In this thesis, I analyze the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019). Although these characters are not intended to represent human beings but are fictional nonhuman species, examining them through the lens of racialization defamiliarizes them and reveals how children's media not only perpetuates specific caricatures of people of color but subtly naturalizes what race is as an assemblage of visual, verbal, performative, and affective components. While scholars studying racial representations in children's animated films often focus on how animated characters speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce visual aspects of race, this interpretive framework does not address the ways in which race goes beyond the surface, nor does it address complex interactions between race, gender, and sexuality. Rather than asserting that nonhuman animated characters are certain races, my term "submerged racialization" suggests that animated characters are not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies but are aggregates of what it is to be racialized in historically specific ways that are co-constitutive with gender and sexuality. These features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, overdetermining how the characters perform without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions enact a multi-layered submerged racialization as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, addressing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization underlying today's most popular children's franchises, I stress that race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us. / Master of Arts / What race are the Minions? While this may seem a strange question, scholars of children's animated films have often described the race of nonhuman animated characters based on whether they speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce certain visual characteristics, such as black skin. However, I argue that the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019) are "submerged racialized figures" and not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies. These characters demonstrate what it means to be racialized in historically specific ways that intersect with their gender and sexuality. Their racial features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, affecting their representation without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions demonstrate a multi-layered submerged racialization throughout the franchise as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, changing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization within today's most popular children's franchises, I demonstrate how race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us.

In spite of the popularity of technologies that facilitate distance learning, institutions still educate students who gather together in shared physical spaces. But now even these traditional settings for learning are more collaborative and technology-rich environments. Qualitative methods in the sociolinguistic tradition allowed me to attend carefully to the vocal and non-vocal interactions of students engaged in a computer supported collaborative authoring assignment. Three research questions guided my inquiry: 1) In what ways did students negotiate roles and responsibilities?; 2) In what ways did students negotiate access to their assignment?; and 3) what was the nature of discourse in computer supported collaborative authoring? I conducted microanalysis of the communication in online discussions and face-to-face discourse throughout an entire semester of one graduate level course entitled The Psychology of Teachers and Teaching. My data revealed that the online discussion forum, physical proximity to the computer during face-to-face collaboration and instructor influence shaped the students’ roles and responsibilities as well as their entry into the assignment. I propose a model illustrating how students negotiate entry into computer supported collaborative authoring assignments and discuss its implications for teaching and learning. / text

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

The increasingly global environment has spurred the economy in the United States as well as the economies in nearly every other nation. Although the U.S. remains the world leader in the global economy, research shows that the United States is at risk of losing its place as the world leader in science and innovation. Policymakers have recognized the need for research addressing global competitiveness. President Bush signed the America Competes Act, which calls for increased investment in innovation and education to improve U.S. competitiveness and President Barack Obama has named a platform, "Science, Technology and Innovation for a New Generation" which will extend and prioritize the efforts to improve math and science education. K-12 U.S. students are graduating from high school unprepared to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in college. Without STEM degrees they will be unable to pursue technology jobs after graduation. Statistics show that the U.S. is failing to produce as many graduates in STEM as other countries. In an increasingly global world, without graduates in STEM courses the U.S. is at risk of losing its position as the economic world leader. Government, industry and academia all agree that the U.S. needs to address education on a K-12 level to ensure that U.S. students are equipped with twenty-first century skills to compete in a twenty-first century global economy. Twenty-first century students are different from students of previous generations. Researchers argue that changes in the environment, specifically an increased exposure to technology, have changed the brains of twenty-first century students; twenty-first century students learn differently. However, twenty-first century students are being taught with an instructional curriculum that was designed for a previous generation that did not have the same exposure to technology. This is causing a digital-divide that is hindering the achievement of students. The instructional curriculum needs to be updated to meet the needs of twenty-first century students. This thesis addresses this need from a technical communication perspective by arguing that the instructional design of twenty-first century learning materials should be improved by adhering to guidelines for twenty-first century learning characteristics and twenty-first century technology use. The guidelines support a national goal to improve K-12 achievement in order to increase U.S. STEM graduates and increase the U.S.'s ability to compete in a global economy.

Life in today’s world is characterized by complexity and rapid change. Twenty-first century skills and especially mathematical understanding are supposed to crucially contribute to meeting the demands of our world since mathematics offers strategies to structure or simplify complex problems. An open question is which teaching practices are appropriate to provide all students with such skills and to broaden the participation of underprivileged students. The present article explores these aspects by focusing on complex tasks, a practice that can be considered highly accepted in the context of mathematics education all over the world. We will concentrate on the perspective of the German mathematics education community as the foundation of our considerations. Based on an analytical investigation of mathematical literacy and twenty-first century skills (such as creativity, critical thinking, or problem-solving), we will address central ideas and characteristics of complex mathematical tasks. To complement the analytical approach, we will illustrate their characteristics as well as possible intersections with twenty-first century skills by presenting an elementary school teaching experiment. Finally, we will critically discuss the potentials and pitfalls of complex mathematical tasks from an abstract perspective and conclude by debating practical consequences for organizing mathematical learning-teaching-processes.

