Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University

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Open Access
Black Diasporic Disasters and the Africanization of Poverty in Western Print Media: a Case Study of Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian Earthquake in the New York Times
(2014-07-09) Saisi, Boke; Robinson, Danielle
Thousands of poor, mainly black Americans were plastered across the news in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Correspondingly, after the devastating Haitian earthquake in January 2010, images and readings of black impoverishment were rife. I argue during both disasters, news media depicted both populations as Africanized, discursively linking blackness and black African-ness with impoverishment. I conducted a critical discourse analysis of eighty New York Times articles, comparing both cases and found that black subjects were homogenously depicted as both threatening and helpless, as “others from within” in coverage of Hurricane Katrina and “others from without” in coverage of the Haitian earthquake; the former being black others who pose an immediate threat by proximity to white majority populations, and the latter as black others whose implied inferiority helps bolster a sense of superiority amongst whites. I conclude that depictions of these essentialized and denigrated black others are problematic as they may inform the mistreatment and management of black populations worldwide.
Open Access
Transient Vogue: The Commodification and Spectacle of the Vagrant Other
(2014-07-09) Moir, Aidan Marie; MacLennan, Anne
As creative director of Christian Dior, John Galliano received substantial press attention in early 2000 when he debuted his haute couture collection portraying models dressed as if they were homeless. Galliano’s couture collection is one of numerous ‘homeless chic’ examples, a trend referring to the resignification of symbols denoting a marginalized social identity into fashion statements by commodity culture. While there has been a re-emergence of ‘homeless chic’ within the contemporary context, the motif encompasses an extensive history which has not yet been properly acknowledged by the media outlets comprising what Angela McRobbie refers to as the fashion industry. A content and critical discourse analysis of the mainstream news media places ‘homeless chic’ within its significantly larger social and intertextual context, an element best illustrated through a comparison with its sister trend, ‘heroin chic,’ and a visual analysis of W’s “Paper Bag Princess” photo editorial.
Open Access
Abandonware, Commercial Expatriation and Post-Commodity Fan Practice: A Study of the Sega Dreamcraft
(2014-07-09) Deeming, Scott; Lessard, Bruno;
This thesis explores the nature of digital gaming platforms once they have been expatriated from the consumer marketplace and have been relegated to obsolescence. In this state, abandonware becomes a site for creative interventions by active audiences, who exploit, hack and modify these consoles in order to accommodate a range of creative practices. As part of the digital toolkit for fan production, the Sega Dreamcast has become a focal point for fan based video game remix practices, whereby fan creators appropriate imagery and iconography from popular media to create new works derivative of these franchises. These fan practices subvert the proprietary protocols of digital platforms, re-contextualizing them as devices for creative intervention by practitioners, who distribute their works and the knowledge necessary to produce them, through online communities.
Open Access
Playing Games with Art: The Cultural and Aesthetic Legitimation of Digital Games
(2015-01-26) Parker, Felan Stephen; Jenson, Jennifer, Dr.
Like other popular cultural forms before them, digital games are undergoing a process of cultural and aesthetic legitimation; the question of digital games’ legitimacy as art is being raised with increasing urgency in a variety of different contexts. Mobilizing a conceptual framework derived from media studies, the sociology of art, and certain traditions in philosophical aesthetics, this dissertation proposes that art is constituted in a complex, historically-contingent assemblage made up of many diverse elements and sometimes called an “art world.” The legitimation of a cultural form as art is achieved through a process of collective action and interaction between not only art makers and art objects but also thinkers, talkers, watchers, and players, as well as ideas, organizations, places, and objects. The central question of this dissertation, therefore, is not “Are games art?” but rather “How are games being reconfigured as art, where, and by whom?” In order to understand the legitimation of games as art, it is necessary to attend to the specific social-material processes through which it is taking place in different contexts. This dissertation focuses on the historical period between 2005 and 2010, and is made up of several case studies, including the highly public debate precipitated by popular film critic Roger Ebert’s derisive comments about games as art; the cultural reception and canonization of blockbuster “prestige games” that pursue artistic status within the boundaries of the commercial industry, such as Bioshock; and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the construction of independently-produced “artgames” such as Passage as a gaming analogue to autobiographical indie music and comics. Each of these overlapping contexts represents a particular conception of games as legitimate art, mobilizing different elements and strategies in pursuit of cultural and material capital, and establishing the terms and stakes for more recent developments.
