Includes bibliographical references. / Identifying the construction of brand loyalty via social networks requires an analysis of the information sharing of a product or brand amongst a social network, therefore indicating the strength of the brand loyalty members of a social network not only have towards a brand, but also promote to other members of the same social network. This exchange of information amongst social network members is called ‘homophily’, where “similarity breeds connection” (McPherson, 2001, p.415). In order to determine the strength of brand loyalty amongst a social network, a qualitative study was performed on a sample of consumers from the ‘digital age’ generation (Castells, 2010, p.xviii), examining the extent of information exchange via social media as well as via the social networks. In addition to this a minor case study was conducted where participants were asked a serious of questions that pertained to a specific brand, that of Woolworths. This was done in order to determine the strength of the brand loyalty they had for a particular brand that may then be theoretically applied on a general scale. As a result the strength of their brand loyalty was determined, indicating whether or not brand loyalty can be constructed via social networks. On the whole it can be determined that social networks play a strong role in the development of brand loyalty, particularly as it pertains to the current digital generation. Keywords: Social Network, Habitus, Purchase Behaviour, Networked Society, Brand Loyalty, Consumer satisfaction, Homophily, Brand Trustworthiness

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 13-15). / The aim of the creative project was to adapt an autobiographical illustrated novel, Ek is Suzie, into a screenplay for a full-length feature film. Using a combination of live action and animation, the two main narratives play out parallel to one another – representing the past and present tense. The explication is intended to offer a reflection on the process of writing the screenplay, on filmic influences that shaped it and on the kinds of theory that illuminate what I was trying to accomplish. Thus, I investigate various creative and technical decisions made during the writing of the screenplay – dropping the novel’s narrator, the mixing of languages, the use of dream and, especially, the play between live action and animation. I note the debate on fidelity in adaptation especially as this debate applies to graphic novels and take special account of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, not only because of its engagement with the process of adaptation, but also because of it seminal use of animation as a serious medium of communication, dealing with trauma and childhood. Other (popular) filmic influences are In America, My Left Foot and Garden State, dealing with the dominant themes in my screenplay – childhood trauma, self-discovery, friendship, family and love.

The departure point for this creative project is based on my experience as an African living in diaspora. While I felt many things during my time ‘away' from the African continent, one constant was always this feeling of unbelonging, and this need to find belonging. As such, this project centers around the theme ‘finding belonging in diaspora'. Growing up in Kenya, I had never really come to terms with the politics of my Kenyanness not to mention my blackness. I had simply just been me. While in Kenya, the only real identifiers I had to contend with that carried heavy politics were my gender and my tribal affiliation. After leaving Kenya and arriving in Canada for school at the age of 16, for the first time in my life I felt black and I felt African. Both identities I felt did not belong in this Canadian space. Over the course of 9 years, I lived in both Canada and London and neither ever warmed me like home. In most, if not all the predominantly white spaces I frequented, I always felt too little of something and too much of something else. As such,, I found myself intentionally and unintentionally drawn to those like me, in colour, in language, and culture. It is only today I have realised that those intentional and unintentional unions I formed were a result of my search for belonging, which I came to find is common in the diaspora experience. Ann Hua, a black diaspora scholar, defines diaspora as a community of people who have been dispersed from their homeland to other locations because of genocide, slavery, migration, and war (Hua, 2013; 31). It's important to note that for many, induction into the Afro-diaspora is involuntary. As Hua notes, political unrest, genocide, war, and slavery has forced many to leave their homes and either seek asylum or become indentured laborers elsewhere. We have seen this throughout the eras, from the 15th-century trans-Atlantic slave trade, capturing of Africans, transporting them to the Americas and coercing them into slavery (Gates Jr., 2017), to the 20th-century dispersion of Rwandese nationals fleeing genocide§ (Guichaoua, André & Webster, Don E. 2015). The identity of diaspora comes in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Fortunately, my induction into the Afro-diasporic community was a voluntary one and the bulk of this project interacts with voluntary Afro-diasporic migrants. During my time in Canada and London, I met many members of the Afro-diasporic community who ended up in these countries in a variety of different ways and for a variety of different reasons. The theme of ‘finding belonging' was omnipresent among my fellow Afro-diasporic community members and it would manifest itself in various ways. For instance, wanting to go to African restaurants to feel more ‘at-home', or wanting to visit African night clubs to listen to more music from ‘home'. Interestingly, I also began to see that this journey towards ‘finding belonging' also manifested in Afro-diasporic communities rejecting assimilation into their new societies and creating spaces of resistance, through organising protests or hosting discussions that centred around issues of race.

