When conservative politicians captured Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, they brought with them a style of rhetoric rooted in the South of the 1950s and 1960s. The three core elements of this Southern style are clear: * Strong beliefs -- firmly held, loudly proclaimed and adhered to at the risk of becoming dogmatic. * Learning not to see -- a practiced avoidance of complications or distracting issues, an ability to turn a blind eye, to deny the obvious. * Policing of the public square -- strict enforcement of the ruling beliefs, at times becoming a bullying of allies to keep them in line, paired with quick and sharp public attacks on dissenting opinions. The Southern style is now an ingrained element of the conservative movement, and it operates with, and relies upon, active cooperation of the conservative press. This, too, has roots in the South. During the decades of civil rights activism, Southern newspapers instilled Southern ideology and allegiance among white readers, turned a blind eye to injustice and other weaknesses of Jim Crow culture and cleared the public square of dissenting opinions and alternative points of view. This study examines how the Southern style operated in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the work of journalists in Richmond, Virginia, Tallahassee, Florida, and Jackson, Mississippi, and on their interactions with political leaders, activists and the public. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2014. / August 21, 2014. / civil rights, integration, journalism, media, newspapers, Southern / Includes bibliographical references. / Neil Jumonville, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, University Representative; Maxine D. Jones, Committee Member; Jennifer L. Koslow, Committee Member; Andrew K. Frank, Committee Member.

The prevalence of social media in the past few years has changed the way people consume entertainment media and generated many new types of hybrid media entertainment experiences. This dissertation focuses on one of its multiple manifestations: social TV. Although several qualitative studies have suggested that live posting enhances viewers' media entertainment reception, few studies actually tested the proposition based on a rigorous research design. In addition, previous experimental research on live posting often assumed that live posting is a rather popular media behavior among young TV viewers. However, the actual popularity of and the motivation behind the behavior remain largely unknown. Against this background, the overarching goals of the dissertation project were 1) to explore the motivation and popularity of live posting among college student; 2) to test the effect of live posting on entertainment TV viewing experience through an innovative experimental method; 3) to identify the key variables that are underlying the mechanism of entertainment effects of live posting; and, 4) to examine a proposed live posting and entertainment model. To that end, five studies were conducted. Result of Study 1 and 2 confirmed that live posting is a popular media behavior (85.7%) among a college sample and helped to establish a 19-item measure of motivations for live posting, encompassing five constructs labeled interaction, community, catharsis, engagement, and extending enjoyment. Built upon these results, two experimental studies were conducted. Study 3 demonstrated that live posting matters, as it affects viewers' media entertainment reception. Implications for the results are discussed in detail. Study 4 focused on the effect of "treatment strength" utilizing a randomized control trial with live-tweeting frequency vary at three levels. Results indicated that live-tweeting frequency had a significant impact on viewers' program enjoyment; however, such effects were not linear. Study 4 also served as a preliminary study investigating the associations between the content of live tweets and program enjoyment. As a final step to the dissertation, Study 5 was conducted with a primary focus on the content of live tweets and other sub-components of live-tweeting behaviors. Findings suggested that both live-tweeting content and other features of live-tweeting are associated with program enjoyment. To conclude, the last chapter reconsidered some of the theoretical issues embedded in the live-tweeting phenomenon and offered a set of well-tuned propositions regarding the entertainment effects of live posting. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Communication in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2015. / October 1, 2015. / Co-presence, Enjoyment, Experiment, Involvement, Live posting, Social media / Includes bibliographical references. / Arthur A. Raney, Professor Directing Dissertation; Susan Losh, University Representative; Ulla Sypher, Committee Member; Patrick Merle, Committee Member.

Overwriting Literature and Other Acts of Cultural Terrorism in the Control Era examines American experimental writers and artists who compose in what Gilles Deleuze called the control era. This project locates the beginning of the control age to the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference at Columbia University. The conference introduced Deleuze and Félix Guattari to the American public, and it featured key artists in the American avant-garde: William S. Burroughs and John Cage. Deleuze explained that these weapons would "hijack" speech and create non-communication. Overwriting Literature reads their composition methods as potential weapons against the "control society." While this study examines experimental writing, it uses these writers to think of how one might apply these techniques to mass media / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 12, 2017. / Deleuze and Guattari, John Cage, Kathy Acker, Media Studies, "Societies of Control", William S. Burroughs / Includes bibliographical references. / S.E. Gontarski, Professor Directing Dissertation; Krzysztof Salata, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Aaron Jaffe, Committee Member.