Open Access
Exhibiting Climate Change: An Examination of the Thresholds of Arts-Sciences Collaborations in the Context of Learning for a Sustainable Future
(2015-01-26) Bieler, Andrew Theodore Cecil; Marchessault, Janine Michele
This dissertation probes the cultural and political thresholds of arts–sciences collaborations in the context of the development of public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. The dissertation is an in-depth case study of a civil society group called Cape Farewell that is organizing collaborations between contemporary artists and climate scientists. Since 2003, Cape Farewell has been leading expeditions to the Arctic, the Andes, and the Scottish Islands and Faroes that bring artists, scientists, educators, and other creative communicators together to innovate public pedagogy about a sustainable response to climate change. Drawing on sustainability theory, Jacques Rancière’s theory of political aesthetics, Grant Kester’s theory of artistic collaboration, phenomenological curriculum theory, and Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfinding, the dissertation describes these expeditionary field studies as forms of ecological wayfinding. By following the wayfaring path of learners alongside materials and shared metaphors from field studies to cultural productions, I describe the multifaceted dimensions of ecological wayfinding in relation to arts-based research, curriculum, and pedagogy. Building on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s theory of pedagogical pivot points, I describe the potential of the climate exhibitions, art works, films, websites, and concerts to produce visionary possibilities for a sustainable future on the planet. These public pedagogies variously negotiate the political thresholds of neoliberalism, the cultural thresholds of Romanticism, and disciplinary thresholds in higher education. Central to my argument is that we need to develop place-based and interdisciplinary sustainability curricula and pedagogy in postsecondary art education in order to foster more meaningful forms of collaboration across the arts and the sciences and alongside socioecological places. Finally, we need to envision an ethics of sustainability on the scale of the cosmos rather than the market via the intimate expenditure of bodies-in-motion and the generosity, empathy, and hospitality that can be inspired by emergent forms of relational and site-specific art practice.
Open Access
The Life Cycle of the Computer: A Study in the Materialities of Risk
(2015-01-26) Lebel, Sabine; Berland, Jody
The environmental effects of personal computers, from dangerous chemicals used in chip production to e-waste, have largely been ignored in pop culture, mainstream media, and much academic research. In order to take up these questions, this dissertation pursues a cultural study of the personal computer. The life cycle analysis (LCA) is a scientific method that calculates all the resources used in the life of a given object, from resource extraction, production, use, user, to disposal. As partial method for my study it brings an environmental accounting, as used in the sciences, and a structure to my cultural study, which approaches the computer as a cultural artifact. In order to more fully consider cultural aspects from daily personal negotiations to larger political questions, I extend the LCA with assemblage theory to consider the social and representational spaces associated with computers and the environment. What my primary sources have in common is that they represent moments of visibility of these problems. My research sources include documents from news media, policy papers, art practice, management discourse, corporate texts, and activist reports. The relative absence of these topics in academia, the news, and popular culture functions as the structuring absences of this project. A large part of my work has been to follow these fleeting moments in academic and mainstream sources. Because of the emphasis on the visual in our culture, my central problematic involves theorizing the visible, especially in relation to the visual, in risk culture in order to theorize how and why environmental risks remain outside to so many understandings of computers and the information age. I argue that to fully understand the environmental effects of technological culture we need to examine six interlocking factors: notions of materiality and immateriality; the geopolitics of toxicity and risk; the shift from industrial to risk society; cybernetics and the environment; the relationship between visibility and visuality; and risk culture.