This dissertation studies a critical facet of Chinese politics, inspections by higher Chinese government to villages. Principally, it looks at how village economic development determines government inspection decisions and how inspections, once conducted, impact village politics. Specifically, I argue that villages perceived as destabilizing to the Chinese regime, villages with higher levels of economic inequality and villages located at the two extremes of economic development, should see more inspections. In addition, I argue that inspections, in return, drive village politics: they increase village leaders' governing efficacy and raise villagers' political awareness. This theory has received strong support from both field work and quantitative empirical tests using the Chinese Household Income Project (2002) dataset.

This qualitative cross-case study explores the intricate practice of cutting within contemporary art, examining the works of six artists to unravel cutting’s diverse expressions. This research identifies cutting as a dynamic form of drawing that has evolved from ancient utilitarian uses and pre-modern crafts to a contemporary art form bridging various disciplines. The study meticulously charts the transformation of cutting from its historical roots in crafts like collages, quilts, writing, and pottery decoration to its present status as a ubiquitous tool in artistic creation.Through semi-structured interviews, visual analysis, and a comprehensive review of both digital and physical portfolios, the study explores how artists harness cutting to achieve a range of formal, conceptual, and metaphorical outcomes. The research, grounded in a constructivist worldview, contextualizes these practices within the broader contemporary art scene, drawing insights from theorists such as Thierry du Duve, David Joselit, Robert Storr, and Hito Steyerl. This research categorizes cutting techniques into literal, physical, and non-literal, encompassing digital and metaphorical approaches, highlighting the practice’s capacity for innovation and transformation. This study reveals a unifying theme across the artists’ works: the use of cutting as an extension of drawing, facilitating endless possibilities for transformation and expression. This dissertation posits that cutting extends beyond the confines of traditional art forms, acting as a versatile tool that empowers a spectrum of artistic expressions. By examining the historical development and diverse applications of cutting practices, the research enriches our comprehension of contemporary art. It reveals the profound and transformative potential inherent within this fundamental artistic act.

Life writing has traditionally been organized into two main subfields: autobiographical writing, focused on the self, and biographical writing, focused on one or more other human beings. Yet, many contemporary texts from different linguistic and cultural contexts defy or complicate such a clear-cut distinction. The present dissertation investigates a group of such texts, which I have called “bifocal narratives.” With this term, I indicate works that, as in an ellipse, hinge upon two foci at once – an autobiographical narrator and a biographical other – and take shape around the relation between these two poles. The dissertation offers both a historical interpretation and a morphology of this form. It does so by comparing three literary contexts (Italian literature, French literature, and Anglophone literature of the North Atlantic) and combining theoretical argumentation, panoramic analyses of a vast corpus, and close readings of individual works. Drawing on bifocal narratives’ amphibious nature as both literary and documentary writings, in the Introduction, I propose to interpret the bifocal form through a twofold lens: as part of a growing interest in the intersubjective formation of identity and the self/other relationship in life writing and life writing criticism; and as a mise en abyme of trends and tensions at work in contemporary literature more at large. In the latter respect, I view bifocal narratives as embodying both a heightened interest in individuality and a tangible difficulty among writers in speaking as characters different from themselves. I link both aspects to a crisis of traditional humanistic ideologies and the mandate of intellectuals in European and North American cultures. In the first chapter, I offer a panoramic view of bifocal narratives by delineating their main manifestations and highlighting some of their defining traits (for example, a strong heuristic tension or a tendency to structure the self/other relationship in polarized terms). In the following three chapters, I focus on three main subgroups of bifocal narratives: hyper-narrative bifocal works, bifocal texts between poetry and prose, and essayistic bifocal narratives. These three clusters of texts allow me to investigate some crucial aspects of the bifocal form, which are particularly evident in these various subsets: the role of narration in shaping a sense of the self, and a serious use of intertextuality; a complex vision of the speaking “I” that complicates a clear-cut division between fiction and nonfiction, an original use of textual blanks, and a deep literary work on both language and documents; and the complication of the auto/biographical model via the alternative paradigm offered by (literary) portraiture, as well as a multilayered approach towards the (post)modern literary and critical traditions. In doing so, I also provide extensive close readings of five main works: Via Gemito (2000) by Domenico Starnone and Limonov (2011) by Emmanuel Carrère; Jane: A Murder (2005) by Maggie Nelson; and Out of Sheer Rage (1997) by Geoff Dyer and Qualcosa di scritto (2012) by Emanuele Trevi. Besides illuminating various aspects of bifocal narratives, these readings also aim to offer original interpretations of these works.

