<p>I study three contemporary Chilean works of visual culture that appropriate and re-assemble visual material, discourse, and atmosphere from the bureaucracy of the military state. I examine Diamela Eltit’s textual performance of legal discourse in Puño y letra (2005); Guillermo Núñez’s testimonial art Libertad Condicional (1979-1982) based on the documents pertaining to his imprisonment, parole and forced exile; and Pablo Larraín’s fictional film Post Mortem (2010) inspired by Salvador Allende’s autopsy report. I argue that they employ a framework that exposes both the functional and aesthetic modes of bureaucracy complicit in state terror that operate within the spectacular and the mundane. Furthermore, I trace bureaucracy’s origins from the founding of the nation to its current practices that enabled the societal conditions for dictatorship and continue to uphold dictatorial legacies into the present.</p><p>In my analysis, I engage theories from performance, legal and media studies to interpret how Eltit critiques the press coverage of human rights trials, Núñez informs institutionalized preservation of memory, and Larraín demonstrates the power of fiction in our documentary reconstruction of the past. I conclude by arguing that this examination of bureaucracy is imperative because state bureaucracy anchors vestiges of the dictatorship that persist into the present such as the dictatorship-era constitution and the newly revived preventative control of identity documentation law.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis explores social memory, migration, place and belonging and cultural citizenship in Pulaski, Virginia, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). Through the lens of autoethnography, a participant-researcher model, I look closely at the affects that globalization has had on the economic and cultural life of this semi-rural community. The Autoethnographic approach has allowed me to reflect on my role as the co-author of oral and written narratives, a communal archive of historical images and a collection of collaborative photography. The impact of this thesis is, in part, a deeper understanding of collective social memory and the research we do on this subject exists in the border space between the self and community. As such, participant based modes of inquiry can help us help address the needs of academic institutions and expectation of community partners with a greater degree of success.

In this paper, I will detail the film making techniques that my crew and I employed while making AM800, my thesis film at the University of New Orleans. I will detail the creative and technical steps we took, from the earliest stages of idea conceptualization to the final phases of post-production and screening. During my recounting of this process, I will discuss our creative goals, the challenges that we faced while achieving these goals, and the resulting product's effectiveness as a narrative short film. The quality of the final product will be gauged through the results of test screenings and direct audience feedback.

Esta pesquisa analisa caminhos por meio dos estudos visuais visando à reflexão sobre o ensino da moda vinculada à percepção cultural por meio da análise de imagens. O objetivo consiste em investigar possibilidades para pensar o ensino e aprendizagem do processo criativo de moda. Para isso, buscou-se interpretar como as imagens são concebidas, investigando suas relações com a cultura na qual estão inseridas. Para tanto, a pesquisa observa as diferentes interpretações acerca da criatividade para fundamentar sua reflexão no tocante ao processo criador em moda com o intuito de potencializar sua práxis para o ensino e o fomento à criatividade dos alunos. O projeto também contemplou uma pesquisa in loco, na França, a fim de observar como o processo criador é trabalhado no país e a relação da cultura com as estratégias de ensino, isso para fundamentar um estudo comparativo do fomento à criação em cursos de moda no Brasil e na França. Além disso, apresenta-se o desenvolvimento de uma coleção autoral para demonstrar como a leitura de imagem pode contribuir com o estímulo da criatividade em Moda. / This research analyzes ways through visual studies aiming to reflect on the fashion school linked to cultural awareness through image analysis. The aim consists to investigate possibilities to think the teaching and learning of creative fashion process. For this, we sought to interpret as images are designed, investigating its relationship with the culture in which they are inserted. Therefore, the research looks at different interpretations of creativity to support its reflection regarding the creative process in fashion in order to enhance their práxis for teaching and fostering the creativity of students. The project also included an in loco survey, in France, in order to observe how the creative process is working in the country and the relationship of culture with the teaching strategies, so to support a comparative study of fostering the creation of fashion courses in Brazil and France. In addition, it presents the development of an authorial collection to demonstrate how image reading can contribute to stimulating creativity in fashion.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

