In the nearly 60 years since Doctor Who first aired in 1963, fandom and fan practices have not only evolved, but moved into the mainstream culture. Collecting and preserving information, and creating melodramatic fanfiction that explores the emotions of the characters, are now commonplace practices across a wide number of properties. This thesis examines this intersection between fandom and industry production using Doctor Who as a case study. Throughout Doctor Who’s original run, fans focused on archival practices as means of preserving the series. Today, fans draw on these archives to both watch and rewatch the series, which has led to an increased emphasis on continuity and the history of both the series and the characters. Fanworks, such as fanfiction often added dimension to the characters, exploring their emotions and psychology. This fan influence, in conjunction with the growing influence of American melodrama and seriality on television, can be seen in the Doctor Who revival. Additionally, the fans themselves who grew up watching the original series have become industry professionals who use their status as fans both in production and in the marketing of the series as a means of authentication as experts who best understand the property. Ultimately, I demonstrate how fandom and fan practices can color production and what that means for the television industry.

In 2014, Switzerland was ranked seventh among the most successful nations in exerting what political scientist Joseph Nye calls "soft power": the ability to exercise power by attracting favor through economic and cultural influence rather than through coercion. This ability is partly due to the way Switzerland redefined its national identity following an economic decline in the 1970s and rapidly changing demographics, resulting in its repositioning on the international market. Indicative of this shift is the adoption of the pseudo-English word "Swissness" into the Swiss-German language in the late 1990s. The notion of Swissness, initially used in marketing Swiss products, has become instrumental in reframing and reshaping the cultural landscape of the nation. This dissertation examines a particular case of cultural nation re-branding through an ethnographic analysis of the revival of Streichmusik (string music). Streichmusik, which was once a localized musical practice of the mountainous region of the Appenzell and the Toggenburg, has become identified as quintessentially Swiss. By considering the role of domestic cultural tourism, I ask how Streichmusik, a visual and sonic representation of Swissness, is promoted and at times commercialized, and how commodification of the musical practice has affected its performance, reception, and cultural significance locally and nationally. In my analyses, I focus particularly on two keywords, Heimat (homeland) and Heile Welt (ideal or idyllic world), as well as local terminology denoting authenticity to argue that Streichmusik and the region offer a restorative platform for Switzerland. The resultant notions of nostalgia and reclaiming a rural utopia, position Appenzell and Toggenburg as an embodiment of Swissness. Based on participant observation and interviews, this study focuses on the voices of performers, cultural institutions, and tourist organizations to demonstrate how the tensions between cultural preservation and marketing practices at a local and national level provide a reimagined heritage in their attempt to (re)brand both the region and the nation at large. I further argue that having found a new place in the cultural imaginary through Swissness, Streichmusik performers articulate differing relationships with domestic cultural tourism and globalizing market forces at a time of shifting discourses of Swiss national identity. / 2017-05-31T00:00:00Z

This study aimed to answer these research questions: what role do transnational screen media play in how urban Indian children think about their culturally hybrid identities? In what ways does transnational screen media consumption influence these children's perceptions of their lived sociocultural realities? Using survey and ethnographic research methods comprising a survey for children, participant observation and in-depth interviews with children, and in-depth interviews with parents and teachers, the research for the study was conducted in Bangalore city in southern India. The study found that the children’s major socialization agents, i.e. the family, the school and the transnational screen media they consumed played an interrelational role in children’s formulating and negotiating their culturally hybrid identities. The implication of this finding is that as these children mature, they are challenged to exercise a critical reflexivity that may only reconcile the differences between their perceptions of mediated globalities and their lived sociocultural contexts uneasily, at the intersections of these children’s sociocultural identity markers. / Media & Communication

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The subject of my dissertation is how phenomenology can be used as a tool for understanding the intersection between texts and technology. What I am suggesting here is that, specifically in connection with the focus of our program in Texts and Technology, there are very significant questions concerning how digital communications technology extends our humanity, and more importantly what kind of epistemological and ontological questions are raised because of this. There needs to be a coherent theory for Texts and Technology that will help us to understand this shift, and I feel that this should be the main focus for the program itself. In this dissertation I present an analysis of the different phenomenological aspects of the study of Texts and Technology. For phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, technology, in all of its forms, is the way in which human consciousness is embodied. Through the creation and manipulation of technology, humanity extends itself into the physical world. Therefore, I feel we must try to understand this extension as more than merely a reflection of materialist practices, because first and foremost we are discussing how the human mind uses technology to further its advancement. I will detail some of the theoretical arguments both for and against the study of technology as a function of human consciousness. I will focus on certain issues, such as problems of archiving and copyright, as central to the field. I will further argue how from a phenomenological standpoint we are in the presence of a phenomenological shift from the primacy of print towards a more hybrid system of representing human communications.

In the globalized world, border regimes are ambiguous, withdrawn or reinforced based on who approaches them, where and how. Borders are equally the boundaries that permeate spaces of nation-states and cut across them through racialized, gendered, and classed divisions. Following the so called "migration crisis" in Europe of 2015, there has been a wave of research documenting how practices of bordering and othering dehumanize asylum seekers, violating their rights. In this thesis, I proceed from similar observations to see how such practices, together with experiences resulting from them, affect the possibilities of agency and imagination of a common space on behalf of people with migratory background. Employing the idea of hybridity, I maintain that while the responsibility for atrocities related to migration and bordering should always remain on violators, whether official institutions or individuals, their persistence should not be seen as foreclosing agency, imagination, or practices of building a future common space on behalf of people with migratory background. The hybrid position that these people occupy does not necessarily only sustain their disempowerment, but it also equips them with unique possibilities for agency. Neither seems there to be any predefined path from exposure to harsh violations of one's rights to disempowerment. The possibilities for common and welcoming places to which everyone has a right appear through an engaged and equal attention to migrants' own agency, imagination, and capabilities, rather than through an exclusive attention to their vulnerability or a neoliberal celebration of multiculturalism.

Tayeb Salih’s world-literary classic Season of Migration to The North (1967) has been read widely in Arabic as well as multiple world languages. Primarily examined in terms that pertain to the postcolonial field of study, it showcases all the well-rehearsed topics such as coloniser- colonised, identity, nationality, culture, hybridity, literature, language, gender, sexuality, historiography, and most importantly for this thesis: migration. Although the novel has been translated into many world languages, it is Johnson-Davies’ famous English translation (1969) that in my view produces a unique dialogue with the Arabic text. This translation is generally much admired, with only a few critiques, but criticism has not quite addressed the fact that it is in Salih’s colonial language, that is the language he himself could have used. Given that most prominent “writing back to the imperial centre” is in the languages of the colonisers, often in creolised versions of those languages, Salih’s production in Arabic begs the question of linguistic hybridity. In this thesis, I will engage in an intertextual and linguistic analysis of the novel to argue that one cannot regard the Arabic text as “the original” and English as the secondary. Rather, both English and Arabic are co-originary languages of this novel. This demonstrates that the core of the novel is a restless migration between dichotomies produced by the colonial history.

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