The 1952 Presidential campaign ushered into national prominence the Democratic nominee, Adlai Ewing Stevenson. His sudden and dramatic emergence as an important factor in world politics was due in part to his unique oratory. Dynamic in style and content, his speeches commanded the rapt attention of the American people for three intense months during which he delivered over two hundred and fifty. Of interest and importance is the new insight into national problems that he gave to the American voter as a result of these orations. The problem is to analyze, through his public addresses before and during the 1952 campaign, the power of his oratory with respect to the enforcement of ideas, and to more fully understand his personality and philosophy.

This paper explores vilification in the popular counterterrorism show, Fox’s "24." A critical, in-depth analysis of three prominent antagonists from the show illustrates the different ways in which they are vilified. Each of the three characters is examined to understand which type of villain he or she embodies in "24," which of the show’s moral codes the villain affronts, and how he or she is punished or treated as a result. The analysis considers the broadcast of the show’s first six seasons in relation to neoconservative and Christian Right values that characterized the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. It finds that the show’s characterizations of all three villains—an Islamic extremist, a femme fatale, and a shirking bureaucrat—reinforce dominant xenophobic, patriarchal, and hypermasculine values, which underscored the Bush administration’s war on terror.

This thesis examines the discursive arguments made by activist and advocacy organizations that are active supporters or opponents of immigration in the United States. This project especially considers the role of new media as a way for different organizations to distribute their perspectives, construct knowledge, and organize support around their stances on immigration. While old media such as television, radio, and print continue to be important in framing the issue of immigration, new media such as websites and social networking, as well as media technology such as text messaging, are starting to reorganize and expand the spaces in which these controversial debates take place. In recognition of the complexity and divisiveness of the immigration debate, this thesis takes into account a diverse group of organizations that focus on different aspects of immigration including the role of temporary migrant workers, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants. In the post 9/11 era controversy over immigration has been renewed and heightened. Immigrants and migrants moving from the Global South have especially been targeted by pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric dispersed by the media, politicians, and civil society groups. This thesis analyzes how culture, the economy, and citizenship, as well as race and racism are framed by both immigration critics and advocates as a means of impacting legislation, swaying public opinion, and in constructing a vision for the future of immigration and immigrants in the United States.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

When children grow up in a Christian home they learn fidelity is essential in a relationship. The inconsistency of biblical messages and parental infidelity is identity altering for children. In this study I use autoethnography to explore how my parents’ infidelity collided with religious teachings to shape my identity and influence my interpersonal relationships. I also use narrative interviewing to identity the ways my siblings were affected by the same experience and how such discrepancies in our home influenced their identities. The theory of narrative inheritance (Goodall, 2005) serves to be a source of empowerment as well as a contributing factor to definitions of infidelity. Familial roles are illuminated as I explore how my siblings and I negotiated cognitive dissonance that resulted from the conflicting narratives of Christianity and parental infidelity.

Following the Enlightenment, Western adherence to positivist theory influenced practices of Western research and documentation. Prior to the introduction of positivism into Western scholarship, innovations in printing technology, literary advancements, and the development of capitalism encouraged the passing of copyright statutes by nation-states in fifteenth century Europe. The evolution of copyright and positivism in Europe influenced United States copyright and its protection of the author, as well as the practice of archiving and its role in interpreting history. Because Native American cultures practiced orality, they suffered the loss of their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions not protected by copyright. By incorporating postmodern perspectives on archiving and poststructuralist views on the formation of knowledge, this thesis argues that Native American tribes now use Western forms of digital technology to create archives, record their histories, and reclaim control of their traditional cultural expressions.

This study analyzes oral recipe sharing practices as they emerge in Southern cooking. Researcher and participants were immersed in cooking recipes together in a qualitative research method that combined interactive interviewing with sensory ethnography. Findings revealed a category of oral recipe sharing practices that is missing from the literature: cooking lessons. This study identified cooking lessons as a distinct recipe sharing practice and worked to further operationalize and concretize such practices in hopes of spurring further research.

Using a Marxist framework with a grounding in critical literacy, this study employs a content analysis methodology to analyze 25 episodes of five of the most popular children’s television cartoons in order to understand how these cartoons portray economic and social systems, as well as how the messages these cartoons express would tend to support these systems. In so doing, this research hopes to provide a conceptual framework that educators and parents can use as a guide for demonstration of a critical approach to understanding the curriculum of children’s media inside or outside of the classroom. Educators can modify this framework to suit the age of the children that they are working with or to better align with the characteristics of the text their students are consuming. While this research may be used as a guide by educators, it is also a comprehensive Marxist analysis of some of the most popular cartoons targeted to pre-school aged children. Analysis of the data indicates these cartoons support a capitalist ideology through the expression of a particular worldview and associated values, which include normalizing authoritarian relationships, promoting consumerism and entrepreneurship, supporting beliefs about work that employers would value, and other views that tend to be valued in a capitalist system.

<p>Recent work in affect theory has addressed the category of what Sianne Ngai terms “ugly” feelings (Ngai 2007, Edelman 2004, Halberstam 2011) and the costs associated with the premium placed on so-called positive modes of thinking and feeling (Berlant 2011, Ahmed 2010, Love 2007), yet cynicism persists in many accounts as the feature of an undesirable political subjectivity. Likewise in popular and political discourse, cynicism is denounced as the mark of an ineffectual subject who chooses to opt out, rather than reach for supposedly obvious markers of (capitalist) achievement. This dissertation refuses these characterizations, instead considering cynicism as an affect bound up in neoliberal sociopolitical shifts. I argue that cynicism describes a feeling of living under structural conditions that curtail—in ways that are often effaced—the kinds of self-determining subjectivities that have been taken for granted as a feature of Western, liberal democracies and remain foundational to imagined modes of dissent. Exploring this situation in the context of three cultural frames—politics and governance, modes of labour in capitalist economies, and a structure of feeling premised on the pursuit of happiness—I examine cynical subjectivities in fiction, film, and American political discourse so as to 1) develop an inquiry into affect as situated between subject and structure; 2) acknowledge the commonality of a feeling of impasse and dominant cultural narratives that mask this frustration of agency; and 3) consider inertia and passivity as sensible orientations in a cultural moment in which the costs of momentum are becoming increasingly visible.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Media has the potential to legitimize or spread a belief system to the general public. The 2014 movie Left Behind is an example of a deliberate attempt at promoting the belief system referred to as dispensational premillennialism (DPM), or belief in the imminent rapture of Christians. Producers of Left Behind (2014) sought to promote DPM to the general public, hoping for a mass conversion. Online discussion and interviews were gathered and interpreted qualitatively. Content analysis of audience anticipation and reception show believers were as concerned with the conversion of the general public via this movie than the movie itself. Differences between the text of the movie and discussion surrounding the film provide insights into the DPM worldview. Dispensational premillennialists are observed; rejecting earthly existence as counterfeit, asserting the general inerrancy of prophecy while rejecting “date setting” practices and using the effigy of the Antichrist to criticize perceived socio-political enemies.