Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Popular culture – United States. United States – Social conditions'
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Hopkins, Susan. "Pop heroines and female icons : youthful femininity and popular culture." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1999.
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The thesis suggests much feminist theorising on girls' and young women's relationship to popular culture is limited by a 'moral-political' approach which searches for moral and
political problems and solutions in the consumption of popular images of femininity. The thesis offers a critique of such 'moral-political' interpretations of the relationship between youthful femininity and popular culture. Following thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and
Jean Baudrillard, the thesis opposes the political preoccupation with 'reality' and 'truth'. The study follows Nietzsche's and Baudrillard's notion of the 'Eternal-Feminine' which accepts the necessity of illusion, deception and appearances. Through a close textual
analysis of magazines, films, television and music video, this study offers an aesthetic appreciation of popular culture representations of femininity. The thesis comprises six essays, the first of which explains my Nietzschean inspired aesthetic approach in more detail. The second essay looks at images and discourses of supermodels and model femininity in women's magazines. The third looks at image-based forms of 'girl power' from Madonna to
the Spice Girls. The fourth essay examines the 'Cool Chics' of the pay TV channel TVJ,from Wonder Woman to Xena: Warrior Princess. The fifth essay, 'Gangster Girls: From
Goodfellas to Pulp Fiction' considers the 1990s model of the femme fatale, the bad girl who thrives on moral chaos. The final essay 'Celebrity Skin: From Courtney Love to Kylie
Minogue' suggests some of the most powerful feminine role models of our time have built their careers not on notions of authenticity and truth but rather on the successful management of illusion and fantasy. The essay argues that our social world has outgrown the traditional
moral-political approach which aims to lead girls and young women from 'deceptive''immoral' appearances to moral, 'authentic' 'reality'. The pleasures of popular culture, Isuggest, cannot always be linked to deep meanings but may be drawn from superficial appearances and beautiful surfaces.
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Belsaas, Matthew W. "The death of the big rig cowboy culture." Virtual Press, 2007. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1365174.
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This creative project documents the effects of deregulation on the trucking industry. Through the use of DVD, the viewer learns all about the culture of trucking and the way it has changed in the past 30 years since deregulation. In August of 2006, I logged over 4,000 miles speaking with four different drivers. The result is a DVD consisting of a documentary, video short stories, photo journals, audio recordings and a flash card game, teaching the viewer about the trucking culture.Department of Telecommunications
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Johnson, Alfred B. "Fascination machine : a study of pop music, mass mediation, and cultural iconography." Virtual Press, 1998. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1185429.
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The mediation of popular musicians in the twentieth century results in the construction of cultural formations-mass mediated pop musician icons-that are, to various degrees, weighted down by the ideologies and concerns of those who receive them as mediated texts. In passing judgment on these cultural icons, the public engages in a massive act of reading, and in the process the icons become sites of personal and cultural signification. This study examines the nature of signification in and through mass mediated popular music icons by exploring the processes by which popular music icons are produced, circulated, and read as texts; and it examines, when appropriate, the significant content of these icons.
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Scharff, Virginia Joy. "Reinventing the wheel: American women and the automobile in the early car culture." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184279.
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This dissertation examines the interplay between gender ideology, women's actions, and automotive technology in the United States from the beginning of the automotive era through the 1920's. Looking at cultural ideology as a strong yet fragmented and malleable historical force, I have analyzed the effect of popular conceptions of masculinity and femininity on the design, marketing, and use of automobiles. At the same time, I have attempted to show how motorcars, often employed as vehicles of social ideals, promoted some reinterpretation of men's and women's proper roles and places. The auto indeed served as a focus for discourse about the contingent relation between social and political emancipation. While some observers expected the automobile to liberate women from domesticity and subordination, others insisted on the congruence between automobility and domestic life. Though some women would use cars as tools of social or political nonconformity, the auto ultimately transformed and extended women's spatial and temporal province, while preserving the home as the ideal hub of women's activities. Still, the car culture revision of gender ideology had profound consequences for the way the private family car would emerge as a primary transportation mode, facilitating new manners and morals, new commercial and political possibilities, and a revolution in urban development.
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Jozajtis, Krzysztof. "Religion and film in American culture : the birth of a nation." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1501.
