Bibliography: leaves 110-120. / This minor dissertation is undertaken to examine the cross-cultural similarities that are revealed by motion pictures through analyzing the work of Akira Kurosawa and contrasting it with selective mainstream cinema texts. Kurosawa is a critical case in point due to his welding of Occidental and Japanese ideas into his films, and his origin from a hybridized Japan, a society which historically has freely absorbed and embellished itself from numerous cultures, including America, Korea, China and Europe.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-237) / Daniel C Hallin and Paolo Mancini's Comparing Media Systems (2004) has been hailed as an important contribution to understanding the inter-relationship between the media and political systems. The work was, however, based on a study of 18 stable, mature and highly developed democracies either in Europe or in North America. As an emerging democracy that has recently undergone dramatic change in both its political system and its media, South Africa's inclusion poses particular challenges to Hallin and Mancini's Three Models paradigm. This thesis focuses on the South African print media and tests both the paradigm's theoretical underpinnings as well as its four principle dimensions of analysis: political parallelism, state intervention, development of a mass market and journalistic professionalisation. A range of insights and a number of modifications are proposed. This thesis is based on interviews with South Africa's most senior media executives and editors, a comprehensive study of the relevant literature and 15 years of personal experience as a political analyst, columnist and parliamentary correspondent covering South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The thesis sheds new light on the functioning and applicability of the Three Models comparative paradigm as well as on the development and future trajectory of South African print media journalism.

This thesis project accompanies the 2019 photographic portraiture series entitled Becoming. Using James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston as departure points, both the photo series and this academic explanative seeks to explore the question of what does it mean to become? Or in other words, what is the imperative to be who you are, to actualize within a space that demonstrates a regular investment in the destruction of bodies that are Black and queer. Through a set of five individual interviews, the questions of what does it mean to be who you are? why is it important? how do you become through your creative work? serve to create space for knowledge production, combatting what Spivak dubs as epistemic violence. Guided by the principles of post colonial life writing, African and Black feminist thought, Black queer theory, and art as an emancipatory tool, this thesis centers voices often theorized about yet rarely heard and argues that creative work more broadly offers a path for liberation. The published work of Becoming, both the photographs and interviews, can be found at http://www.becomingphotoseries.com/ and fulfils the creative media aspect of this dissertation/creative project.

Media studies has recently witnessed an upsurge in theoretical and empirical work that investigates the moral-ethical implications of the mediation of suffering. The research focus has largely been limited to representations of distant suffering by global media to audiences in the Global North. Contrary to the above, this work focuses on the mediation of suffering by media in the Global South. This study is underpinned by the understanding that suffering is also a proximal (local) phenomenon and mundane (everyday) phenomenon. It is against this backdrop that this work uses the B-Metro tabloid's mediations of child abuse in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe as a case study. The study espouses a holistic view of mediation where mediation is the social circulation of meaning across the moments of production, text and reception. Roger Silverstone's concept of proper distance is used to evaluate the extent to which the BMetro's representations of child maltreatment are successful in engendering an ethic of care among its readership. Methodologically, the study triangulates focus group data about the context of production, with a textual analysis of the child abuse stories and focus group data about the reception of the same. Findings from the context of production point to an overreliance on legal, social and cultural elites for news about child abuse. Data shows that B-Metro journalists are torn between compassion and institutionalised compassion fatigue about child abuse. Findings also point to the prevalence of a gendered perception of child abuse among the journalists. Textual analysis data revealed that the editorial discourse identifies the ethic of care and the ethic of voice as being instrumental in the fight against child abuse. Further, the texts exhibit a patriarchal, gendered and heteronormative conception of child abuse. Reception data shows that it is more plausible to think of media users' responses as being located along a continuum whose range spans compassion fatigue and an ethic of care. A typology of witnessing is used to capture readers' responses to the mediations of child abuse. The tabloid genre was found to be simultaneously enabling and disabling the successful activation of an ethic of care. The thesis concludes by advancing a dialectical view of mediation that explores the equivalences and ambivalences between the moments of production, text and reception.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.