Includes bibliographical references. / To write critically about any given text is very different to writing critically about the process of that text’s creation. Given that this essay will deal closely with representations of the self, perhaps it is not out of place for me to open with an autobiographical confession: while I greatly enjoy the former, relishing opportunities to analyse both literary and filmic texts, I have no such fond feelings for the latter, especially when the situation calls for a critical analysis of my own writing process. The task seems to intrude on a sacred space that I imagine most writers value greatly, a time when what will eventually become the ‘finished product’ is still in formation, is still incomplete. Due to the very nature of the process, it is a time when everything is still in flux, when ideas are still seeking their final form. Therefore, subjecting this tenuous process to critical examination seems somewhat like a betrayal of its nature, a desire to fix in meaning that which has no such absolute meaning. As a result, I have strategically avoided such undertakings in the past as much as possible. It then comes as a surprise to me that after completing the screenplay for Then It Happened, I have the desire to do just that. The reason, I believe, is revealing. It is not the aforementioned final product (the screenplay) that has inspired the ideas that will be discussed in this essay, but the process of creating it, for it is the process that brought me into contact with the three incarnations of the biographical narrative that will be discussed below: autobiography, biography and the biopic (in the form of both the screenplay and the final film). If I have done my job as a storyteller relatively well, then – hopefully – upon reading the screenplay, the reader will receive it as one coherent narrative, with a unity of purpose and style. They will not see it as a collage, composed out of several key sources, namely, Frank Capra’s autobiography The Name Above the Title, Joseph McBride’s biography of Capra, The Catastrophe of Success, as well as six other biographies of the key players: Harry Cohn, Robert Riskin, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The reader might – again, hopefully – glean the sense that a significant amount of research has gone into the screenplay, and from this might infer that multiple sources have been used, but the story should not feel in any way disjointed or 2 fragmented. The purpose of this essay, then, will be precisely to take this story apart and to reveal the collage. In this critical analysis of my writing process, I would like to reverse that very process: instead of stitching together the information gathered through my research, attempting to make the connections invisible, I will magnify those very seams and examine the act of their creation. For I believe that these seams can inform the way that we think about the processes of writing, reading, adaptation as well as the intimate connections between the three, ultimately revealing the importance of narrative in our lives. I will begin, in sections one and two, by examining the forms of autobiography and biography in their own right as well as in their relationships to one another. These sections of the essay will be used to establish a foundation on which the discussion of key questions may be based – questions about subjectivity, interpretation, adaptation and fidelity. Then, in sections three and four, I will look more closely at my own writing process and its intersection with the autobiographical and biographical writings of others. Here I will examine the biopic genre and connect it with reflections on theories of adaptation, furthering this discussion by exploring alternate ways in which both my screenplay, as well as biopics in general, may be read in relation to the contested issue of fidelity.

My short documentary, Grandpa Ernest Speaks (2021), is the creative research portion of my master's degree submission. The film is heavily influenced by post-structuralist theory regarding the archive as an experiential entity as well as posttraumatic cinema discourse (in particular, Joshua Hirsch's phases of posttraumatic cinema). This critical reflection therefore investigates the intersection of these two theoretical paradigms: looking at how archival materials may specifically be used in personal documentary films dealing with family/ancestral trauma and posttraumatic memory, and positing that these films' engagement with the archive fits into the larger framework of posttraumatic cinema. I reflect on Grandpa Ernest Speaks in conversation with two other personal posttraumatic documentaries, The Imam and I (dir. Khalid Shamis, South Africa, 2011) and Stories We Tell ( dir. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012). I conduct a semiotic and content analysis of portions of all three films in order to both situate them within the posttraumatic imaginary-specifically, within Hirsch's second phase-and examine the role of the archive and artefacts in each. In doing so, I confront the question of record vs. representation in documentary, and argue that-in the archival-based posttraumatic documentary-the distinction between the two lies in the way that the artefact is interpreted or contextualised via meta-textual captioning. This study demonstrates that posttraumatic memory may be nonlinear and non-chronological. The analysis of my film and the two additional case study films examines how this complication of past and present, archival and contemporary, is articulated onscreen: conveying the transmutation of memory as well as the ongoing and self-reflexive act of contributing to the familial archive.