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The myth of Atalanta represents the struggle for women athletes to gain legitimacy. Atalanta has strength and power that are foiled by heterosexual conventions of the sex/gender system. Thus, she functions as a metaphor of possibility and dashed hopes. This study explains the persistence of heterosexist representation of female athletes in popular press by exploring the linkages among sport, gender, and technology. Such an exploration is situated amid a body of interdisciplinary research that explores sport as a social and cultural form. As a Feminist Mass Communication study, this project explores the textual strategies employed by producers of mass-mediated content, as well as the institutional power relationships that secure them; and finally, for the exploration of the ways in which gendered ideologies are rearticulated in coverage of female athleticism. The study addresses four research questions: (a) What forms of femininity have been valorized or eclipsed in popular representations of female athleticism? (b) When and in what contexts is female muscularity addressed in the popular press? (c) What strategies does the popular press use to naturalize differences between male and female athletes? (d) Are there moments in the popular press coverage of female athleticism where the relationship between sport and gender is, or potentially could have been, transformed? To answer these questions I conduct a frame analysis on 140 articles from the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1921–1996. Frame analysis allows for the examination of the stability and/or change of mediated representations over time, the organizational practices of media and the representations they engender, and the politics of gender. I conclude that femininity as constituted by the popular press has limited potentially transformative moments in sport and athleticism. Furthermore, the origins of female athleticism are inaccurately represented in media, resulting in a collective amnesia about female athletic experiences. Finally, technological discourse embodies the masculinist values replicated not only in sport media, but also in the more general and popular representation of female athleticism.

My dissertation analyzes the processes of subject formation through the civilizing missions of nationalism and secularism in India, and toward that end, provides a secular critique of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, which seeks to unify the nation in the name of “one nation, one culture, one people.” After providing an introduction to the some of the dominant theories of nationalism, I compare the works of Partha Chatterjee and Jacques Derrida in terms of the different ways in which they consider their subjectivities as derived, the former through European history and the latter through the French language. Afterwards, I argue that it is necessary to draw a parallel relation between political and cultural modes of belonging to the nation with the psychological experience of nationhood. After raising the problematic relationship that psychoanalysis shares with history and postcolonial theory, I employ Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic theory to theorize the subject of Hindu nationalism. Then, I introduce the gendered and sexualized subject of the nation and highlight its problematic relationship with the essentially male discourse of nationalism. Specifically, I analyze ‘lesbian subjectivity’ and its exclusion by patriarchal and heterosexual discourse of Hindu nationalism, which posits the citizen-body as a male, homo-social entity through Deepa Mehta's film Fire. Following that, I raise the problematic of translation of secularism in the Indian context and the inherent challenges present in articulating a ‘secular subjectivity’ in a space that is fraught with the discourses of modernity, nativism, nationalism and religion. I argue that in spite of the problems of political translation that secularism faces, it behooves us to retrieve a secular subjectivity that stands in strong opposition to the discourses of religious fundamentalism in India. Finally, I argue that the act of religious conversion on part of low caste Hindus to Islam and Christianity is actually a performance of cultural criticism, which puts on the anvil the Hindu majoritarian agenda to ‘Indianize, Hinduize, and Spiritualize’ the nation of India.

Previous studies have found that preschoolers appear confused about some of the properties of televised images, indicating that the televised image shares some of the same properties of the object it is representing. For example, 3.5-year-olds claim that a televised object will spill if the television is turned upside down and 3.5- and 4.5-year-olds claim that a character appearing on television can see and hear them. Little is known, however, about the reasoning behind these confusions regarding televised images and whether children will act on these beliefs. In this project, two novel tasks were created. One of these tasks looked at whether children's behavioral responses about a televised person matched their verbal beliefs. Three-and-one-half- to 5.5-year-olds were introduced to a live person and a televised person who provided information about the location of a hidden sticker(Study 1a and 1b). All three age groups said that the televised individual could see the hiding event and acted on this claim by searching for the sticker in the location suggested by the televised individual about as often as the information suggested by the live individual. The second task examined the rationale behind childrens' confusion about the properties of televised images by creating a task in which children made comparisons between an item presented in three different modalities (as a televised object, as a physical object, and as a photo of the object). When given this comparison task (study 2), 3.5- and 4.5- year-olds claimed that the televised objects no longer shared the properties of real objects (e.g., said that the televised object would not spill if the television was turned upside down). Having the televised object next to the real object or a photo of the object seemed to help direct children's attention to the fact that the question was being asked about the televised object itself and not the real object it was representing. Preschoolers may understand the properties of televised objects much earlier than previously believed; however, understanding the properties of televised people may be more difficult.

The Continuing Ballad of Franco the Kid is an installation housing a collection of thoughts, both static and animated, addressing the absurdities of cultural dichotomy in contemporary America. Its theme-park aesthetic is an intentional appropriation meant to echo the spectacle that makes up America’s cultural landscape. Within this presentation the action of various iconic characters merge with fragmented text to form an allegorical matrix used to address America’s consumption and entertainment-obsessed culture and the consequential malaise induced by such obsession. The Continuing Ballad of Franco the Kid addresses this cultural state of being while underscoring current methods of communication and thought-control carefully orchestrated by corporate driven media machines, and the resulting dangers of such productions.

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