Gesher is a theatre founded by a group of Russian immigrants in Tel Aviv in 1990. Gesher is a cultural phenomenon that, like a prism, refracts issues of interethnic relations, cultural and immigration policy, and the status of media discourse in Israel. Therefore, Gesher is a rich site for research on cultural production and exchange. In this dissertation, I apply the theoretical perspectives of cultural and critical studies to the analysis of the cultural practices of Gesher and the discourses emerging in the theatre's reception. First, I use the theoretical perspective of cultural studies to write the history of the Gesher theatre, connecting each stage in its evolvement with the cultural and social context in Israel. Second, I offer a critical discourse analysis of Gesher's media reception, exploring questions of cultural production and exchange in the context of hegemonic ideology. I contrast the media reception of Gesher in Israel to its reception abroad. Third, I theorize the dynamic of cultural exchange that emerges in this media reception in order to uncover regimes of power and normative knowledges active in Israeli cultural production. To that end, I construct an original theoretical model grounded in my fieldwork. My analysis of Gesher's reception indicates a novel situation in which the discursive condition of immigration has important parallels to colonization. And so, extrapolating post-colonial discourse analysis to the context of immigration, I suggest a model of Mutual and Internal Colonization. In the discursive process of mutual colonization the roles of the cultural colonizer and the colonized shift in different contexts, leading both immigrants and their hosts to colonize each other, and then ultimately to colonize themselves as these roles turn inwards. In the future, this model can be applied for theorizing the positions of different subjects with hyphenated identities across cultures.

Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the center of Israel's defense narrative, its violence, its deployment of blood and its domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence and the concept of victim in a nation's logic involve images of penetration to borders and land. However, this dissertation is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through babies and identities, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. I revisit Said's Orientalism (1978) and the way it was applied to the analysis of Israeli cinema by Ella Shohat (1989). I also use the framework of ‘The West and the Rest’ developed by Stuart Hall (1992), thereby relocating the different ways in which Orientalism and Eurocentrism internally work within the Israeli nation state. In this dissertation I argue that Israeli national identity is constructed on a notion of imagined unity as articulated in the Zionist ideology, while in practice denying and oppressing cultures and identities of Oriental Jews. This notion of unity, I claim, was achieved under a false sense of emergency by the Arab threat, and thereby advocated the need for a strong Jewish state. This logic is used continuously in public discourses to justify the state's overlooking of internal conflicts. To demonstrate my argument I analyze in depth the case of the Kidnapped Yemenite Babies Affair. This case study, I argue, reveals how the media, who play a central role in Israeli society (Caspi and Limor, 1986), articulate and shape inner conflict and how they define and reproduce identities while maintaining national unity and hegemony. Through this analysis I wish to re-define the relationship between the state of Israel, minority groups and the Arab ‘enemy’. I also discuss the essence of national identity, citizenship and unity and how, from the states' standpoint, such inner conflict interrupts and threatens the wholeness of the Israeli state. In my work I engage with such theoretical concepts as articulation, representation, nationhood and national identity, Orientalism, race and ethnicity, colonial and post-colonial discourse, identity politics and community.

This research project has investigated how popular media images of Asian Americans affect Asian Americans' self-concepts, their views on other Asian Americans, and the perceptions of people from other racial groups. The subjects are almost all undergraduate students of from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Boston, and they are divided into three racial groups: Asian Americans, blacks and whites. There are 538 students in the survey and 67 students in the focus group interviews (21 groups). Survey findings indicate that the respondents' general perceptions of Asian Americans across different racial groups can best be described as “model minority”: they are quiet, smart and hard-working. There is a major difference between perceptions of Asian American males and females: Asian American females are perceived as sexually appealing, but Asian American males are not. Although the survey has not demonstrated statistically significant and verified media effects, focus groups strongly suggest media influence on the respondents' perceptions of Asian Americans. The notion of media effects is expanded beyond behavior or attitude change. Media effects are evidenced when Asian American respondents reflect on childhood memories in which cartoon images of Asian stereotypes evoked shame, anger and alienation; when Asian American respondents use white beauty standards which are permeating in mass media images to judge themselves and other Asian Americans; and when respondents across racial groups use media images of Asian Americans to validate their impressions of Asian Americans in real-life. The third person effect, that media affect other people but not oneself, is strongly evidenced in the focus groups, arguably one of the first such studies done in a qualitative method. The findings of the study demonstrate strong implications for the need to teach media literacy so that students can learn to critically examine not only what the media messages are about, what they are for, and in whose interests, but also ways of changing the current media to be more open and democratic.

