the Israeli ‘Shoot and Cry’ narratives to demonstrate how that same effect is prominent in American war films and displaces the audiences’ sympathy from the victim to the aggressor. The project closes with an analysis of two films, Amreeka and Forget Baghdad, both of which complicate notions of memory, place, and Palestinian and Arab identity, in stark contrast with what is seen in most mainstream films portraying the peoples and places of the Middle East.