Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Ronet D. Bachman, Dept. of Sociology & Criminal Justice. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation refutes the notion that contemporary girls are uninterested in feminism by exploring how teenage girls are engaging in feminist activism as bloggers. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I analyze how girl bloggers produce feminist identities and practices that challenge hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal cultural politics. I employ feminist ethnographic methods, including a series of in-depth interviews with U.S. -based girl feminist bloggers and an online collaborative focus group, as well as a discursive and ideological textual analysis of girl-produced feminist blogs. Using these methods, I privilege girls' voices while proposing a model for conducting feminist ethnography online. In doing so, I demonstrate how girls' feminist blogging functions as an activist practice through networked counterpublics, intervening in mainstream and sometimes even commercial public space. I position this activism within a lengthy tradition of American feminism, analyzing how my participants remain in conversation with feminist history while simultaneously responding to their unique cultural climate. Finally, I argue that we must recognize the political importance of girls' feminist blogging by theorizing it as an emergent citizenship practice that makes feminism an accessible discourse to contemporary teenage girls. / text

While youth media production work has increased dramatically over the past two decades, researchers still lack an adequate theorization of how institutionally-mediated youth production programs instigate democratic acts. Central to this deficiency ares hortcomings in the two dominant frameworks typically used to conceptualize the democratic potential of young people's media work. In response to this, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt and use her conceptualization of public action as framed in relation to a "pedagogy of natality" to assess the relationship between creative youth practice and democracy. While Arendt's framework offers a compelling vision of democratic action, her model is also invaluable for mapping how production work affects adolescents' democratic experience. It focuses the analytic lens on agonistic struggles that expand the way youth register and pay heed to plurality. I demonstrate this utility through a critical ethnographic study of the Summer Visions Film Institute, an initiative designed around a series of two-week digital video production programs for youth aged 14-19. In examining the Summer Visions program, I address the experience of student video producers but focus close attention on the work and experience of peer-to-peer youth mentors in the program for the following reasons. First, peer education has a role in many youth media programs but there continues to be a dearth of research on peer mentorship in media production settings. Second, while student participants take part in Summer Visions for ten days, the mentors are involved in production work on a daily basis over a seven-week period. Most are also former students of the program and so they offer a more robust set of case studies. Using Arendt, I demonstrate how media production programs contribute in contradictory but nonetheless important ways to the formation of new publics, not because such work leads to straightforward forms of position taking about specific political projects, but because it leads to forms of thoughtfulness that challenge the lure of oblivion that haunts our lives and prevents us from seeing those who are different and yet part of our worlds.

Syftet med studien är att ta reda på hur och på vilka sätt modeföretag kan marknadsföra sig via digitala medier för att skapa närmare kontakt och påverka kundernas köpbeteende. Undersökningen är baserad på en kvalitativ metod i form av sex intervjuer. Intervjuerna bygger på fyra huvudgrupper i processen av användandet av digitala medier. Respondenterna som medverkat i intervjuerna är alla på något sätt aktiva eller har kunskap inom digitala medier. Studien visar på en problematisering om huruvida utvecklingen av digitala medier påverkar modeföretag eller inte. Samhällets digitalisering innebär både negativa och positiva effekter för modeföretagen. De positiva effekterna inkluderar bland annat möjligheten för modeföretag att ha en snabb kommunikation med kunderna, samt att det går oerhört snabbt att nå ut med budskap till omvärlden. Baksidan av detta är att även negativa budskap sprids lika fort, samt att kunden ställer högre krav på att modeföretag ska vara kontaktbara dygnet runt. Resultatet av studien är att digitala medier är en otrolig tillgång för modeföretag, framförallt gällande kommunikation med kunder och marknadsföring.