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This research addresses an emerging scholarship examining relations between media, religion, and culture in contemporary society. Whilst it acknowledges the value of this growing body of work, the study is based on a recognition that an overwhelming concern with the contemporary scene has resulted in a neglect of the history responsible for the conditions of the present. Given the prominence of America as both a source and an object of this scholarship, moreover, the particular national context in which the institutions and practices of the US media have developed has been taken for granted somewhat. Oriented towards these perceived lacunae, this thesis examines the interaction between religion and film as an influence upon the development of American culture in the twentieth-century. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first of these is devoted to an extended discussion of the scholarly background to the research, and argues that the historical dimension of the interrelationship between religion and film in America is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In particular, it stresses the fundamental importance of religion within the discourse of national identity in the United States, and posits the notion of a non-denominational American civil religion as a useful theoretical tool with which to examine Hollywood as a distinctively 'American' form of cinema. Part Two develops this position through a case study of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and one of the most famous films of all time. Discussing the picture as a response to a crisis in American Protestantism, the study argues that the race controversy prompted by its Southern viewpoint was, to some extent, a function of Griffith's ambitions to revive the traditional religious bases of U.S. national identity via the medium of film. Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of Birth helped enact a broader transformation of American culture, wherein the cinema became instrumental in sustaining the belief that the United States was a nation uniquely favoured by Providence.
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Keith, RuAnn. "Constructing professionalism reifying the historical inevitability of commercialization in mass media communication /." Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/communication_diss/16/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2009.Ted Friedman, committee chair; Alisa Perren, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, David Cheshier, Deron Boyles, committee members. Title from title page (Digital Archive@GSU, viewed June 22, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-305).
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Mirza, Hala. "Stories about Culture, Education, and Literacy of Immigrant Graduate Students and Their Familes." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062873/.
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Every year many immigrant families become members of United States communities. Among these are international graduate students whose lives and identities, as well as those of their families, are changed as they negotiate between cultures and experiences. In this study, three Saudi graduate students share their stories about culture, education and literacy. This research employs narrative inquiry to answer the following question: What stories do Saudi immigrant students tell regarding their educational beliefs and experiences, as well as the experiences of their children in the U.S. and in Saudi Arabia? The participants' interview texts are the main data source. The three-dimensional narrative inquiry spaces of temporality, sociality, and place help identify the funds of knowledge in place throughout these narratives. Data analysis uses funds of knowledge as a theoretical lens to make visible the critical events in each narrative. These events point to themes that support the creation of a third space in which the participants negotiate being in two cultures as well as their storying across time to understand their own experiences. Themes of facing challenges, problem solving, adaptation, and decision-making connect these stories and support the discussion of findings within the personal, practical, and social justifications for this narrative inquiry. The participants' negotiation of being in two cultures as revealed here serves as a resource for educators in understanding the instructional needs of immigrant families. The findings also have the potential to contribute to changing existing misconceptions about this minority group and other immigrant groups. In a rapidly growing global community as the United States, such narratives provide insights that invite personal understandings and connections among diverse people.
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Smith, Shahriyar. "Contexts of Reception and Constructions of Islam: Second Generation Muslim Immigrants in Post-9/11 America." PDXScholar, 2017. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3766.
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The World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 fundamentally transformed the context of reception for Muslim immigrants in the U.S., shifting it from neutral to negative while also brightening previously blurred boundaries between established residents and the Muslim minority. This study explores how second-generation Muslim immigrants have experienced and reacted to post-9/11 contexts of reception. It is based on an analysis of ten semi-structured in-depth interviews that were conducted throughout the Portland Metropolitan Area from January to April of 2016. It finds experiences of discrimination to be primarily affected by two factors: public institutions and gender. It also finds, furthermore, that research participants react to negative post-9/11 contexts of reception by redrawing bright boundaries to include themselves within the American mainstream. Because Islam itself has become politicized within post-9/11 contexts of reception, this study also explores how second-generation Muslim immigrants construct and maintain religious meaning as a form of political identity. It finds that research participants unilaterally construct a Localized Islam that is dynamic and variable in its response to familial and social pressures. The thesis concludes by putting forward a typology outlining its four primary forms of localization within contemporary social and political environments.
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McMillan, Rachel K. "POPULAR MEDIA AND SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE: INTERPRETING RECENT HISTORICAL TRENDS IN INTERMARRIAGE." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/573.
