This project examines the impact of environmentalism as it operates in presidential rhetoric after Earth Day 1970. Specifically, I look at how environmentalism is constructed and then utilized in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush, and William Jefferson Clinton. I argue that U.S. presidents use the rhetoric of environmentalism as a rhetorical tool to define their ideal citizen, interpret complex rhetorical situations for the American people, and introduce policies. Environmental vocabularies, I argue, are crucial to understanding presidential communication, as they enable presidents to move policy discussions away from technical discourse and frame ideas using accessible and familiar terms. This project, in many ways, highlights the discursive identity of the American people and the role of structuring vocabularies in presidential power. In each post-Earth Day administration, the citizenry is invited to participate in a version of environmentalism that also reflects the chief executive's political vision for the country. Through a Burkean cluster and agon analysis, each of the three case studies reveals the unique way each presidency defines environmentalism and the strategic function of each definition. Chapter 3 uses a cluster-agon analysis to demonstrate how environmental rhetoric helps Ronald Reagan construct his economic policy. Chapter 4 argues that H.W. Bush's unique definition of environmentalism functions as a strategic communication tool that helps shape his domestic and international policies. It was also an important step in breaking down binaries between economic development and environmentalism that had shaped present-day understandings of environmentalism. A cluster-agon analysis reveals that although he was considered to be a failed environmental president, Bush's definition of environmentalism laid the groundwork for future, more successful environmental presidencies. As the last case study in this project, Chapter 6 looks at environmentalism within President Clinton's presidency, arguing that his definition of environmentalism operationalizes a unique cluster of terms that allows him to advocate for social justice issues and circumvent a lame-duck Congress. By understanding the environment as a set of values and not a tangible object, these case studies unpack the wide variety of cultural work that its language is able to do. This research on a macro level is an analysis of political communication strategy, understanding what words work and what words don't. Unlike many rhetorical projects, however, this project uses environmentalism as a lens through which the possibilities and limits of presidential power can be explored.

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Products are designed to satisfy user needs. Thus, industrial designers are expected to have a thorough understanding of user needs and to incorporate those understandings into the design of products; however, it is not a straightforward task for designers to translate their conditional understanding into a product. The gap between product and user can be even wider when latent user needs, such as cultural ones, are calculated into the problem. Therefore the meanings and functions imbued in products by the designer may not be recognized and acknowledged by users, due to the differences in cultural preferences of designers and users from separate cultures. In spite of the fact that user satisfaction has been extensively supported in the design literature, it seems that such an approach allows only a passive role for designers, who actually act as cultural intermediaries; that is, the designers' role is merely presumed to catalyze the process and match user requirements to the end product. Thus, the impact of designers' cultural preferences is considered as incidental, or at least overlooked. A content analysis method was triangulated to collect and analyze diverse visual and textual data relating to the concept generation stage of the product development process. To collect data, professional industrial designers in the two culturally diverse countries of Australia and Iran were recruited to participate in half-hour design exercise sessions to sketch to a design brief, followed by responding to an interview questionnaire. The analysis of data revealed that: (1) designers' cultural preferences do influence their approaches toward tackling the design problem; (2) there are nexuses between the design aspects of the concepts generated and the cultural dimensions of the values of the societies in which the designers were born and has lived, and; (3)potential users can unconsciously comprehend the meaning invested in the product by the designer. This thesis breaks new ground for further advancing the study of the Designer-Precedent Approach (DPA) in other cultural and social contexts, while it challenges the conventional approaches of user-centered design (UCD) broadlyperceived as the ultimate method of incorporating users' wants into products.

Thesis (M.A.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-105).