Open Access
Picturing Life Stories in a Biomedical Setting: A Phenomenological Analysis of Neonatal End-of-Life Photography
(2015-01-26) Martel, Sara Lyn; Murray, Stuart
This dissertation explores End-of-Life (EOL) photography, a common practice in North American hospitals whereby nurses facilitate photography for families around the death of their newborn. It is based on a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 10 parents bereaved by a neonatal death in the last five years, who all participated in EOL photography in the same Canadian neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The focusing research question asked how parents experience this photography within the NICU setting and in their lives beyond the hospital. The study’s methodology combines the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the critical theory of Michel Foucault to consider the intersections of lived experience, media technologies and the material structures of power/knowledge. The method is modeled on an interpretive phenomenological analysis approach involving an embodied hermeneutic and integrating photo elicitation, as the participants were invited to bring their EOL photographs to the interviews. The dissertation situates EOL photography within the contemporary NICU, revealing the practice as an experience of living relationships between nurses, parents and newborns in the biomedical setting. It considers how the move from film to digital photography developed the practice from “memento-making” to collaborative “story-telling.” New opportunities to construct the newborn’s life-story is shown to be integral to the parents’ knowing their newborn in life and healing from their death, yet opens complex questions around sharing this life-story within the families’ social sphere. The dissertation reflects on these experiences in the context of a broader sociocultural ambiguity around death-in-birth, connecting EOL photography with the politics of biomedical reproduction and end-of-life. The dissertation concludes by conceptualizing EOL photography as a practice of palliative space-time, which works towards presence, proximity, attention, and care into end-of-life in a biomedical setting.
Open Access
Mangos with Chili: Two-Spirit, Queer and Trans People of Colour Performance as Social Movement Building
(2015-08-28) Kai Yin Khoo, Anabel; Driver, Susan D.
Mangos with Chili (MWC) is a two-spirit, queer and trans people of color (2-QTPOC) performance arts cabaret based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This research focuses on MWC performance content and personal interviews with four of MWC’s artists: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Landa Lakes, Micha Cárdenas and Manish Vaidya. The author examines three aspects of MWC to consider: the economic context of precarity of cultural work; spirituality and healing in performance; and the politics of vulnerability and interdependence. By examining the challenges MWC faces and the methods MWC offers for social justice movement building, the author argues that MWC offers a politics and set of practices that hold difference affirmatively while leaving enough space to imagine and enact new worlds.
Open Access
Capoeira as a Resource: Multiple Uses of Culture Under Conditions of Transnational Neoliberalism
(2015-08-28) Robitaille, Laurence; Coombe, Rosemary
This dissertation explores the shifting meanings and values attached to capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ‘martial game’, as it circulates as a ‘cultural resource’ in the context of neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice to new lands and commercialized their embodied knowledge and cultural difference. While they initially sought to create economic capital, a whole range of indirect repercussions followed: they generated affective communities, disseminated a Brazilian imaginary soon transformed into symbolic capital, and arguably transmitted an embodied memory that can be traced back to the practice’s African ancestry. This multi-sited ethnographic study uses a mixed methodology to explore how capoeira’s circulation in North American markets enables its multiple uses. A central commitment to theoretical analysis is conveyed by each chapter’s distinctive theoretical framing. Chapter One demonstrates processes of creation of political and ideological value as it examines capoeira’s role in the twentieth century formation of Brazilian nationalism. Chapter Two describes a new paradigm for considering ‘culture’ in a neoliberal political economy in which cultural goods and services assume new valuations. Chapter Three describes capoeira’s commercialization through theories on transnationalism and concepts of economic anthropology. Chapter Four analyses the construction of a field of discourse that renews capoeira’s semantic values, specifically as it relates to the field of Brazilian culture. Chapter Five turns to theories on affect to account for capoeira’s experiential, embodied, and phenomenological power to generate relations of intimacy uniting practitioners. This affective