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This thesis is about measuring social acceptance of the American public on the increasing trend of intermarriage in the United States. It outlines U.S. Census data in the areas of population, educational attainment, regional data, and marriage data. It analyzes popular and influential media from 1960 to 2011 including: marriage of Guy Smith and Peggy Rusk, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Star Trek, Jungle Fever, The Joy Luck Club, and modern television shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, Modern Family, and New Girl.
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Greenfield, Lawrence Frederic. "Toys, children, and the toy industry in a culture of consumption, 1890-1991." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1247843037.
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Choi, Sungkyu. "Cross-cultural attitudes toward deaf culture in a multi- and singular cultural society : a survey of residential school based teachers for the deaf who are deaf and hearing." Virtual Press, 1995. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/941571.
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During the past few years, Deaf culture has emerged as an important philosophy that could lead to a radical restructuring of Deaf education methods. The purpose of this study was to determine attitudes concerning Deaf culture from teachers of residential based schools for the Deaf who are Deaf and Hearing.Prior to initiating direct contact with the teachers, the superintendents or principals of the selected residential schools were contacted via mail, and their permission secured. In the United States, 279 teachers (69 teachers who are Deaf, 210 teachers who are Hearing) from seven midwest residential based schools for the Deaf and in South Korea 310 teachers (26 teachers who are Deaf, 284 teachers who are Hearing) from all eleven residential based schools for the Deaf participated.Two-factor ANOVA procedures with repeated measures on one factor were utilized to analyze the teachers' attitudes toward Deaf culture in America and South Korea from a 30-question survey using a five-point Likert scale.This study concluded that: (a) Deaf culture was a subculture in mainstream society whether it was a multi- or singular cultural society--although attitudes toward Deaf culture were accepted more negatively in a singular society than those in a multi-cultural society; (b) Deaf culture was accepted by teachers of schools for the Deaf who are Deaf more readily than those who are Hearing in both multi- or singular cultural societies; and (c) there was no significant correlation between attitudes of teachers who were employed at different levels of instruction, such as elementary and middle or secondary school.Department of Special Education
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Bentley, Jon Alexander. "A Question of Queerness: Case Studies of Contemporary American Television." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4900/.
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This project utilizes a case study approach to explore the various ways in which the portrayals of gay people have changed on American television. Three contemporary programs - Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The L Word - are examined as examples of how far American television has progressed in terms of treating gay people with respect. Whether those shows move beyond merely presenting gay characters and into a level of actively challenging mainstream views on gay people is also examined. Findings suggest different factors affect the ability of the individual programs to test said views - including the genres to which each belongs, and their presence on network television (Will & Grace), basic cable (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) or premium cable (The L Word). While all three programs show some tendencies toward queerness, they also take steps toward negotiating with mainstream culture, indicating that complete queerness may be an unattainable goal on American television.
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Lua, Angel Granillo. "HISTORY THAT HEMORRHAGES: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE CROSSING, SIMULACRA, AND THE RHETORIC OF VIOLENCE." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2018. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/636.
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Recollecting the history of the United States, which is inextricably entangled with westward expansionism (Manifest Destiny) and the construction of borders, is also a complex and troubling reexamination of the American identity itself. This is evident in critical perspectives that analyze our violent past and the narratives that continue to govern not only contemporary culture but also the academic sphere as Native scholars have been proposing over the last twenty years. However, what remains vital to this conversation is how to better include the narratives and voices from both native peoples and Mexicans—especially in the southwest borderlands—which also counteract the dominant narratives mentioned above. However, these alternate narratives can be affirmed and authorized as crucial histories by utilizing Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and at the same time, act as a form of resistance. By reevaluating three crucial moments in The Crossing, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and employing a heuristic I will call the rhetoric of violence, I hope to highlight the importance of such marginalized narratives and the voices that occupy them in American history.
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Gonzales, Melinda Arteaga. "Performing Culture, Performing Me: Exploring Textual Power through Rehearsal and Performance." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4965/.
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This thesis project explores Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of a new mestiza consciousness, in which the marginalized ethnic American woman transcends her Otherness, breaks down the borders between her different identities, and creates a Thirdspace. Through the rehearsal and performance process, three ethnic American women employed Robert Scholes' model of textuality-the consumption and production of texts-as a framework to construct a new mestiza consciousness, and create a Thirdspace. The project set to determine what strategies were significant rehearsal techniques for encouraging the cast members to exercise textual power and claim a new mestiza identity, a Thirdspace. The results reveal four overarching factors involved in assuming textual power through rehearsal and performance in the production-building trust, having appropriate skills, assuming ownership and responsibility, and overcoming performance anxiety. The discussion addresses the direct link between Thirdspace and Scholes' notion of production of original texts.