Celebrity sells. The right of publicity, broadly defined as the inherent right of every individual to control the commercial use of his or her identity, has been well-established in the United States (US) for over fifty years. It protects the associative value that one brings to products and services, and is invoked mainly by celebrities to prevent unauthorised commercial uses of their persona. / There is a wealth of legal literature in the US that discusses a broad range of issues from justifications for the right of publicity to its interaction with freedom of speech under the First Amendment. However, very few contributions have studied the connections between cultural practices and the right of publicity in depth. This dissertation draws on insights pertinent to aspects of right of publicity laws in its evaluation of how the cultural studies literature may contribute to doctrinal development. The usefulness of cultural studies in this inquiry rests in its examination of the roles and meanings of celebrities in contemporary society. / This thesis demonstrates how an appreciation of the production, circulation and consumption of the celebrity personality can be incorporated into an analytical framework. It argues that what we generally call ‘celebrity’ is a collective product of the celebrity individual, the audience and the cultural producers. Two exemplary insights are explored. The first insight on the definition of the contemporary celebrity based on well-knownness provides the impetus for the legal protection of the commercial value of identity. The second insight about the celebrity’s function as a cultural sign representing majoritarian ideals has important implications both for contemporary consumption and identity politics. It will be shown how these insights support the concepts of evocative identification, associative appropriation and political recoding, all contributing to a more nuanced understanding of three key elements of a typical publicity claim. As celebrities in other common law jurisdictions like the United Kingdom and Australia rely on the passing off action to seek redress for unauthorised commercial uses of their identity, the relevance of these concepts to passing off is also examined. / The findings indicate that insights from cultural studies on the celebrity phenomenon can support both an expansive interpretation of identification in a publicity claim and, at the same time, a more restrictive application of the requirement of commercial appropriation. The dissertation also demonstrates how treating ideological codings of the celebrity persona as political speech can influence the articulation of the First Amendment defence. In addition, these cultural insights have similar relevance to passing off laws, supporting a broad interpretation of goodwill and damage, and a standard of impressionistic association based on the notion of affective transfer as sufficient to constitute misleading conduct. / In conclusion, this dissertation establishes that, far from being merely a theoretical discipline concerned with semiotic codings and the politics of power and identity, cultural studies provides a pragmatic framework for judges, scholars and lawyers to further their understanding of the extra-legal issues relating to the laws protecting the commercial value of the celebrity personality.

The purpose of the study was to investigate process and stability issues in intermarried families utilizing data from a group of American Indian intermarried families and a group of endogamous European American families. Stability issues such as marital satisfaction and overall problem solving were investigated by comparing scores between the two groups. Process issues such as the participation and the coalition practices related to intermarriage were investigated by comparing scores between the two groups and analyzing in more depth the gender and ethnic data of the parents in the American Indian intermarried group. Supplementary qualitative analysis was also supplied by focus groups of American Indian college students discussing the subject of American Indian intermarried families. Significant distinctions were identified by both analyses which indicate a complex relationship between intermarriage status, American Indian culture, family problem solving, and marital satisfaction. / Graduation date: 1996

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1983. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-179).

Societal changes make culture increasingly central but also problematise it. New per-spectives are needed to meet these challenges. The international field of cultural studies is a promising effort to answer these challenges and vitalise cultural research. Sweden may make a significant and indeed unique contribution to this effort, but im-portant steps remain to be taken with this purpose. One such step would be to install a new national-international research institute on a higher level, in order to connect disciplines, universities and regions, and push innovative developments forward. Against such a background, this report leads up to an outline of a proposed new Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS). This is yet only a proposal, writ-ten at a time when ACSIS yet only exists as an imaginary utopia – though living with an extraordinary vitality in the minds of a wide intellectual network of committed scholars. Funding is presently being sought for, but it is not yet decided in what exact manner the ideas presented here will eventually be made real. The formulation of tasks, organisation and budget is thus yet a hypothetical model. Still, this bold adventure has reached a long way since its first inception. The ACSIS has long been an attractive dream for me and for many of my colleagues among cultural researchers. It is a very great pleasure to see the plans crystallised thus far, as the journey towards an ACSIS has reached its last and decisive phase. The report results from a committee work funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercen-tenary Foundation (Riksbankens jubileumsfond), and the Swedish Council for Re-search in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Humanistisk-samhällsvetenskapliga forskningsrådet). I had the great pleasure to work together with Svante Beckman, Ulf Hannerz, Lisbeth Larsson, Britta Lundgren, Orvar Löfgren, Ove Sernhede and Ulf Lindberg, and was reliably assisted by Åsa Bäckström. The group started working in January 2000, with a series of working meetings. Each member of the group has also had intense discussions of the basic ideas with other Swedish and international scholars, in meetings and by personal communication. Many therefore deserve warm thanks for making this report possible. The material and mental support by the two research funding bodies was essential, as was the generous and always stimulating collaboration in the committee. Linköping Univer-sity and the City of Norrköping have been overwhelmingly supportive towards this unique proposal, further strengthening our faith in its potential. We are also grateful to all those many Swedish and foreign researchers with whom these ideas have been discussed. The National Institute for Working Life programme for Work and Culture in Norrköping was a most hospitable host for this whole planning project.

