The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 20, 2009). Thesis advisor: Greeley Kyle. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 23, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

The retail sector spends millions of dollars each year advertising to consumers. This is a considerable investment for companies seeking effective ways to inform and persuade the consumer. Consequently, retailers need to develop creative message strategies and tactics that will positively affect consumer attitudes. One particular tactic available to retailers is the use of a spokesperson in the advertisement. Salespersons are used in numerous advertisements and can provide key benefits to an advertiser. However, to maximize these benefits, retailers need to carefully select the spokesperson that will be most effective for their store and product. This purpose of this research is to examine the characteristics that influence consumers' perceptions of print advertisements that include a spokesperson in the advertisement. Most of the past literature concerning spokespersons has concentrated on the consumer perspective of meeting and interacting with a living, breathing person. This research seeks to use the past research on salespeople to examine the spokesperson as a cue in a print advertisement. In this perspective, the consumer views the spokesperson from a visual-only perspective. The proposed experiment will utilize print advertisements from two retail businesses. More specifically the study will investigate how consumers react if the individual viewed in the advertisement is typical (matches with their preconceived stereotype) or if the salesperson is atypical (does not match with their preconceived stereotype). This research also examines how men and women are viewed differently in the spokesperson role and how changes in physical appearance may impact consumers' perceptions. The research also studies the influence of spokesperson stereotypes on consumers' cognitive responses.

This study investigates a multilingual, multi-genre data set of 13 post-9/11 popular culture videos, produced by performative artists from across global society, which use digital media aesthetics to defy hegemonic narratives relating to Islam and the War on Terror. The languages represented across the 13 texts are English, French, Spanish and Arabic; and the popular culture genres are hip-hop, comedy, punk and parkour. The texts are grouped thematically for analytical purposes into the following categories: 9/11, War on Terror, Clash of Civilisations, and Palestine. Using the sociological manifestation of narrative theory (Baker 2006, Somers 1994) as the conceptual framework, I firstly conduct a narrative analysis of the texts focusing on themes of temporality; character/identity; and multivalence, i.e. the co-existence of seemingly contradictory narratives within a single text (Stroud 2002). I argue that a combination of aesthetics and multivalence is deployed in all the videos, despite their creative and linguistic diversity, which functions to arrest viewers out of uncritical immersion in their normative (hegemonic) narrative environment, and open a space in the affective present for new meanings and values to enter. This technique or affective practice, which I term ‘aesthetic shock’, addresses a widespread critique of socio-narrative theory; namely, the failure to account for how social agents might subscribe to new narratives that contradict their existing worldview. Secondly, the socio-narrative framework is supplemented with recent scholarship on affect (Berlant 2011, Butler 2004) and Deleuzian philosophy (1987). This permits a deeper understanding of the texts as indicative of an epistemological groundswell that is symptomatic of our unfolding moment in history, whereby contradiction and aesthetics emerge as key narrative tools for resistance to the post-9/11 hegemonic order. The two models are connected from a translation studies vantage point by the notion of ‘renarration’ (Baker 2008), offering a unique angle on the flows, patterns of exchange, and evolving identity constructs in the digital media context. Following detailed exploration of the texts and their production contexts, consistent features are drawn out in an attempt to identify emerging patterns between them. These findings include the affective practice of what I term ‘conscious individualism’, the creation of intimate publics (Berlant 2011), and a united, pluralised front against the neoliberal economic agenda for which prominent public narratives such as Samuel Huntington’s reductive ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis (1996) act as a smokescreen. Ultimately, it is argued that the texts should be seen as deterritorialising sites of aesthetic activism; a means for the non-elites masses across global society to creatively capitalise on the affordances of the digital era, to assert themselves against oppressive cultural narratives and affirm new modes of thinking and being the world. Expressions of political resistance such as the 13 texts analysed in this study are becoming more visible and more vital across different linguacultures as the rationalist nation-state paradigm loses currency, evoking the possibility of futures other than that of capitalist progress. I contend that we must pay close attention to such narratives –both their message and their medium – if we are to achieve a more constructive and nuanced appreciation of the chaotic and contradictory world in which we live.

This research investigates the gendered nature of video arcades and video games, in relation to the perceptions and attitudes of the users to them. Video arcades are relatively recent sites of leisure and engagement with electronic games. Very little research (if any) in this area has been done in South Africa. This research is concerned with both media and gender and draws on a theoretical framework informed by poststructural understandings of gender construction and discourse. The research also examines users' habits and attitudes to and perceptions of the video arcades, the games and their narrative scenarios, in relation to gendered behaviours. As a Media Educator, these findings reinforce the researcher's belief in an urgent need for Media Education in South African schools. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.

This thesis is the product of a discourse analytic investigation of the first decade of the British lesbian magazine, DIVA, which launched in 1994. Work on mainstream women's and men's magazines has established them as sites at which (largely heterosexual) femininities and masculinities are constructed and construed, but relatively little scholarship has addressed lesbian magazines in this fashion. DIVA is Britain's only nationally sold, mainstream lesbian magazine; with this in mind, the thesis provides an analytic account of the magazine's launch, production and brand, and considers the discursive construction of lesbian community and the boundary work that that entails. The initial analytic chapters detail editorial philosophies, routines, and financial circumstances; design, front covers, and editorial content. Though the magazine has only limited resources available, those restrictions are simultaneously liberating, allowing DIVA's editors to pursue their political commitments at the same time as operating in the commercial marketplace. In considering the discursive construction of 'us', the thesis highlights a focus on community, support, and heritage. It further considers the discursive management of the boundaries of that imagined community, focusing on the 'threat' posed by bisexual women and the arguments this causes among readers. Finally, DIVA's handling of (heterosexual) others is considered, concluding that they are constructed as irrational, yet powerful, aggressors. Overall, DIVA's was a brand invested in the notion of community and in its role not only in imagining that community but also bringing members together. Though readers were at times divided over who belonged, or should belong, they were united in their belief that there was something to belong to. In the face of a hostile greater 'other', which was constructed as a constant source of threat, this belonging was incredibly important.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-113). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A. in Sociology)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 23, 2010). "Department of Sociology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-69).

In the 1990s, Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1992) was arguably of signal importance in the thematization of the limits imposed by the media on the negotiation of gender identity. However, the utilization of Faludi’s various analyses, in the interest of rendering social critique, has become progressively more problematic during the first decade of the 21st century. This is because her analyses engage neither with the development of media technologies subsequent to the early 1990s, nor with the way in which such technological developments now engage audiences on a greater multiplicity of levels than before, in a manner that consequently stands to inform their subjectivity to a degree hitherto unimagined. (A good example of the latter would, of course, be the proliferation of interactive exchanges on the World Wide Web). As such, in the light of such technological developments, this treatise is orientated around an investigation of the continued relevance of Faludi’s Backlash (1992) for the negotiation of gender identity in the contemporary era. In particular, its focus falls on West’s film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), which is considered against the backdrop of the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider phenomenon, which encompasses sequels to the film, online interactive sites, graphic novels, figurines, and video games, among other products. This investigation draws on the reception theory of, on the one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer, and, on the other hand, Stuart Hall.