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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-256). Also available on the Internet.

Reality television programming chronicling the daily workings of multiple birth families within American culture has gained notoriety in recent years. Such programs, especially Discovery Health and TLC's 17, 18 Kids and Counting and TLC's Jon and Kate Plus Ei8ht, film, edit and broadcast the "everyday" life of these families. This research study focuses attention on hegemonic ideologies surrounding family values, motherhood, gender roles and religious faith, illuminated through textual and audience analysis. Working from an interdisciplinary approach combining feminist media and cultural studies, this study finds that hegemonic notions of family values, gender representations, religious faith and conceptions of motherhood are evident to varying degrees in the television texts and accepted by fans who negotiate their meanings online. / by Emily M. CIttadino. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation examines the relationship between the growth and popularization of psychology in American life in the postwar period and Americans’ belief that theirs is a “classless,” or overwhelmingly middle-class, society. I argue that psychology has, until recently, inadvertently naturalized middle-class norms of self-perception, communication, aspirations, and subjectivity. From the 1950s on, the United States has been what observers call a “therapeutic culture.” Psychological ideas have infused the major arenas of American life, including the educational, judicial, commercial, political, personal, and interpersonal realms. This project examines the origins and development of psychological professionals’ views of class, highlighting the professional, economic, disciplinary, and cultural factors that combined to form those views. I analyze a small but persistent thread of dialogue in the professional literature of the period that questioned mainstream psychological assumptions about class, and I explore how that impulse developed into major mental health policy initiatives in the 1960s, then was undermined by political and social conflicts. I also develop a case history of one mental health project that attempted to transcend psychology’s class biases, only to be contained by structural and disciplinary factors. After examining psychological professionals’ views of various publics, this project investigates a series of publics’ views of psychological practitioners. I draw on popular portrayals of postwar psychological practitioners across various media, including one particular working-class medium, postwar men’s adventure magazines, and employ classic cultural studies readings to analyze the significant differences in the portrayals. / text

While Black women are more visible in media and popular culture today, the range of their visibility remains narrow and in continuation within the dominant ideology concerning Black women within the U.S. The images that are presented discourage a full understanding of the conditions of the Black female experience and the ways these women are socially constituted within it (Newton & Rosenfelt 1985). This paper examines how the images of Black women are contradictory to the depressed socioeconomic status of Black women, how the show Girlfriends works to move beyond these images by expressing moments of the lived experience of Black women, and how Black women recognize their position within the oppressive institutional forces of the U.S. by negotiating their representations. / text

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New forms of tourism are on the rise where the incentive to travel is not primarily induced by a country’s heritage, but by mediatized narratives, characters and locations starring in products such as movies, comics and literature. This so-called contents tourism is considered promising by some, but the question is: who benefits? Europe is often understood as the old continent, a place with a rich history. Modern products capitalize on this sense of oldness and tell new narratives, providing Europe with new identities. These differing identities create challenges for cities and therefore demand to be mitigated. Utilizing the Japanese concept of contents tourism, this thesis aims to shed a light on the impact of these forms of tourism on city identities. This provides a better understanding on how interests, and entwined identities, challenge one another in European cities. Three case studies are employed: Harry Potter tourism in Oxford, tourism induced by the Millennium series in Stockholm and Twilight tourism in the Italian city of Volterra. It argues that there are three ways in which a city can perceive identities brought about by contents tourism: acceptance, indifference or reluctance. Not all alternative identities are considered challenging, but contents tourism influences city identities regardless.

The purpose of this thesis is to consider three opposing statements regarding aesthetics in our popular culture. The first statement is that the youth of this age are demolishing the old standards of aesthetic taste and are creating a nonaesthetic; the second statement is that the youth are enlarging the vision and scope of the accepted standard of aesthetic and changing its direction; the thrid statement is that the creations of the youth in our popular culture of today are neither new nor nonaesthetic, but merely a continuation of aesthetics as they are accepted. One statement will be chosen as the most valid of the three.

Student Number : 0302215H - PhD thesis - School of Language and Literature Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This study explores the meaning of contemporary Kenyan popular music by undertaking literary interpretations of song lyrics and musical styles. In making these interpretations, the fabric of popular song is shown to be a network of referents and associations with texts situated both within and outside of the song-texts. As polyphonic discourse, these vast range of textual and paratextual referents opens up various points of engagement between artiste, songtext and audience and in the process, the surplus meanings generated by both the poetry of the text and the referents embedded within it account for the significance of popular songs as concrete articulations that mediate the realities of modern Kenya. Through the six chapters that make up the core of the study we see the mini-dramas that are played out in the material conditions within which the songs are produced; in the iconographies that are generated by artistes' stage names and album titles; in the strategies of memory work that connect present-day realities to old cultural practices; in the soundtracks of urban spaces and in those of domesticated global cultural trends and finally, in the mediation of the antinomies surrounding the metanarrative of the nation and the realization of political transition. I conclude by suggesting that Kenyan popular music demonstrates how contemporary postcolonial texts inform one another, opening up a dialogue between texts and also between local events, experiences and knowledges. Equally important, the study defines contemporary Kenyan culture by working out the sources of the images and idioms built up in this music and accepting the complexities of postcolonial existence as a site of fluid interaction between various cultural practices and competing modernities.