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Foxen, Patricia. "K'iche' Maya in a re-imagined world : transnational perspectives on identity." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38191.
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Over the past two decades, large-scale transnational migrations between Central America and the United States have had a significant impact upon both home and host societies. In Guatemala, cross-border movement was spawned by the brutal civil war that devastated many indigenous communities in the early 1980s. Over time, this flow resulted in the formation of complex transnational networks and identities that span home and host locations. This thesis examines the manners in which a community of K'iche' Indians straddled between the highlands of El Quiche, Guatemala and an industrial New England city have responded to the deterritorialization caused by the confluence of violence and displacement. It describes, on the one hand, the context of post-war reconstruction in El Quiche, which is shaped by a fragile institutional peace process and an emerging ethnopolitical movement that emphasizes a pan-Maya identity. On the other hand, it depicts an inner-city space in the US where K'iche' labor migrants lead hidden, marginal lives, seeking to obscure any overt form of collective organization or identity. By examining the flows of people, money, commodities and symbols between these contrasting environments, the thesis shows how K'iche's in both communities maintain concrete and imaginary connections with each other despite the many ruptures caused by violence and dislocation. The thesis also teases out the manners in which today's cross-border movements, which involve ever larger distances, absences, and cash inflows, are both inscribed in, and differ from, previous local strategies of, and discourses on, internal movement and migration within Guatemala, which have long formed part of K'iche' culture. Specifically, it shows how K'iche's draw on their "mobile" past in order to maintain a sense of continuity in the present and elaborate viable identities and strategies for the future. Overall, the thesis argues that the multiplicity of strategies and discourses developed b
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Djavadzadeh, Keivan. "Wild women don't have the blues : genre, race et sexualité dans le rap féminin états-unien." Thesis, Paris 8, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PA080063.
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De toutes les musiques populaires contemporaines, le rap, né dans le South Bronx à New York vers le milieu des années 1970, est probablement celle que l’on associe le plus communément à l’expression d’un discours masculin misogyne. Les rappeuses elles-mêmes décrivent fréquemment le rap comme un environnement masculin voire hostile aux femmes. Pourtant, depuis 1979, plusieurs générations de rappeuses ont fait le choix d’investir cet espace, écoulant des dizaines de millions de disques et participant de manière significative au développement de cette musique, sans être reconnues à la hauteur de leur contribution la plupart du temps. Cette thèse, inscrite au croisement de la science politique et des sciences de l’information et de la communication, s’intéresse à la façon dont des femmes noires des classes populaires négocient leur place dans une industrie dominée par les hommes. Grâce au rap, elles accèdent à une forme de visibilité sociale dans l’espace public qui leur permet de faire entendre un discours sur le genre, la race et la sexualité à rebours des représentations hégémoniques. La représentation étant un principe organisateur des relations sociales réelles, l’analyse du discours des rappeuses aide à mieux comprendre la façon dont se constituent et sont contestées les normes de genre, de race et de sexualité aux États-Unis. Le rap est aujourd’hui l’un des principaux lieux de (re)production de ces normes, et le terrain d’une guerre de position culturelle à propos des différentes idéologies de genre et de race. Dans le rap, des artistes femmes performent leur genre et leur race et construisent autrement leur identité, loin des modèles dominants de la féminitéOf all popular music genres, rap – a music born in the South Bronx in New York in the mid-1970s – is the one most commonly linked to a masculine and misogynistic discourse. Even female rappers often describe the genre as a male-dominated and even hostile environment. Still, numerous female rappers have entered this space since 1979, selling millions of records and contributing to the development of this genre, even though they usually don’t get the recognition they deserve. At the crossroads of political science and media studies, this study focuses on how working-class, black women find success in a male-dominated industry and reach social visibility in the public sphere. In their lyrics, female rappers openly discuss gender, race and sexuality and dispute hegemonic representations. Because representation is an organizing principle of social relations, a study of female rappers’ discourse provides us with a better understanding of the way norms of gender, race and sexuality are constituted – and challenged – through rap music. Rap is now one of the main spaces where these norms are (re)produced. It is the battlefield of an ongoing "war of position" involving ideologies of gender and race. In this space, black women express gender and race through performance and negotiate their identity far from the traditional gender norms
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de, Wasseige Mathieu. "A critical analysis of ideological narratives in contemporary US network television series." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209843.