This thesis examined media and NGO representation of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur over an eighteen-month period between January 2004 and June 2005. It concentrated on three key questions. The first question relates to the 'noise' graph of emergencies. What factors - and what actors - were involved in determining the newsworthiness of Darfur? This first key question concerns the graph of media coverage of Darfur, through an escalation phase, an abundant phase, and finally a gradually diminishing phase. Ideally, the diminishing phase of media coverage should correlate with the diminishing stage of the actual emergency. This is rarely the case and so logically other dynamics must exist. The second question examines media representation of the Darfur crisis compared with what was actually occurred. How accurate was the reporting, and what were some of the effects of inaccuracy? The final question is one of perception. To what extent was the crisis in Darfur misperceived; who was primarily responsible for generating that misperception; and was a degree of misperception inevitable? This question encompasses both the representation offered by the international media and that offered by NGO media and public relations departments. The study is framed within the notion of the 'crisis triangle' (UNDP, 1997), which is composed of policymakers, humanitarian actors and the international media. It analyses NGO media functions within the framework of the NGO crisis triangle, composed of internal NGO conflicts between fundraising, advocacy and operational aid. Darfur revealed beyond doubt that the factors involved in determining newsworthiness are complex and, furthermore, not necessarily controlled by any one actor or any one side of the crisis triangle. US political interests significantly contributed to escalating Darfur to the status of 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world', but equally so did the genocide question, and no one actor manipulated the timing of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda to coincide with a campaign of ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur. One of the most important factors identified was that of simplicity, which explains how media attention was engaged, but not necessarily why. The simplicity also ensured that media and NGO representation of Darfur was unavoidably inaccurate. The media influenced the political will of the international community towards Darfur only indirectly, although it could just as convincingly be argued that the political will of the international community was one of the primary factors influencing the media. There were two identified practical lessons from the examination of the representation of Darfur. The first was that if NGOs were to accept a short-term fall in funding for the longer-term benefit of raising awareness then both a more accurate perception and possibly more sustainable funding could be generated. The second was that if media institutions were to adhere to the Red Cross code of conduct when reporting from disaster situations then a more accurate perception would be generated. This would result in the necessary illusions of disaster reporting not being quite so necessary.

<p>This project began as an investigation of the way children are depicted, characterized, and represented in adult literature, or in fiction that is not meant for children. In this sort of literature, child characters are typically very complicated. And the ways in which they are complicated say a great deal about the author's assumptions about children and childhood, and about the dominant assumptions of children and childhood that characterize the author's historical period. In order to speak to the ideas which characterize the Romantic period, this project concentrates critical attention on two texts by Mary Shelley, and two of the stranger child-like characters from her historical period.</p> <p>This thesis works through what it means to understand the knowledge of kids in terms of what I call the "extracurricular." "Extracurricular" signals this thesis' particular concern with questions relating to the remainders of education and knowledge. Deborah Britzman's work on queer pedagogy provided the language necessary for examining the theoretical and political implications of child knowledge in Shelley. Britzman's discussion of what she terms "difficult knowledge" provided critical traction for talking about the types of education Shelley theorizes, more specifically, in Frankenstein and Matilda, but was not sufficient for a full analysis of the problems that arise in these texts, and within the critical contexts in which the texts are taken up. Instead of simply applying the concept of difficult knowledge to Shelley, this thesis works to translate the Shelleyean concept of "dangerous knowledge" into a model for understanding the relationship of the political to the pedagogical as it pertains to kids. This thesis, in other words, takes place at the intersection of Shelley's discussions of dangerous knowledge and Britzman's discussion of difficult knowledge.</p> <p>The implications that Shelley's work has for the value of public education, and a less privatized society than the one she witnessed and responded to in her fiction, are still urgent today. While our education system is, ofcourse, profoundly different than the system Shelley was writing about, her demands for a public space (as well as a happy domestic sphere), and a system of public education that is healthy, democratic and keyed towards respecting the knowledge of children represent a politics ofhope in which education is taken seriously because it is understood to have a critical place in the formation of subjectivity.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

The following work is a feature length screenplay about Anna Morris, an 18-year-old girl who finds herself faced with a moral dilemma when her estranged father, Robert, contacts her on her 18th birthday. When she learns about Robert’s past involvement in an online child pornography ring Anna must decide if she can forgive him, or -- more importantly -- if he is worthy of forgiveness. However, as the story unfolds we find that it is not just Anna who needs to forgive. This story approaches issues of repentance, growth, and the journey into adulthood as Anna takes on each new challenge.

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This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present. Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.