exchange, I argue, drives the whole cross-cultural economy of transnational capoeira. Chapter Six studies capoeira as performance to understand how its traditional system of values is perpetuated. This study demonstrates that capoeira’s transnational circulation has generated a coherent system of interacting values fueled by individual entrepreneurship but also socially experienced and collectively perpetuated. It shows how cultural objects, representations, and practices can be intentionally wielded to generate a broad range of benefits including, but not reduced to, economic ones. Understanding culture in such pragmatic terms highlights cultural actions’ potential to contribute to broader fields of value, where value is understood as simultaneously economic, politic, cultural, and affective, and both socially and individually generated. Abstract
Open Access
This Project can be Upcycled where Facilities are Available: An Adventure Through Toronto's Food/Waste Scape
(2015-08-28) Coyne, Michelle M.; Moore, Paul
At the intersection of food, regulations, and subjective experiences is a new way of understanding the intersection of wasted food—a new category of edibility. This project investigates the reasons for, and impacts of, politically-motivated dumpster diving and food reclamation activism in Toronto, Canada. The research incorporates ethnographic participant-observation and interviews with politically-motivated dumpster divers in Toronto, as well as that city’s chapter of Food Not Bombs. The project primarily asks how so much quality food/waste is thrown away and becomes, at times, available to be recovered, reworked, and eaten. My research constitutes a living critique of the hybrid experience of food and waste where the divisions between the two categories are not found in locations (the grocery store or dumpster), but rather in the circulations of actions and meanings that dumpster divers themselves re-invest in discarded edible food products. My research objectives are: (1) to document the experience of dumpster divers in Toronto as connected to a broader movement of food/waste activism around the world; (2) to connect this activism to discussions of food safety and food regulations as structuring factors ensuring that edible food is frequently thrown away; (3) to contextualize contemporary food/waste activism within a history of gleaning, and in relation to enclosure acts that have left Canada with no legal protections for gleaners nor recognition of the mutually beneficial social relation between gleaners and farmers; (4) to explore dumpster divers’ work as part of the circulation of urban culture within media networks. Ultimately, I isolate alternative gift economies as central to dumpster divers’ critique of industrial food distribution within the commodity systems of global capitalism. This gifting relation proves to be, in part, a nostalgic view of an idealized past. Nonetheless, the gifting relation becomes an ideal linked to broader anarchist communities that allows divers to create communal subject identities that exist outside of market relations, made global through communication networks of independent and self-published media. By connecting globally, the small-scale, local actions of Food Not Bombs chapters around the world allow surprisingly few individuals to spread a politic with the potential to impact beyond their limited political circles. This project is theoretically situated at the junction of studies of material culture, food and food waste, and new social movements; I connect political experience in local communities to the circulation of food and waste through urban environments and media networks. For the dumpster diver, edibility is delinked from purchase price and is instead imbedded in systems of power and active resistance.
Open Access
Transnational Divorce: The Violation of Immigrant Japanese Mothers' Rights an the Hague Abduction Convention
(2015-08-28) Noguchi, Hiromi; Oikawa, Mona
As a counterpoint to existing discussions of how Western fathers’ rights can be secured in the context of transnational divorce, this study raises the important question of how immigrant Japanese mothers’ fundamental rights can be protected. The voices of Japanese women have long been silenced in the context of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Through in-depth interviews with Japanese mothers who returned to Japan with their children (returned Japanese mothers), and divorced immigrant Japanese mothers who reside in Canada, this study analyzes the stories of the mothers in terms of the impact of immigration and transnational divorce on their social locations. Drawing on critical race scholarship, particularly interlocking theory, it critiques the Western construction of returned Japanese mothers as abductors and reveals the ways that their marginalization as non-English speaking, foreign-born women of colour is further entrenched through transnational divorce.
Open Access
Confess the Gay Away? Media, Religion, and the Political Economy of Ex-Gay Therapy
(2015-08-28) Thorn, Michael Edward; Moore, Paul S.
