The interrelated topics of food, eating, nutrition, and diet continue to represent growing areas of interest in communication studies and related disciplines. Food is essential to our existence, and the images we use to communicate about food are important to public culture. In this project, I conduct a visual rhetorical analysis of the food pyramids created by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the 1992 Food Guide Pyramid and the 2005 MyPyramid, to explore how these iconic images negotiate the competing interests of the food industry, nutritionists, and the general public. As icons circulate, they become subjected to various forms of appropriation which includes copying, imitating, and satirizing the original image. Therefore, I study a collection of appropriated food pyramids created by different groups and individuals to identify the salient features of the food pyramid icon. As a group these images encourage viewers to believe that an abundance of food always exists by highlighting products over processes. Viewing the earth as endlessly abundant aligns with a cornucopian perspective on the environment which implicitly supports the status quo in the U.S. industrial food system. I conclude by offering ideas of appropriated food pyramids that visually challenge this problematic ideology. The USDA food pyramids and their visual appropriations provide an important space for us to interrogate the rhetorical messages we consume in public culture.

abstract: In this thesis, I examine the inclusion of American Indians as museum subjects and participants in Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum. To determine the forces that informed Peale's curatorship, I analyze Peale's experiences, personal views on education and scientific influences, specifically Carl Linnaeus, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and Thomas Jefferson. Peale created a polarized natural history narrative divided between Anglo-Americans and races that existed in a “natural state.” Within the museum's historical narrative, Peale presented Native individuals as either hostile enemies of the state or enlightened peacekeepers who accepted the supremacy of Americans. Peale's embrace of Native visitors demonstrated a mixture of racial tolerance and belief in racial hierarchy that also characterized democratic pedagogy. I derive the results by examining Peale's correspondence, diaries and public addresses, as well as administrative documents from the museum such as accession records, guidebooks, lectures and museum labels. I conclude that although Peale believed his museum succeeded in promoting tolerance and harmony among all cultures, his message nevertheless promoted prejudice through the exaltation of “civilized men.” By studying the social and intellectual constraints under which Peale operated, it is possible to see the extent to which observation of and commentary on ethnic and racial groups existed in America's earliest public culture and shaped early American museum history. Contemporary museums strive for cultural preservation and tolerance, therefore analysis of Peale's intentions and effects may increase the self-awareness of today's museum professionals. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis History 2015

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Tourism visits to sites associated to varying degrees with death and dying have for some time inspired academic debate and research into what has come to be popularly described as ‘dark tourism’. Research to date has been based on the mobilisation of various social scientific methodologies to understand issues such as the motivations of visitors to consume dark tourism experiences and visitor interpretations of the various narratives that are part of the consumption experience. This thesis offers an alternative conceptual perspective for carrying out research into museums that represent genocide and occupation by presenting a discourse analysis of five Lithuanian museums which share this overchig theme using Foucault’s concept of ‘discursive formation’ from ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’. A constructivist methodology is therefore applied to locate the rhetorical representations of Lithuanian and Jewish subject positions and to identify the objects of discourse that are produced in five museums that interpret an historical era defined by occupation, the persecution of people and genocide. The discourses and consequent cultural function of these museums is examined and the key finding of the research proposes that they authorise a particular Lithuanian individualism which marginalises the Jewish subject position and its related objects of discourse into abstraction. The thesis suggests that these museums create the possibility to undermine the ontological stability of Holocaust and the Jewish-Lithuanian subject which is produced as an anomalous, ‘non-Lithuanian’ cultural reference point. As with any Foucauldian archaeological research, it cannot be offered as something that is ‘complete’ since it captures only a partial field, or snapshot of knowledge, bound to a specific temporal and spatial context. The discourses that have been identified are perhaps part of a more elusive ‘positivity’ which is salient across a number of cultural and political surfaces which are ripe for a similar analytical approach in future. It is hoped that the study will motivate others to follow a discourse-analytical approach to research in order to further understand the critical role of museums in public culture when it comes to shaping knowledge about ‘inconvenient’ pasts.