Un nouveau genre est apparu en bande dessinée, le récit mémoriel historique. Il retrace la mémoire d’un individu, celle de l’auteur (Marjane Satrapi- Persepolis ) ou de l’un de ses proches (Art Spiegelman- Maus ), au sein d’un événement historique majeur des XX e et XXI e siècles. Cette création artistique, en mots et en images, repose sur la nécessité de transmettre un passé le plus souvent familial. Le caractère intime et personnel de ce type d’album induit qu’un récit mémoriel historique est, sauf exception, l’oeuvre d’un unique auteur, qui en réalise le scénario, le dessin et éventuellement, la mise en couleur. L’engagement moral de ne pas trahir la mémoire invoquée conduit ce dernier à mener d’importantes recherches documentaires et à restituer, le plus objectivement possible, les faits, personnels et historiques. Le récit mémoriel historique en bande dessinée est l’expression d’une mémoire individuelle, représentative de la mémoire collective. L’apparition de ce nouveau genre est à mettre en relation avec l’intérêt croissant porté à la mémoire depuis la fin du XX e siècle. Il est, en quelque sorte, un marqueur visuel et narratif de l’« activisme mémoriel » mis en lumière par Henri Rousso. Il crée une mémoire imagée, laquelle est une mémoire traumatique où l’image est prédominante ; cette dernière, dessinée voire photographique, interagit avec le texte et impressionne durablement. Ces albums sont critiques, fidèles aux évènements et conformes à l’historiographie. Leur publication influence l’image que nous nous faisons des faits historiques. Maus , seul album au monde à avoir reçu un prix Pulitzer (1992) a ainsi contribué à un profond changement du regard porté sur la Shoah. / A new genre of comics has developped, the historical graphic memoir, which is based on the author’s personal experience (Marjane Satrapi- Persepolis ) of a major historical event of the twentieth or the twenty- first century, or on one of the author's relatives (Art Spiegelman- Maus ). A graphic novel of the sort is mainly based on the need to transmit a family history. The intimate and personal nature of this type of book implies that a historical graphic memoir is, in most cases, the work of a single author, who directs the script, as well as the drawing and possibly the colour setting. The moral commitment, the involvement of the author in giving an accurate picture of the facts, both personal and historical, induces an important documentary research. The historical graphic memoir is the expression of an individual memory, that is also representative of a collective memory. The appearance of this new genre is linked with the growing interest in memory since the late twentieth century. This is, somehow, a visual and narrative marker of "memorial activism" as highlighted by Henry Rousso. This creates a pictorial memory, a traumatic memory where the picture is predominant; drawn or photographic, it interacts with the text and impresses durably. These albums are accurate and their publication influences the representation we have of historical facts. Maus, the one album ever to have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1992) has contributed to a profound change in people's outlook on the Holocaust.

Esta pesquisa analisa caminhos por meio dos estudos visuais visando à reflexão sobre o ensino da moda vinculada à percepção cultural por meio da análise de imagens. O objetivo consiste em investigar possibilidades para pensar o ensino e aprendizagem do processo criativo de moda. Para isso, buscou-se interpretar como as imagens são concebidas, investigando suas relações com a cultura na qual estão inseridas. Para tanto, a pesquisa observa as diferentes interpretações acerca da criatividade para fundamentar sua reflexão no tocante ao processo criador em moda com o intuito de potencializar sua práxis para o ensino e o fomento à criatividade dos alunos. O projeto também contemplou uma pesquisa in loco, na França, a fim de observar como o processo criador é trabalhado no país e a relação da cultura com as estratégias de ensino, isso para fundamentar um estudo comparativo do fomento à criação em cursos de moda no Brasil e na França. Além disso, apresenta-se o desenvolvimento de uma coleção autoral para demonstrar como a leitura de imagem pode contribuir com o estímulo da criatividade em Moda. / This research analyzes ways through visual studies aiming to reflect on the fashion school linked to cultural awareness through image analysis. The aim consists to investigate possibilities to think the teaching and learning of creative fashion process. For this, we sought to interpret as images are designed, investigating its relationship with the culture in which they are inserted. Therefore, the research looks at different interpretations of creativity to support its reflection regarding the creative process in fashion in order to enhance their práxis for teaching and fostering the creativity of students. The project also included an in loco survey, in France, in order to observe how the creative process is working in the country and the relationship of culture with the teaching strategies, so to support a comparative study of fostering the creation of fashion courses in Brazil and France. In addition, it presents the development of an authorial collection to demonstrate how image reading can contribute to stimulating creativity in fashion.

This is a film about my father, who died in 2017. It deals with his ancestry, rooted in South African history, as well as the events before and after his family’s immigration to America in 1965. The purpose of the project was to investigate the past, as I have been disconnected from my family history due to exile, assimilation, tragedy and trauma. This lead to the discovery of undeniable patterns of love and loss, which I present in this film, yet do not completely understand. Content warning: discussion of suicide and car accidents.

This paper unpacks the franchise system and the often-tumultuous relationship between Producers and Consumers, especially around the release of new films by the Producers. Star Wars represents far more than just a corporate product. There is a thriving ecosystem around pieces that have touched fans lives personally. The reaction of fans to new media texts in existing franchises is in constant flux. Tumultuous emotions of betrayal come in waves from fans immediately following the release of new content. Specifically focusing on reception to prequel films, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999) and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), reveals how both generational differences and technology affect fan interaction and reaction across iterations of the franchise. Fans attempt to remediate the differences in cannon and their own interpretations of the franchise through fan creation. Fans have historically been early embracers of new technologies and have used increasingly available editing software and cameras to express their passion for the franchise. A digital world has created ever expanding platforms of interactivity in which Producers/Consumers can reach one another. The spaces in which these interactions occur have evolved from personal fan websites to social media sites. The amount of online information available to consumers, from reviews to fan content, has diminished the power of official franchise content. The release of Solo revealed a dangerous level of apathy from consumers. As opposed to the fervor surrounding powerful media texts at the time of The Phantom Menace, the diversified media landscape has undoubtedly affected Star Wars.

This project is composed of two video games that look at multiple facets of the company Amazon through a critical lens. Fulfillment explores the working conditions of Amazon Fulfillment Centers through play. Amazon Invazion provides a critical look at the company from a consumer perspective, showcasing some of the many acquisitions made by Amazon from 1994-2018. Both games prompt the player to consider their own participation in the company’s growth.