The question that guided my research was: Are alternative, non-idolatrous, discourses and uses of the computer discernible in Puerto Rican society? In Puerto Rican culture, the idealization of modernity and technology has strong historical and cultural roots (Álvarez Curbelo, 2001). In order to gain a better understanding of the multiple connections between modernity and technology, I explored the philosophy of technology, particularly the works of Heidegger. This exploration proved fruitful in deepening my understanding of technology as a cultural and historical phenomenon. Using this understanding as a point of departure, I engaged in a “conversation” with other authors and the insights I gleaned included: the recognition of technology as a space for ideological struggle; the contemporary subordination of political freedom to the promise of technology; consumption and consumerism can usefully be considered manifestations of the promise of technology; consequently consumption has gained importance as a form of communication and of citizenship. This comprehension of consumption as an increasingly significant social phenomenon, led me to explore the specificities of the ways in which goods are socially endowed with meaning. I attempted to apply the general interpretations of the social significance of objects to the personal computer, an object that became a mass consumer good in the United States and Puerto Rico during the decade of the 90s. Early studies of the computer in the 60s and 70s had already pointed to this object's polysemic richness. I selected Thompson's (1990) depth hermeneutics as my methodology because of its usefulness in exploring the meanings given by social subjects to their world and because hermeneutics attempts to liberate rationality from permanent reduction to means-end thinking. Since meaning was a central concern, I appropriated Schrag's (1986) hermeneutical concept of communicative praxis. This concept assigns equal weight to speech and action in the creation of meaning. The search for contestatory communicative praxis led me to analyze written—political party programs and newspaper articles—and oral discourses—generated through interviews and focus groups—on the personal computer in Puerto Rico. Notwithstanding the dominance of discourses of technological idolatry in Puerto Rico, my research found glimmers of contestatory views.

This dissertation is a qualitative exploration into the politics of pornography and focuses on the instability of the pornographic sign and on the external determinations which naturalize pornographic ways of looking. My project is to supplant assumptions in current debates that pornography has interior, often trans-historical meanings and effects which are "put into" the text by various agencies with the idea that pornography is a cultural transaction constructed in practice. I offer up the idea of a pornographic code to designate the moment (or the "event") which occurs when others are transformed into sexualized objects, and I explore pornographic sign as a site (rather than an object) where important cultural issues relative to gender, power and representation are staged and contested. This dissertation is thematically divided into halves, with the first three chapters providing an historical overview of various "stagings" of pornography. In this first half, I examine key transformations of "pornography" in the United States and Great Britain from the word's first use (circa 1857) as the writings about prostitution as a matter of social hygiene to its currently accepted use as the sexually explicit material intended to arouse the consumer and which sometimes equates sex with violence. Specific chapters track permutations of pornography throughout the mechanical age (roughly 1850-1920), and, later, during the "sexual revolution" and its aftermath (late 1960s to mid-1970s). The final three chapters explore the indeterminacy of the pornographic sign and the ubiquity of the pornographic code through an examination of current stagings. Chapter Four draws extensively from the literature of feminism and considers the problem of interpretation within a postmodern context. Chapter Five provides an analysis of the literature emanating from such Christian Right leaders as James Dobson, Carman, and Jerry Falwell; I argue that their anti-pornography and anti-gay material reenforces instrumental and pornographic ways of looking. The dissertation concludes by revisiting the idea of a feminist erotic as an alternative to pornographic culture.

This study investigated the institutional development of the critical perspective in academia. The purpose was to determine the extent to which the perspective has grown in the field of communication. The literature published before this study claimed, without presenting convincing evidence, that the perspective bloomed in the field during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Four questions guided the study: What was the particular development of the "critical" perspective in US communication scholarship? How has it been appropriated and construed by communication scholars? What were the historical circumstances and the intellectual context which framed its development? What is its current status in academia? In order to answer these questions the study traces the perspective's development using a content analysis of three mainstream journals, a survey of academic programs, and a citations analysis. Additional support came from interviews with critical scholars and journal editors, as well as from historical accounts of the period. The results of the study show that the critical perspective found a space for its development in the field of communication, especially in professional journals and citation practices. However, its presence was limited and, by 1987, there were no clear trends about its future development. It seems that the institutional environment did not allow for a vigorous development of the perspective in the field of communication. Utilitarianism, philosophical positivism, and the lack of economic support from government, industry, and funding agencies hindered its growth. The results also show that critical work's central features have been misrepresented by traditional social scientists. In general terms, then, the critical perspective earned a small but permanent place in the field of communication and enjoys the status of a legitimate academic endeavor in the field of communication. Today critical scholars can publish in professional journals and have access to academic appointments and other institutional resources.

This study explores the online embodied experiences of gay men, contending that these experiences deconstruct naturalized physical world understandings of the attractive and healthy erotic body. In particular, this study examines discourses emerging from three distinct queer-identified IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels: #gaymuscle, a community formulated around images of the muscular male body; #gaychub, a community celebrating male obesity, where—in diametric opposition to #gaymuscle—fatness holds considerable value; and #gaymusclebears, a space representing the erotic convergence of the obese and muscular male body. Constructed by gay male interactants, each of these three IRC channels represents an affirming space for the discussion, exploration, and eroticism of the male body. Utilizing the methods of critical ethnography, I analyze not only the terms and forms prevalent to these online communities, but the deeper intricacies concerning the negotiation of embodied identity and eroticism in cyberspace. In doing so, I demonstrate how interactions in the virtual can provide significant embodied experiences while subverting naturalized conceptions of physical beauty and normative sexual practices.