The “ex-gay” movement does not encourage people to pray the gay away but confess it away. As a loose organization of mostly Christian ministries and psychotherapy practices offering “freedom from homosexuality,” the movement utilizes religious and psychological confessions of sin and disease and testimonies of truth and belief as technologies of both self-sacrifice and identity formation. The aim is to control unwanted same-sex desire through life-long labour and struggle and to sacrifice one’s gay or lesbian identity for an ex-gay identity. However, in the debate surrounding the movement, those opposed use confessions of trauma and harm, and testimonies of their own truth and belief, to try and sacrifice the movement in favour of gay and lesbian identities. Confession and testimony, then, underlie the discourses and practices of all involved in ex-gay truth games as two sides of the same coin. Although the movement formed in the 1970s, this dissertation analyzes it from the 1990s, when, in alliance with the Christian Right, it “came out of the closet” through a cross-platform advertising campaign that generated fifteen years’ worth of “earned media” in news and popular culture entertainment. By deploying an economic discourse of consumer choice, the movement hoped to justify itself as a legitimate form of intervention while the Christian Right hoped to use it to encourage the repeal of gay rights legislation. Those tactics backfired, resulting in a consumer fraud lawsuit, legislation banning conversion therapy for minors, and scathing critiques and satires in mainstream popular culture. However, the movement has legitimized itself within its own conservative Christian communities. In this dissertation I show that limiting the ex-gay debate to commercialized and politicized concepts and strategies neglects the real problem at the heart of the controversy: the paradoxical use of confessions of self-renunciation and true-belief as technologies of self-emergence sacrifices the self to unstable and “fundamentalist” truth games; on both sides of the debate. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I treat the movement as a mediated cultural phenomenon currently constituted by cost-benefit calculations and marketing protocols but historically constituted by the psychological and religious governmentalities that pervade its thought and practices.
Open Access
Augmented Reality as a new Medium: Remediation and Novel Form
(2015-08-28) Papagiannis, Helen; Fisher, Caitlin
This dissertation is a pioneering exploration and mapping of the vast terrain of Augmented Reality (AR) as a new medium experienced from the unique perspective of being both a practitioner and academic researcher working with AR for the past nine years. AR has been typically defined as a layering of digital images, including text, audio, video, and 3D models, in real-time atop the physical environment and is experienced through an AR equipped device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a computer with a webcam, or a pair of see- through digital glasses. There is a current gap in knowledge in AR, particularly in the fields of communications, media, and humanities, with the critical need to revisit how we come to understand and define AR, especially at a time when AR is emerging as a medium, no longer just a technology found in Computer Science labs. This dissertation provides a first-hand look and foresight into the new world of AR, its promise and expanded capabilities building from a Communications and Culture foundation as a practitioner and researcher deeply immersed in the field. Setting a course of research-creation enabled a major technological innovation, resulting in ground-breaking work: the world's first AR book designed for the iPad using image tracking. The path of research-creation further led to a proposed visionary framework for the present state and coming future of AR entitled, The 40 Ideas That Will Change Augmented Reality, which documents and prescribes possibilities, proposing an articulation of a new language of AR.
Open Access
Me, Myself, and Interface: The Role of Affordances in Digital Visual Self-Representational Practices
(2015-08-28) McArthur, Victoria Marie; Jenson, Jennifer, Dr.
A growing number of digital games and virtual worlds allow users to create a virtual self, commonly referred to as an ‘avatar.’ Essentially, the avatar is a digital entity which is controlled by the user to attain agency within the virtual world. Avatars are visually customized by users via interfaces, referred to within the body of this work as Character Creation Interfaces (CCIs). CCIs are often framed as tools that are utilized by players to create a desired avatar. In other words, the popular approach is one that is anthropocentric in nature and neglects to take into account the ways in which interface affordances - the action possibilities afforded by an artifact - potentially constrain our interactions with them. In my dissertation, I argue that CCIs co-construct avatars with players. I mobilize Actor-Network Theory in order to re-position these interfaces as actors, rather than benign tools in digital-visual self-representational practices. In order to investigate the interface-as-actor I present an analytical framework: the Avatar Affordances Framework, and apply this framework to 20 CCIs in order to systematically study their affordances. In the second phase of this investigation, I present data on two user studies: the first, a within-subjects study investigating self-representational practices in the Massively-Multiplayer-Onlne-Game (MMOG) Rift (n = 39), the other, a between-subjects study of self-representational practices on the Nintendo WiiU console's MiiCreator (n = 24). Results of these two studies are presented alongside analytical data derived from both interfaces via the Avatar Affordances Framework in order to illustrate how interface affordances are negotiated by players. A final study, an autoethnographic chapter, situates myself within the dissertation as both a researcher and user of the technology, addressing how my own experiences with these games, and my own self-representational practices, have come to shape this research. Data from the aforementioned studies was then utilized in order to generate a list of best practices for game developers. To date, such documentation is absent from game design literature. It is my hope that the practices outlined herein help developers make design choices that invite opportunities for identity play without simultaneously creating socially exclusive spaces.