This dissertation examines documentary cinema in Socialist China as an emerging technology of mass politics, a new medium for creating political imaginaries and writing history, and a global vernacular connecting China to other revolutionary and modernizing cultures. At the center of my investigation is documentary cinema's capacities to work across boundaries between reality and fiction, between physical and metaphysical worlds, and between a historical world bound by its materiality and a revolutionary world mobilized to take leaps into a brighter future. I argue that these capacities made documentary a particularly relevant media for socialism for both epistemological and historiographical reasons. Epistemologically, documentary brought together the empirical and the ideological, both fundamental to a Marxist quest for truth. Historiographically, documentary's deep bond to the present moment and its capacity for temporal re-structuring and mass mobilization allowed it to intervene radically into the making and writing of history, particularly in a society engaged with engineering its own transformation. Using visual archives only recently made available, the dissertation's wide-ranging discussions include how documentary re-enacted the civil war upon the founding of the PRC, documented "tomorrow" during the Great Leap Forward, created mass passions for diplomacy in the 1960s, and enabled a poetics of mourning and testimony in the immediate years after the Cultural Revolution. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation investigates department stores as complex spatial and cultural buildings, in which values and ideas are expressed, negotiated, and produced. Situated in a cultural context commonly referred to as a society of consumption, where identity and social structures are worked out through consumption rather than production, the query turns to a specific act of consumption: that of shopping. More precisely, it investigates the role of space and spatial distribution in shopping. How space is distributed, arranged, or ordered allows for different possibilities in constructing categories from which the shoppers are to make a selection, and for how these categories can be related to one another, which informs the shoppers what belongs together, what is to be held apart, what is important, what is private, what is public, and what is of higher or lower status. It further supports, prevents, and promotes different routes and choices, giving different patterns of presence, publicity, privacy, purpose, etc. that not only affects the atmosphere of the spaces, but makes suggestions of what is found in them. These questions are investigated through a series of conceptual laboratories, each addressing the problem from different standpoints and focusing on different parts of the question: from how categories are constructed and given character, to how they form systems of values, how shoppers are trained in aesthetics of fashion, how relative degrees of presences are made use of, and how they appear influenced by spatial distribution. In this, the work shifts between qualitative and quantitative methods, each completing and evolving the other. It shows that to a remarkable degree, much of the emergent values and ideas can be understood through the filter of spatial configurations, and especially when treated as two systems: one of exposure and one of availability. As similar operations also affect patterns of movement and being, which enables them to also be related to publicity, privacy, and other social characters, the department stores can be understood as not only commercial spaces but as sites of negotiation of public culture. As such, both the analytic model and the more specific findings have important implications for architectural theory in general. / QC 20100803

The work consists of two parts: the first one is focused on the Staré Brno borough, it's historical development and reinterpretation of a water element, that was once present in the form of a millrace that no longer exists. In the second part, one of the important urban knots of the area is chosen to be the site for the public spa and library complex. The design focuses on the cultural aspect of the new intervention and addresses the complex topic of the public spa as the epicenter of the public life.

This thesis is an institutional ethnography of the Nigeria Police Force. It concentrates on evidence from 18 months of fieldwork in one particular police station, in the pseudonymised town of Dutsin Bature in central Nigeria, and draws comparative evidence from examples and locations elsewhere in Nigeria. The fieldwork evidence is also supported by analyses of public discourse, literature reviews, some formal interviews and historical research. The thesis aims to fill a gap in empirical scholarship by looking at policing in Nigeria primarily from the level of everyday practice, and deriving understandings of the ways the overall system works, rather than by taking normative structural approaches and basing suppositions of actual behaviour upon these. It also aims to document emic perspectives on policing in Nigeria, in contrast to most existing scholarship and public discourse which takes an external perspective, from which the voices and worldviews of police themselves are absent. The thesis situates this ethnography within three theoretical terrains. First, developing understandings of policing and public security in Africa, which have often neglected in-depth studies of formal police forces. Secondly, enlarging the ethnographic study of formal institutions in African states, to develop a closer understanding of what state systems are and how they function, beyond the overtly dysfunctionalist perspectives which have dominated recent scholarship. Thirdly, informing ongoing debates over state and society in Africa, problematising understandings which see these as separate entities instead of mutually constitutive, and drawing attention to the ways in which the two interpenetrate and together mould the public sphere. The thesis begins with a historical overview of the trajectory of formal policing in Nigeria, then examines public understandings and representations of policing, before moving inside the institutional boundaries, considering in turn the human composition of the police, training and character formation, the way police officers do their work in Dutsin Bature, Nigerian police officers’ preoccupation with risk and the systemic effects of their efforts to mitigate it, and finally officers’ subjective perspectives on their work, their lived realities, and on Nigeria in an era of transition. These build together to suggest some conclusions pertinent to the theoretical perspectives.