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This critical study unveils the ideological underpinning of contemporary network series narratives through a thematic approach combined with the analysis of the strategies of representation that support the ideological inclination of the series/Cette analyse critique dévoile l'idéologie sous-jacente des séries télévisées contemporaines des networks américains par une approche thématique combinée à une analyse des stratégies de représentations qui appuient la tendance idéologique de ces sériesDoctorat en Langues et lettres
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Tyson, Elizabeth P. "Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Subversive Storytelling from the Bunchgrass Edge of the World." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/467.
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Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming short story collections, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, tell regional stories that push against the myths surrounding the American West. Elements of Naturalism in her work reverse the paradigm of man’s dominance over the frontier. The cyclical nature of time in her stories shows the unfulfilling nature of nostalgia. She uses folk storytelling techniques to take an insider’s perspective and to utilize the subversive nature of dark humor.
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Cashion, Katherine. "The Icon Formation of Ruby Bridges Within Hegemonic Memory of the Civil Rights Movement." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1407.
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In 1960, when Ruby Bridges was six-years-old, she desegregated the formerly all white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. This thesis traces her formation as a Civil Rights icon and how her icon narratives are influenced by, perpetuate, or challenge hegemonic memory of the Civil Rights Movement. The hegemonic narrative situates the Civil Rights Movement as a triumphant moment of the past, and is based upon the belief that it abolished institutionalized racism, leaving us in a world where lingering prejudice is the result of the failings of individuals. Analysis of narratives about Ruby Bridges by Norman Rockwell, Robert Coles, and Bridges herself show that there is a consistent shift over time in which the icon narratives conform to and reinforce the hegemonic narrative. These icon narratives situate Bridges’ story as a historical account of the past that teaches lessons of how to combat instances of interpersonal racism through kindness and tolerance, and obscures Bridges’ lived experience. These reductive stories demonstrate just how powerful the hegemonic narrative is and create a comforting morality tale that pervades dominant culture and prevents us from understanding and finding ways to combat the institutionalized racism and inequality that still exists within the United States.
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Miller, Heather L. "Under the Shadow of the Awful Gallows-Tree: The Murder Trials of Thomas Dula and Ann Melton as a Case Study in Gender and Power in Reconstruction Era Western North Carolina." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2518.
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This is a micro-history that explores everyday life on a small scale by tracing the common, if elusive lives of Thomas Dula, Ann Melton, and Laura Foster, and the communities they lived in, to explore the culture in which they lived—and died. Reactions to the murder unleashed an outpouring of discourse embedded in broader, national debates concerning gender roles. The dominant cultural theme that emerged from the murder trials as reflected in middle-class newspapers maintained that true women did not kill and real men acted as gentlemen and defenders of women’s honor. The project mines a wealth of primary source material: court documents, population censuses, and newspapers. By examining the discourse surrounding Tom Dula’s execution and Ann Melton’s acquittal for the murder of Laura Foster it illuminates the murder narrative as a public forum for discussing gender roles and power in 1860s America.
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Campbell, Christopher Darnell. "A stylistic analysis of 2pac Shakur's rap lyrics: In the perpspective of Paul Grice's theory of implicature." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2130.
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Alvarez, Luis Alberto. "The power of the zoot : race, community, and resistance in American youth culture, 1940-1945 /." Thesis, Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3008265.
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Louckx, Audrey. "Empowering voices: testimonial literature and social justice in contemporary American culture." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209257.
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Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
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Costa, Jennifer Marie, and Maria Lorena Ochoa. "Acculturation among a Hispanic population in San Bernardino County." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2523.
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The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between Hispanics and their levels of acculturation. This study's intent was to incorporate variables in order to identify generation and language as defining factors for acculturation. A Likert-type Bidemensional Acculturation Scale for Hispanics (BAS) was used to test six hypotheses.
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Goldberger, Stephanie. "Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles: Strengthening Their Ethnic Identity Through Chivas USA." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/307.