Open Access
Left Out: A Revealing Look Into the Everyday Fashion Choices of Individuals With Mobility Disabilities
(2015-12-16) Thompson, Emma Katelin; MacLennan, Anne
Based on interviews with individuals with mobility disabilities, this thesis argues the lack of mainstream clothing available and the geriatric style of clothing often associated with physical disability is largely a result of the embedded notion that disability is a problem to be solved by the individual – a perspective influenced by the medical sociology of disability. As appearance plays a role in interactions, the stereotypes surrounding physical disability are perpetuated by an appearance that cannot be changed due to the absence of clothing one might desire to wear.
Open Access
Pathways to the Eighth Fire: Mapping Indigenous Knowledge in Toronto
(2015-12-16) Johnson, Jon James; McNab, David T.
A considerable body of scholarly research now accords with long-held Indigenous prophecy in affirming the ongoing importance of Indigenous knowledge for the health and wellness of contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and their environments. Yet, while much research has examined Indigenous knowledge and traditions in more natural or rural contexts, there has been to date very little examination of the presence and character of Indigenous knowledge and traditions in more urban contexts. This dissertation redresses this gap in the research via an analysis of Indigenous knowledge, traditions, and storytelling in Toronto and their prophetic implications for contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The analysis is based on a comparative literature review of Indigenous knowledge, traditions, and community as they have been practiced in urban and non-urban locales, long-term participation within Toronto’s Indigenous community particularly as a tour guide for the highly-regarded community-based Great ‘Indian’ Bus Tour of Toronto, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a small group of Anishinaabe Torontonians regarding their perceptions of the city and the practice of urban Indigenous knowledge and traditions. These lines of investigation revealed that land-based urban Indigenous knowledge and storytelling traditions are practiced in at least some cities like Toronto in ways that exhibit significant similarities and continuities with those practiced in non-urban locales. Land-based stories of Toronto’s Indigenous heritage shared among Indigenous Torontonians portray Toronto as a traditional Indigenous territory, promote life – and land – affirming connections to places in the city and the development of a cosmopolitan ethics of place that may constitute a significant pathway to the Eighth Fire of Anishinaabe prophecy.
Open Access
Turkey's Internal Other: Embodiments of TASRA in the Works of Orhan Pamuk, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Fatih Akin
(2015-12-16) Ozselcuk, Evren; Tschofen, Monique
In Turkey, the concept of taşra connotes much more than its immediate spatial meaning as those places outside of the city center(s). Its extensive circulation as a trope that indicates externality to modernity is inextricably linked to the specific configurations of the project of Turkish modernization. In this dissertation, I draw from the insights of postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis to develop a novel conceptualization of taşra, through which I interpret Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order. I argue that a close analysis of the dominant discourses on taşra is revealing, for it constitutes one primary site where the predicaments and contradictions of Turkish modernization and national identity-constitution are played out, where collective anxieties around these issues continue to be projected and managed. In my analysis of these discourses, I adopt a deconstructive rather than a corrective approach: my objective is not to reveal what taşra “really” is but what work it is made to do. The contemporary cinematic and literary texts that I engage with in this study are the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005), Turkish-German director Fatih Akın’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) and three films by the pioneer of the new genre of taşra films in Turkey, Nuri Bilge Ceylan—namely Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). Through close readings of these texts, I illustrate how each complicates, affirms and/or expands received understandings of taşra that celebrate and/or denounce it as being culturally, spatially and temporally external to modernity.
