Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-225) / This thesi explores two possibilities and relates them to each other: infusions of fantasy (or magic, the dream, the ,marvellous) which undermine realism and the use of disruption as a specific strategy for communicating disorder or elusive experience. It examines the expression of both fantasy and disruption with an emphasis on film editing. This study considers editing as the foundation of narrative structure in film, and explores the effects of alternative articulations of space, time and the body in film that deliberately subvert the norms of continuity editing.

The political and economic crisis that beset Zimbabwe since the late 1990s forms the backdrop to this study which examines the discourses that occupied a position of dominance on the state radio station, Radio Zimbabwe, between March and April 2011. This study moves beyond an analysis of texts and also looks at how some women listeners, who were living in a rural community in Zimbabwe, engaged with the radio and the mainstream discourses in the context of everyday life. The analysis of Radio Zimbabwe broadcasts is informed by Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony (1971) as well as ideas from the propaganda model postulated by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988). The audience study draws on some ideas by Carragee (1990) on the critical audience research perspective. This study also takes a poststructuralist approach to language, discourse and subjectivity. Available media scholarship on the post-2000 crisis in Zimbabwe has mostly focused on analysing how the print media represented the land question and the elections. Scholars have neglected to look at hegemonic and counter hegemonic discourses that were broadcast on the most pervasive medium in the country and on the continent, radio during this time. In radio studies in Africa and in Zimbabwe, the exploration of radio content is also largely missing. Also conspicuously absent in research that has been carried out in Zimbabwe and in Africa is an understanding of how audiences interact with mainstream meanings embedded in radio texts. In view of the above-mentioned gaps in literature, this study focuses on radio texts and radio listeners. The study combines a critical discourse analysis of Radio Zimbabwe content with a discourse analysis of narratives of 30 women listeners of the station that were interviewed. Two arguments are made in this thesis. The first is that in the face of waning support, immense opposition at home and abroad and an unrelenting economic crisis, the Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government used the discourses on land, the liberation struggle, the father of the nation, Christianity and God to legitimise its continued stay in power. These discourses were also used to delegitimise political opponents inside and outside the country. The second argument that this thesis makes is that women's engagement with Radio Zimbabwe content and hegemonic meanings broadcast on the station is not straightforward and predictable. Though some women said they listened to the news, a programme embedded with dominant ideas, most of them said they did not remember what was contained in most bulletins. Most women recalled news items that were directly relevant to them. While Radio Zimbabwe content was predominantly political in nature, the programmes that women talked about as favourite programmes had nothing to do with politics. The majority of women in the study singled out Kwaziso/Ukhubingelelana and Chakafukidza Dzimba Matenga as programmes they enjoyed listening to. In terms of interacting with mainstream ideas, most of the time many of the women affirmed the dominant discourses. There were, however, instances when some women contested hegemonic ideas. Sometimes mainstream ideas were challenged because what the women heard on the radio and their lived realities were not congruent. Interestingly, there were also times when this disjuncture did not drive women to question what they heard on the station.

The Internet’s liberative qualities have been hyped by a number of Zimbabwean scholars who argue, on the basis of the existence of online alternative media that carries political content, that democratisation can be technology-led. Given that the question of source selection is connected to the democratising potential of the Internet (Lecheler and Kruikemeier, 2016) by some scholars – this study interrogated the liberative potential of the Internet by tracing the social media sourcing patterns of four daily newspapers within Zimbabwe’s polarised mainstream media. Using a mixed methods approach which deployed Actor-Network theory as a preliminary methodological tool, this study collected and evaluated empirical data drawn from 146 social media sourced political stories published over a 30-month period and the responses from semi-structured interviews with purposively sampled participants – to account for the human and non-human actors in the news production network. A social constructivist analytical lens was then used to appreciate the contexts in which social media sourcing was being adopted in newsrooms, which revealed how unique circumstances had triggered unprecedented reliance on social media as a political news source. Those unique circumstances involved an escalation of factional fighting within the ruling ZANU PF that morphed into a propaganda war, which was waged through The Herald newspaper by one faction and through social media by the other faction. The public feud, which played out on social media, forced political reporters to gather story ideas from social media and overly rely on a few tech savvy elite sources. In these circumstances, social media’s influence on the political news agenda was overstated as it was conflated with the influence of a news event (ZANU PF factionalism) and the influence of social media users (high-ranking ZANU PF members) who could not be ignored. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute towards filling the lacuna in terms of scholarship demonstrating the influence of social media within Zimbabwe’s political narratives.