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A large Mexican-American population already exists in Los Angeles and, with each generation, it continues to rise. This Mexican-American community has maintained its connection to its heritage by playing and watching soccer, Mexico’s top watched sport. In this thesis, I analyze how Major League Soccer's Chivas USA serves as an outlet through which many Mexicans in Los Angeles have developed their ethnic identities. Since the early twentieth century, Mexicans in Los Angeles have created separate residential communities and sports organizations to strengthen their connections with one another.
To appeal to Mexican-Americans, Chivas USA has branded itself closely to its sister team Chivas Guadalajara of Mexico. I explore how Chivas USA's Mexican-American fans have responded to the team's arrival in Los Angeles by forming three different supporter groups — Legion 1908, Union Ultras, and Black Army 1850. By interviewing members of the Union Ultras and Black Army 1850, I learned their beliefs towards a range of issues, including: why they support Chivas USA rather than the Los Angeles Galaxy and how they view the poor representation of Mexican-American players on the United States National Soccer Team. As I conclude, these supporter groups have increased in number and diversity as Chivas USA has grown in popularity. To increase its Mexican-American fan base and to sustain professional soccer in Los Angeles, Chivas USA should relocate to a new stadium for the Major League Soccer's 2013 season and consider rebranding its name to "Chivas Los Angeles."
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Pagano, Jennifer Hoolhorst. "The evolution of Sunset Magazine's cooking department: The accommodation of men's and women's cooking in the 1930s." Scholarly Commons, 2019. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/3575.
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The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that were progressive and less structured. Lane's new strategy to compartmentalize Sunset's content into its four categories—gardening, the home, cooking, and travel—resulted in a magazine that was conventionally gendered. Tension due to this shift played out in the publication's new cooking department. This thesis traces the development of Sunset's cooking department between 1928 and 1938 under the direction of its creator and founding editor Genevieve Callahan through the examination and analysis of Sunset cooking features and oral histories. The original department, structured to model a middle-class domestic ideology, did not accommodate all of Sunset's readers. The Western intellectualism of pre-Lane readers and their tendency to be less bound by conventional gender roles in the kitchen carried over into Sunset's cooking department via reader recipe contributions. These Western cooks included men and women whose foodways deviated from that of the typical middle-class housewife. Callahan experimented throughout the cooking department's first decade by shifting its editorial framework and softening her home economics rigidity to create a department that was inclusive of women and men who cooked both inside and outside the kitchen. The changes made to the department over that decade illustrate how editorial experimentation reconciled a new middle-class-oriented cooking department to accommodate Western cooks less apt to model traditional gender roles.
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Senger, Saesha. "Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, and Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio at the End of the Twentieth Century." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/music_etds/150.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the associated music – was an important, if overlooked or even trivialized, arena in which these shifting gender dynamics played out. This dissertation explores the significance of the Adult Contemporary format at the end of the twentieth century through analysis of chart performance, artist image, musical works, marketing, and contextual factors. By documenting these relevant social, political, economic, and musical factors, the notable role of a format and of artists neglected by scholars becomes clear.
I explore these issues in the form of lengthy case studies. Examinations of how Adult Contemporary artists such as Michael Bolton, Wilson Phillips, Matchbox Twenty, David Gray, and Mariah Carey were produced and marketed, and how their music was disseminated, illustrate record and radio industry strategies for negotiating the musical, political, and social climate of this period. Significantly, musical and lyrical analyses of songs successful on AC stations, and many of their accompanying promotional videos highlight messages about musical genre, gender, race, and age. This dissertation ultimately demonstrates that Adult Contemporary-oriented music figured significantly in the culture wars, second and third wave feminism, expressions of masculinity, Generation-X struggles, postmodern identity, and market segmentation.
This study also illustrates how the record and radio industries have managed audience composition and behavior to effectively and more predictably produce and market music in the United States. This dissertation argues that, amid broader social determinations for taste, the record industry, radio programmers, and Billboard chart compilers and writers have helped to make and reinforce certain assumptions about who listens to which music and why they do so. In addition, critics have weighed in on what different musical genres and artists have offered and for whom, often assigning higher value to music associated with certain genres, socio-political associations, and listeners while claiming over-commercialization, irrelevance, aesthetic insignificance, and bad taste for much other music.
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Edmundson, Joshua R. "THE ONE EXHIBITION THE ROOTS OF THE LGBT EQUALITY MOVEMENT ONE MAGAZINE & THE FIRST GAY SUPREME COURT CASE IN U.S. HISTORY 1943-1958." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/399.