Open Access
Network Narrative: Prose Narrative Fiction and Participatory Cultural Production in Digital Information and Communication Networks
(2015-12-16) Meurer, David Michael; Fisher, Caitlin
In this study of prose narrative created explicitly for participatory network communications environments I argue that network narratives constitute an important, born-networked form of literary and cultural expression. In the first half of the study I situate network narratives within a rich, dynamic process of reciprocity and codependence between the technological, material and formal properties of communication media on the one hand, and the uses of these media in cultural practices and forms of expression on the other. I point out how the medial and cultural flows that characterize contemporary network culture promote a codependent relation between narrative and information. This relation supports literary cultural expressions that invoke everyday communication practices increasingly shaped by mobile, networked computing devices. In the second half of this study, I extend theoretical work in the field of electronic literature and digital media to propose a set of four characteristics through which network narratives may be understood as distinct modes of networked, literary cultural expression. Network narratives, I suggest, are multimodal, distributed, participatory, and emergent. These attributes are present in distinct ways, within distinct topological layers of the narratives: in the story, discourse, and character networks of the narrative structure; in the formal and navigational structures; and in the participatory circuits of production, circulation and consumption. Attending to these topological layers and their interrelationships by using concepts derived from graph theory and network analysis offers a methodology that links the particular, closely read attributes and content of network narratives to a more distant understanding of changing patterns in broader, networked cultural production. Finally, I offer readings of five examples of network narratives. These include Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s Flight Paths, Penguin Books and De Montfort University’s collaborative project A Million Penguins, the Apple iOS application The Silent History, Tim Burton’s collaboration with TIFF, BurtonStory, and a project by NFB Interactive, Out My Window. Each of these works incorporates user participation into its production circuits using different strategies, each with different implications for narrative and navigational structures. I conclude by describing these distinct strategies as additive participation – participation that becomes embedded within the work itself – and delineating different approaches that are employed independently or in combination by the authors and producers.
Open Access
One Nation Under the Market: Mediated Narratives of the 2008 Crisis in America
(2015-12-16) Curran, Michael Gregory; Bailey, Steven C.
This dissertation examines the construction of the 2008 economic crisis in American media through a comparative analysis of three case studies, each involving a different medium and each involving a distinct implied public. I have approached this subject from a rhetorically-inclined hermeneutical and phenomenological perspective that conceptualizes texts as manifestations of symbolic practices which reflect social reality as well as construct it, and I explore how the texts of each case study simultaneously reflect and conjure both the 2008 crisis and their imagined publics. In order to explore the some of the various ways the 2008 crisis has been constructed in American media, this research deploys three primary lines of investigation: the examination of radio broadcasts of speeches by American presidents during the crisis, the analysis of a selection of documentary and fictional films on or related to the crisis, and the evaluation of periodical articles from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The findings of the research reveal that the three case studies examined offer particularly distinct and elastic depictions of the 2008 crisis. The presidential radio addresses depicted the crisis in a predominantly metaphorical manner as a painful event experienced by a national public through their rhetorical invocation of a particular and patriotic mytho-ideological imaginary of America and its history. The films portrayed the crisis primarily as the dramatic unfolding of a traumatic narrative, emphasizing the character-driven nature of this dramatic unfolding and frequently highlighting the moral ambiguity of agents and characters. The periodical articles largely constructed the crisis as principally related to matters of governance, finance and economics in both its precipitation and in its assuagement or resolution, conspicuously paying scant attention to the affective dimensions of its impact. Collectively, the case studies evidence that the multiform and dynamic character of the depictions of the 2008 crisis in American media are significantly shaped by the combinative overlap of the particularity of the crisis as a complex and ambiguous phenomena, the dominant modes of address and distinct properties of each media type, and the particular implied publics to which each body of texts corresponded.
Open Access
Cultural Heritage and Representation in Jamaica: Broaching the Digital Age
(2015-12-16) Henry, Abigail Ruth-Ann; Coombe, Rosemary
This thesis discusses Jamaica’s cultural heritage management in the 21st century and questions how the country’s cultural heritage is represented in today’s digital age. Tracing the development of Jamaica’s cultural policies since the late-colonial period (beginning in the late 1930s), I consider the ways in which the state has managed cultural heritage historically and connect the evolution of theoretical understandings of heritage to explore evolving ideologies of policy and management. I then examine three digital cultural heritage projects in Jamaica to question their representation of heritage material to the local population and the wider world. I argue that these presentations of Jamaica’s cultural heritage illustrate a 21st century neoliberal interplay of cultural heritage, nationalism, and economic development. The projects put forward a restricted and exclusive form of heritage knowledge which re-inscribes historical inequalities. I conclude that cultural heritage organizations and policymakers must incorporate participatory methods to leverage digital technologies to ameliorate ongoing issues of hegemonic representation.