This study analyzes crime novels written around the turn of the twenty-first century that blur the boundaries between “serious” fiction and genre fiction. I argue that these novels represent violence, not as an isolated event or action, but as a pervasive cultural logic. In other words, they frame violence as a cultural and institutional problem, instead of as a disruptive social anomaly, and they thereby expose violence as a constitutive force in a world and era in which social relations are always already mediated by the disciplinary apparatus of institutions. Novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, draw attention to the cultural logic of violence by reproducing conventions associated with more traditional crime fiction—a crime to be solved, a “detective” figure, and the gradual revelation of clues—but these novels break with traditional crime fiction in one important way: they do not follow a trajectory of crime and punishment. Such a trajectory necessarily limits our understanding of violence to isolated actions that can be punished and to individuals who can be reformed. By breaking with the logic of crime and punishment, these novels position violence as a master narrative or as an interpretive lens that invites readers to engage in a critique of institutionalized and systemic violence. This investigation traces how this new practice of crime narrative seeks to exile readers from horizons of expectations that would ordinarily be associated with crime fiction. These contemporary novels constitute a new crime fiction subgenre: a narrative that, through the use of new conventions, forces its readers to confront the limits of canonical forms and to consider violence as a contemporary master narrative. / text

At the conclusion of the U.S. Mexican War in 1848, Mexican Americans across the United States found their disjointed communities struggling to adapt to a newly acquired national status. My project argues that Mexican American literary manhood functioned as a representational strategy that instantiated a Mexican American national public and that sutured regional communities into a national whole. Within a transnational, multilingual archive, Mexican American manhood served as a means through which to articulate multiple forms of citizenship and competing cultural investments in U.S. and Mexican national projects. Between 1848 and the 1960s -- that is, prior to the Chicano movement -- USAmerican writers looked to Mexican American manhood for this purpose because it was inseparable from a rival sovereign state, revealed an inconsistent racial hierarchy, and troubled gendered ideals of the civil participation, yet simultaneously contained such contradictions. For Mexican American writers Manuel C. de Baca, Adolfo Carrillo, Maria Cristina Mena, Jovita González, Américo Paredes and José Antonio Villarreal, manhood offered a tactic for imagining participation in national citizenship, unhindered by institutional or legal impediments, although each represented Mexican American manhood in radically different ways. Conversely, authors Gertrude Atherton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London turned to Mexican American manhood as a powerful tool for disenfranchising or assimilating Mexican American communities from and into the U.S. nation. For these authors, Mexican American manhood was instrumental in the dissemination of narratives of American progress because it facilitated claims to continental and imperial expansion, reinforcing ideals of Anglo American manhood and masking claims to whiteness. Through analysis of prose fiction in both English and Spanish, my dissertation explicates the cultural creation of Mexican American literary manhood as a constitutive category of American manhood and as a textual strategy that positions Mexican Americans as national citizens. / text