Full textAbstract:
The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.
Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage in and encourage hateful and discriminatory practices against the LGBT community. Then, when the magazine was banned by the Post Office, the editors and staff took the federal government to court. As such, ONE, Incorporated v. Olesen became the first Supreme Court case in U.S. history that featured the taboo subject of homosexuality, and secured the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech for the gay press. Thus, ONE magazine and its founders were an integral part of a small group of activists who established the foundations of the modern LGBT equality movement.
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Swanson, Joshua. "Talk This Way: A Look at the Historical Conversation Between Hip-Hop and Christianity." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3810.
Full textAbstract:
Christianity and Hip-Hop culture are often said to be at odds with one another. One is said to promote a lifestyle of righteousness and love, while the other is said to promote drugs, violence, and pride. As a result, the public has portrayed these two institutions as conflicting with no willingness to resolve their perceived differences. This paper will argue that there has always been a healthy conversation between Hip-Hop and Christianity since Hip-Hop’s inception. Using sources like Hip-Hop lyrics, theologians, historians, autobiographies, sermons, and articles that range from Ma$e to Tipper Gore, this paper will look at the conversation between Hip-Hop and Christianity that has been ongoing for decades. This thesis will show why that conversation is essential for the church and necessary for Hip-Hop artists to express themselves fully. This paper will show rap and Hip-Hop culture to be a complex institution with its own theology, history, and prophets – that uses its own voice to express how urban youth view not only their lives but also how God and the church are present in their lives.
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D'Souza, Ryan Arron. "Arab hip-hop and politics of identity : intellectuals, identity and inquilab." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/5849.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Opposing the culture of différance created through American cultural media, this thesis argues, Arab hip-hop artists revive the politically conscious sub-genre of hip-hop with the purpose of normalising their Arab existence. Appropriating hip-hop for a cultural protest, Arab artists create for themselves a sub-genre of conscious hip-hop – Arab-conscious hip-hop and function as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, involved in better representation of Arabs in the mainstream. Critiquing power dynamics, Arab hip-hop artists are counter-hegemonic in challenging popular identity constructions of Arabs and revealing to audiences biases in media production and opportunities for progress towards social justice. Their identity (re)constructions maintain difference while avoiding Otherness. The intersection of Arab-consciousness through hip-hop and politics of identity necessitates a needed cultural protest, which in the case of Arabs has been severely limited. This thesis progresses by reviewing literature on politics of identity, Arabs in American cultural media, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and conscious hip-hop. Employing criticism, this thesis presents an argument for Arab hip-hop group, The Arab Summit, as organic intellectuals involved in mainstream representation of the Arab community.
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Keen, Rusti Leigh. ""Look West," Says the Post: The Promotion of the American Far West in the 1920s Saturday Evening Post." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3087.
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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This thesis will look at the various images of the American Far West presented by the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer, and will examine his editorial strategy that promoted the Far West as a last land of opportunity while also recognizing and weighing in on the challenges of that region.
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Horton, Janell M. "Exploring the cultural experiences of family case managers : an interpretative phenomenological analysis." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/4034.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This study explored the lived experiences of family case managers who routinely work with families who are culturally different from themselves. The purpose was to understand and interpret the meaning of culture and cultural difference as it relates to the engagement process with families. The research also sought to understand whether cultural insensitivity or bias may contribute to the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system. The author conducted 10 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with graduates of a large, research-intensive Midwestern university’s Title-IV-E Social Work Program, who also were employed as family case managers in public child welfare. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and the analytic process of the hermeneutic circle. Results suggest the concept of culture is a complex term that encompasses many characteristics and a number of dimensions. In addition, four themes were identified as underlying the engagement process with culturally different families. These themes routinely overlapped, and family case managers often had to attend to each of the thematic areas simultaneously. At nearly every step in the engagement process, family case managers modulated their interactions in order to find balance and stability in their relationship with the family. Finally, poverty was revealed to be the most salient cultural difference in working with families involved in the child welfare system. These results have important implications for social work education, child welfare practice, and research on the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system.