This study examines American war films released during World War II to determine what kinds of persuasive appeals were used to propagate support among the American people for the war. As well, the symbiotic wartime relationship between the Federal Government and the Hollywood film industry was investigated. The examination of 37 war films, 10 per cent of the total number of war films released from 1941 to 1945, yielded 48 different aural or visual persuasive appeals. These appeals were characterized in the form of statements with which their communicators desired the audience to agree. Examples include "The enemy is a savage, whose actions are cruel and barbaric," "We will win because the enemy underestimates our will," or "The enemy bombs indiscriminately." The appeals were classified under five main categories found throughout the history of war rhetoric: Guilt (the enemy, not we, caused this war), Satanism (comparisons that create polarities between us and our enemy, with the enemy always characterized in the negative), the Illusion of Victory (America's ultimate triumph is inevitable), Apocalypticism and Typology (Biblical metaphors and allusions promoting the notion that "God is on our side"), and Territoriality (the enemy poses a threat to us, our families and the American way of life). In the analysis, the general appeal category of Satanism was found to be the most used, utilizing nearly half of the appeals found in the sample. A harmonic relationship was found to exist between the major appeal categories, resulting in inter-category cooperation, e.g., a Satanism appeal used to amplify an illusion of victory statement. As well, this investigation noted that the plot conventions, icons and character types found in typically American genre films of the 1930's such as the western, foreign intrigue spy film, and the gangster film, were utilized, especially during the first year of the war, to aid in the successful packaging of these appeals.

Broadcast and cable television news coverage of the CIA's drone program from 2002 through 2013 is reviewed critically. Corporate ownership is examined to determine whether the need to generate profits has an influence on news coverage of the issue. This thesis looked specifically at the quality of the coverage of the legal and ethical issues of the CIA drone program and whether the coverage looked at all facets of the controversial aspects of the program. To carry out this analysis, the database LexisNexis was utilized to search news transcripts for this time frame using both the search terms "unmanned military aircraft" and "cia AND drones." These transcripts were then examined to determine which qualified as a discussion of the issues. Broadcast and cable news were then compared in light of the political economic framework of the propaganda model to determine whether corporate ownership has an influence over news coverage, particularly when it comes to news stories on national security issues that bring together powerful defense and government interests. This thesis finds that coverage of the drone program only becomes a serious issue when the policymakers in Washington begin to become divided on the issue, suggesting that rather than facilitating a truly democratic debate with a variety of perspectives, television news follows a discourse set by the political and economic elite. This was the same even for publicly-owned PBS, who, in the midst of the most drone program coverage, produced a drone documentary funded by drone manufacturer Lockheed Martin and did not present a significantly different range of views or more critical coverage of the program than cable news outlets. / A Thesis submitted to the School of Communication in partial fulfillment of the Master of Science. / Spring Semester, 2015. / December 3, 2014. / drones, national security, news, television news, war journalism / Includes bibliographical references. / Jennifer Proffitt, Professor Directing Thesis; Stephen McDowell, Committee Member; Andy Opel, Committee Member.

Research based on the affective approach has established that political partisans' emotional responses to identity-threatening news content, particularly that of anxiety and anger, will affect their subsequent information seeking (e.g., Marcus et al., 2000; Arpan & Nabi, 2011), although they did not agree upon the effect of anger. Some contend that anger will close off information seeking (Valentino et al., 2008), and some argue that anger will motivate more information seeking (Arpan & Nabi, 2011). Based on the Hostile Media Effect and Lazarus' (1991) cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, the current study examined the role bias-induced emotions (anger and anxiety) play in mediating partisan information seeking preferences, as well as the roles that anger expression trait and issue novelty play in moderating partisans' emotional responses. The current study involved an experiment including a 2 (Novel v. Familiar issues) X 3 (three different identity-threatening issues) design with a control condition (non-threatening) to explore the mediating role of anger and anxiety on subsequent information seeking preferences (identity-bolstering information, identity-threatening information, and neutral information), as well as moderating effects of anger expression and issue novelty. A total of 243 participants completed this study. The results indicated three main findings. First, bias-induced anger, but not anxiety, motivated participants to want to read additional identity-threatening information. Second, surprisingly, only the interaction of anger-in expression and exposure to identity-threatening news articles affected the subsequent identity-threatening information seeking, which was contrary to the current study's proposition. The higher the anger-in expression trait, the stronger bias-induced anger's mediating effect. Third, perceived issue novelty did elicit greater anger and anxiety, and it also moderated bias-induced anger's effects on identity-threatening information seeking: the more perceived issue novelty, the stronger bias-induced anger's mediating effect. The findings have implications for the relationship between exposure to identity-threatening news and information seeking in a democratic society. Limitations and suggestions for future research were discussed. / A Dissertation submitted to the College of Communication and Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2014. / July 14, 2014. / Anger, Anger Expression, Anxiety, Emotion, Information Seeking, News Bias / Includes bibliographical references. / Laura M. Arpan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stephen McDowell, Committee Member; Arthur Raney, Committee Member.