The United States Navy possesses a preeminent peacetime role in U.S. national security: “naval forward presence,” or the maintenance of combat-credible naval forces worldwide to deter adversaries, reassure allies, respond to crises, and perform constabulary functions for the global commons. To many, naval forward presence is nearly-synonymous with American grand strategy.But since the post-Cold War defense drawdown, forward presence has constrained the Navy’s efforts to prepare for great power war. To support forward presence, the Navy has organized its force structure around fixed-wing-capable platforms and their supporting multi-mission combatant warships. The politics and spiraling costs of building such ships have stymied efforts to expand the fleet. Presence also requires that the surface navy remain continually visible and busy. Too few ships thus face too many demands. The resultant operational tempo overwhelms maintenance and training cycles, and grinds away at the economic viability of American shipyards. In this way, naval forward presence consumes the Navy’s structural readiness, or its capacity to engage in severe and sustained combat with a peer competitor, such as the People’s Republic of China. And in so doing, presence consumes its own promises – deterrence and reassurance. Why, given its internal tensions, does naval forward presence remain a governing strategic concept for the U.S. Navy, even in the shadow of a major international threat? What lies behind the rhetorical consensus on the value of naval forward presence for U.S. national security? This dissertation takes a popular strategic concept to task, illuminating the ideas, politics, and organizational processes that sustain it, even as its costs and risks accumulate, and even as international conditions change. The inquiry comprises three parts: a history of presence and its implementation; a theoretical analysis of presence through the lens of political science literature; and a case study of the reform agenda following the U.S. Navy’s surface ship accidents of 2017. I find that naval forward presence, as an idea, ran away from the Navy. Initially elevated to prominence for bureaucratic reasons, presence was sustained both by organizational processes outside the Navy’s control, and by policymakers’ belief in the very benefits the Navy had claimed presence could deliver. Naval forward presence is rooted in deep-seated American foreign policy beliefs that cross ideological divides. The idea that the nation, and the world, cannot survive without a navy whose peacetime roles include deterring adversaries, preserving national credibility through crisis response, and policing the international system, is a uniquely American conceit. Ultimately, it also abuts against a physical reality: a navy tasked to do all these things, cannot do them all well. These findings have two implications. First, attempts to solve the trade-off between presence and structural readiness by building more ships are unlikely to succeed, as presence demands, sustained by the power of the idea and organizational processes resistant to change, will continue apace and even rise as the fleet grows. Second, the rise of populist nationalism may challenge consensus support for presence by calling alliance commitments into question. However, hyper-partisanship associated with this movement could doom efforts to restore Navy structural readiness regardless. Therefore, whether presence remains popular or not, presence must be substantially reduced to preserve the United States’ ability to deter, or if necessary, defeat China.

Definitions of celebrity authorship and material textuality at the turn of the twenty-first century have predominantly emphasised the implicitly negative aspects of contemporary developments in the literary marketplace. Particularly prominent are arguments that the practice of authorship has become subject to homogenisation by the matrix of celebrity in which successful writers are now expected to function; and, further, that the changing nature of texts themselves and the ways in which they are marketed is eroding the implicitly superior position traditionally held by literature in the cultural marketplace. This thesis views such readings as pessimistic, and offers an alternative, seeking to formulate a new critical approach to literary value in the contemporary sphere which would appreciate notions of celebrity, populism, and digital mediation as integral and productive aspects of how literary value is formed today. Through in-depth focus on the cases of a number of unconventional contemporary American authors whose work demonstrates differing, innovative approaches to the process of authorship, this thesis exposes the ways in which contemporary, atypically ‘literary’ instances of writing can and do work within and develop beyond traditional conceptualisations of authorship and literary value. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, largely critically considered prototypical ‘celebrity’ authors, are in the first chapter reconsidered as writers whose understanding of their position within the literary marketplace affords them a self-conscious, critical perspective on the notion of celebrity in their work and public personae. The productively self-conscious author-figure is reconsidered in the second chapter, which reads the individual and joint works of author Paul Auster and visual artist Sophie Calle as foregrounding the process of creative collaboration as uniquely illuminating and transformative within the contemporary literary sphere. The notion of dual authorship is revisited and reconceptualised in the third chapter, which considers JT LeRoy and the practice of hoax authorship, outlining how this process forces the reformulation of literary value, particularly in a contemporary setting in which authors are accountable for their work in newer, more visible ways. The final chapter expands these previously-introduced themes to consider bloggers-turned-authors, particularly Tucker Max and Julie Powell, and the impact of the merging of old and new textualities on both the orientation of the figure of the writer and the way in which value is attached to his texts by readers. Ultimately, the unconventional nature of these examples is shown to belie the universality of the representations of value they enact, contributing to a full and salient account of how literary value is determined at the beginning of the twenty-first century.