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Karim. "Leaving the bridge, passing the shelters : understanding homeless activism through the utilization of spaces within the Central Public Library and the IUPUI Library in Indianapolis." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/5928.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)By definition, homelessness refers to general understanding of people without a home or a roof over their heads. As consequences of a number of factors, homelessness has become a serious problem especially in cities throughout the United States. Homeless people are usually most visible on the streets and in settings like shelters due to the fact that their presences and activities in public spaces are considered illegal or at least “unwanted” by city officials and by members of the public. In response to this issue, activists throughout the country have worked tiresly on behalf of homeless people to demand policy changes, an effort that resulted in the passage of the homeless bill of rights in three states, namely Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Illinois. As I discovered through my fieldwork, in Indiana, the homeless, themselves, are currently lobbying for passage of a similar measure. Locating my fieldwork on homelessness in Indianapolis in two sites, the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library (the Central Library) and the IUPUI Library, I examine the use of library buildings as alternative temporary shelters and spaces where the homeless can organize for political change. As an Indonesian ethnographer, I utilized an ethnographic approach, which helped me to reveal “Western values” and “American culture” as they play out in the context of homelessness. In this thesis, I show that there is a multi-sited configuration made up of issues, agents, institutions, and policy processes that converge in the context of the use of library buildings by the homeless. Finally, I conclude that public libraries and university libraries as well can play a more important role beyond their original functions by undertaking tangible actions, efforts, engagements, and interventions to act as allies to the homeless, who are among their most steadfast constituencies. By utilizing public university library facilities, the homeless are also finding their voices to call for justice, for better treatment, and for policies that can help ameliorate the hardship and disadvantages of homelessness.
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Harvey, Michael Joseph. "Seeing the supplements : a rhetorical visual analysis with fitness advertisements." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/5901.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This study uses a rhetorical visual analysis to investigate supplement advertisements within the top three fitness magazines, according to circulation, to provide a richer understanding of the message construction within the visual images the advertisements contain. The advertisements were selected at random over a time span of a year and a half within each of the magazines, totaling nine separate advertisements for analysis. The purpose of this study is to determine to what extent, if any, the construction of advertisements in men's fitness magazines operates as ideographic images establishing legitimacy as determined through application of Sonja Foss' rhetorical visual analysis methodology. Previous research has identified various analyses of visual images within the fitness culture, however, rhetorical visual analysis of supplement advertisement does not appear to have been investigated prior to this project which is the primary concern for the initiation of the current research. Employing rhetorical analysis in order to understand visual images provides a perspective that is imperative to identification of elements and functions of visual images. The current findings indicate that images in advertisements in men's fitness magazines do not establish rhetorical legitimacy, as understood from a rhetorical perspective. However, when examined through a traditional aesthetic intentionalist perspective, the construction of the advertisements operates as ideographic images, establishing legitimacy through the image. This information provides us with the understanding that advertisements within current muscle magazines are operating under a traditional viewpoint, and as such, produce traditional perspectives. The advertisement industry within this genre is reliant upon the consumer first knowing what the product is and then realizing how the image fits into that function. The limitation within this perspective of the advertisement industry is the consumer's knowledge base concerning the product, the product being explained through text and the time the consumer is willing to spend on correlating the intent or function with the images presented.
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Gullion, Christopher Scott. "Cultural tourism investment and resident quality of life : a case study of Indianapolis, Indiana." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3738.
Full textAbstract:
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)This thesis will explore issues concerning cultural tourism investment and resident quality of life in the Midwestern city of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is important to understand from a cultural tourism perspective how further attempts to grow and invest in tourism will affect resident perception of quality of life and future cultural tourism investment. To achieve this goal, data from the 2012 Indianapolis Quality of Life survey was statistically analyzed to specifically examine how residents' perceived quality of life affects cultural tourism investment. This allows for the study of what city-service attributes (i.e. safety, attractions, transportation, et cetera) identify as potential indicators of whether residents' perception of quality of life affects cultural tourism investment and if there were any correlations between demographic factors of age, gender, ethnicity, and household income with the perception that investing in cultural events and attractions for tourists is good for residents. Results indicated that several key city-service attributes identify as potential indicators of whether residents' perception of quality of life in Indianapolis affects residents' perceptions that investing in cultural tourism for tourists is good for residents. In addition, several key city-service attributes identified as potential indicators of residents' perception of quality of life in Indianapolis excluding perceptions of cultural tourism investment. Finally, results indicated that demographic factors of gender, age, ethnicity, and income were not significant when it came to affecting the perception that investing in cultural events and attractions for tourists is good for residents.