Human perception is a process that begins with sensory input that is organized and then interpreted. During this process there is a movement of information about an event in the real world, into information that represents that event in the mind. This movement of information in the form of perception is similar to the filming process; where the event, sensory input, organisation and interpretation is like the pro-filmic event (that which exists in the world before or regardless of whether it is filmed), the light entering the camera lens, and, the editing process and audience experience, respectively. When these systems are influenced at any stage of the process, there is an alteration in the resulting representation. The pro-filmic event can be influenced through the filmmaking techniques used to record it that may influence beliefs that concern the event. For example, the recording of films that concern mental illness need to be approached with caution because treatment of the pro-filmic event can either reinforce or challenge stereotypes about the mentally ill. Bipolar is a mental disorder of mood that is often represented with wild inaccuracy in films. The biographical drama, Shine (1996), for example, attempts to represent the life of David Helfgott, a musician who suffered a mental breakdown and spent subsequent years in mental asylums. He is portrayed as an imbecile, always mumbling indistinctly. In the film, the connection between psychopathology and creativity is supported, heavy- handedly. This demonstrates how the intervention (by the filmmaker and his filmmaking techniques) can transform meaning and influence viewer perception through the film medium. For the case-study documentary film, Don’t Hide the Madness (2017), I use recording and editing techniques to portray a personal account of bipolar in a way that challenges mainstream beliefs about the disorder. I argue that this application of the film medium has the capacity to confront stigma and change perceptions about mental illness.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-292). / This thesis explores emerging patterns of communication in student video production and the extent to which such patterns signify cultural border crossings in a South African upper income group school context. The investigation was carried out with specific reference to the politics of difference, an educational philosophy defined by Henry Giroux (2006) as border pedagogy. Within the framework of multimodal pedagogy, four learners from diverse cultural backgrounds collaborated with one another in a timeframe of three days to create digital video productions using guidelines provided by the researcher. The production unit was observed in order to answer questions around the utilisation of video production in the classroom, as well as how learners interact and negotiate cultural issues while producing video. The data was analysed with a custom-made multimodal toolkit as proposed by Baldry and Thibault (2006). By employing Kress and Van Leeuwen's four strata of Discourse, Design, Production and Distribution various types of data illuminated themes around social memory, race, the influence of class difference, and gender representation. Assessment techniques in terms of the multimodal theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) also enabled the researcher to look at the way in which meaning is made "in any and every sign, at every level, and in any mode" (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001: 4). The classroom intervention was designed to encourage adolescents as "unique hybrids" (Bhabha 1994) to cross borders of cultural identity, hypothesising that difference might emerge more clearly in the negotiation and video production process, than what might crystallise in analyzing the final video production. Metaphorical border crossing in a cultural and racial sense might become more apparent in production than final product. The negotiation of Border Difference took preference over the ultimate erosion of these borders.

Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis investigates children's gaming relationships with peers in out-of-school settings, and explores their interpretation of digital games as gendered media texts. As an interdisciplinary study, it combines insights from Childhood Studies, Cultural Studies, Game Studies, domestication and performance theory. The concept ludic gendering is developed in order to explain how gender "works" in games, as designed semiotic and ludic artefacts. Ludic gendering also helps to explain the appropriation of games through gameplay, and the interpretation of gendered rules and representations. The study expands on audience reception research to account for children's "readings" of digital games. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to study gaming relationships. Combining SNA with broadly ethnographic methods provided a systematic way of investigating children's peer relationships and gendered play.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 218-236). / In 1994, South Africa was emancipated from apartheid, and in 1996, a new democratic Constitution was released. This charter envisioned a progressive society and placed emphasis on equality, multiculturalism, reconciliation and freedom. The state targeted the cultural industries, including cinema, to carry this new vision to the nation. The problem, however, was that the production, exhibition and distribution infrastructure inherited from apartheid was not only dominated by Hollywood, but also exclusively catered for the white sector of the nation. This monopolised, racially skewed structure continues to pose an obstacle to the dissemination of progressive identities and the sustainability of local cinema. Through an analysis of relevant film policy, industry structure and specific cinematic texts, this study aims to trace the intersection between the dynamics of national identity representation and South Africa's political and economic position as a developing nation in the global marketplace. The research presented took place over a period of three years (2007-2010) and incorporated both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-289). / This thesis chronicles the emergence of men's lifestyle magazines within South Africa between 1997 and 2007. It aims to contextualize the emergence of these magazines within the broader South African context and position each magazine as representing a nuanced masculine ideal to the mainstream male readers. This thesis then offers a critical reading of two more marginal men's lifestyle magazines, namely, MaksiMan (2001-2007) and BLINK (2004-2007).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-338). / This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord's spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx's fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life. Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the discursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, and maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflation of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef.

Includes bibliographical references. / Using Dayan and Kat's theory of "media events" - those historic and powerful live broadcasts that mesmerise mass audiences - this thesis assesses the socio-political effect of live broadcasting on South Africa's transition to democracy and the effects of such broadcasts on post-apartheid nationhood. The thesis follows events chronologically and employs a three-part approach: firstly, it looks at the planning behind some of the mass televised events, secondly, it analyses the televisual content of some of the events; and thirdly it assesses public responses to events, as articulated in newspapers at the time.