This study is positioned within a specific South African context where many learners not only lack access to resources but are considered underprepared and therefore are seen as academically disadvantaged. Research findings presented here centre on learning theories within the social constructivist paradigm, make use of a developmental research methodology and use a number of different research instruments. The main objective of this study was to investigate the use of virtual learning environments, constructed as educational adventure games, as viable learning tools and to determine the influence of game play on skill development and overcoming learning difficulties. More specifically two educational games, Zadarh and ãKhozi developed at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, were used to investigate the use of technology in classrooms that included underprepared and academically disadvantaged learners. Zadarh was designed to challenge learner misconceptions related to photosynthesis and photorespiration and was used to investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of games to overcome these misconceptions. ãKhozi was used to introduce learners to issues related to HIV/Aids and to evaluate the use of such tools to develop skills. However, It was first necessary to develop an instrument, based on the Persona Outlining Model (POM), to evaluate and measure skills. The POM uses a number of interfaces (literacy, communication and visualization skills) and properties (age, gender and socio-economic background) to describe a typical learner, or game player. The instrument based on these interfaces and properties was used to evaluate the skills of young South Africans from Buhlebemfundo, Qhakaza and Tholokuhle schools and two universities, namely, University of Zululand [UniZulu] and University of KwaZulu-Natal [UKZN]), all from the region of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The majority of the sampled learners appear to lack appropriate visualisation, logical, mathematical, reading and writing skills and results suggest that poor performance may be associated with a low household income and poor English language skills. While participants (Buhlebemfundo, Qhakaza and Tholokuhle schools, and UniZulu and UKZN university students) who played Zadarh individually solved game problems, they still held many of the misconceptions. Further investigation revealed that when participants were unable to solve a problem they learnt by rote the solution to the problem. Playing Zadarh in groups and allowing participants to ask for clarification of assessment instrument questions showed that many participants developed a deeper understanding on the relationships between photosynthesis and respiration. Participants from Qhakaza were asked to play ãKhozi in flexible groups whichchanged from session to session. Using the previously developed skills assessment instrument showed improve visual, literacy and communication skills. Results strongly suggest that only through dialogue can misconceptions be overcome and that learning is a social activity as proposed by Vygotsky over 80 years ago. More specifically research presented here supports Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, the role of play in development and the need for written language skills. The new art form of digital games when conceived as microworlds can play an important role in education if games support co-operation between players, peers and mentors, allow for exploration through play and support the development of reading and writing skills. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

This study concerns itself with the relationship between game design and emergent social behaviour in massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. This thesis argues for a legitimisation of the study of ‘communities of play’, alongside communities perceived as more ‘serious’, such as communities of interest or practice. It also identifies six factors that contribute to emergent social behaviour and investigates the relationship between group and individual identity, and the emergent ways in which these arise from and intersect with the features and mechanics of the game worlds themselves. Methodology: Under the rubric of ‘design research’, this study was conducted as an ethnographic intervention, an anthropological investigation that deliberately privileged the online experience whilst acknowledging the performative nature of both game play and the research process itself. The research was informed by years of professional practical experience in game design and playtesting, as well as by qualitative methods derived from the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, Computermediated Communications and the emerging field of Game Studies. The process of conducting the eighteen-month ethnographic study followed the progress of a sub-set of members of the ‘Uru Diaspora,’ a group of 10,000 players who were made refugees when the massively multiplayer game ‘Uru: Ages Beyond Myst’ was closed in February of 2004. Uru refugees immigrated into other virtual worlds, using their features and capabilities to create ethnic communities that emulated the culture, artefacts and environments of the original Uru world. Over time, players developed ‘hybrid’ cultures, integrating the Uru culture with that of their new homes, and eventually creating entirely new Uru and Myst-inspired content. The outcome is the identification of six factors that serve as ‘engines for emergence’ and discusses their relationship to each other, to game design, and to emergent behaviour. These include: • Play Ecosystems: Fixed-Synthetic vs. Co-Created Worlds: Online games and virtual worlds exist along a spectrum, with environments entirely authored by the designer at one end, and those comprised primarily of player-created content and assets on the other, with a range of variations between. The type of world will impact the sort of emergent behaviour that occurs, and worlds that include player-created content will be more inclined to promote emergent behaviour. • Communities of Play: Distributed groups formed around play demonstrate distinct characteristics based on shared values and play styles. The study describes in detail one such play community, and analyses the ways in which its characteristic play styles drove its emergent behaviours. • The Social Construction of Avatar Identity: Individual avatar identity is constructed through an emergent process engaging social feedback. • Intersubjective Flow: A social reading of the psychological notion of ‘flow’ that describes the way in which flow dynamics occur in a social context through play. • Productive Play: Countering the traditional contention that play is inherently ‘unproductive’ as some scholars suggest, the thesis argues that play can be seen as a form of cultural production, as well as fulcrum for creative activity. • Porous Magic Circles and the ‘Ludisphere’: The magic circle, which bounds play activities, is more porous than game scholars had previously believed. The term ‘ludisphere' is used to describe the larger context of aggregated play space via the Internet. Also identified are leakages between ‘virtual worlds’ and ‘real life’. By identifying these factors and attempting to trace their roots in game design, the study aims to contribute a new approach to the making and analysis of user experience and creativity ‘in game’. The thesis posits that by achieving a deeper cultural understanding of the relationship between design and emergent behaviour, it is possible to make steps forward in the study of ‘emergence’ itself as a design material.

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.

Thesis (M. S.)--Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Knoespel, Kenneth; Committee Member: Burnett, Rebecca; Committee Member: Fox Harrell; Committee Member: TyAnna Herrington.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-258).

Thesis (PH.D.)--Syracuse University, 2003. / "Publication number AAT 3113227."