Spelbranschen är en av de snabbast växande marknader men den är också kritiserad för att vara mansdominerad och sexistisk. Tidigare forskning om genus inom spel, visar att en majoritet av spelutvecklare är män och en effekt av detta är att spelen många gånger är gjorda för just män. Forskningen visar också att kvinnor är underrepresenterade i spelen och när de är med framställs de ofta som hjälplösa och svaga. Den forskning som är gjord kollar nästan uteslutande på spel som riktar sig mot en vuxen publik, men väldigt få studier har gjorts om genus i spel som är riktade mot barn. Därför undersöker denna studie hurvida kvinnliga karaktärer framställs i spelserien The Legend of Zelda, som är riktad mot barn. Genom att göra en semiotisk bildanalys har kvinnliga karaktärer i spelet analyserats. Analysen har gjorts med teorier som berör stereotyper, kroppslig mångald och The male gaze. Studien har även undersökt om hurvida framställningen förändrats över tid. Resultatet visar att spelserien nästan uteslutande framställer kvinnor, och deras kroppar, på ett stereotypsitk sätt. Analysen visar även att spelserien är riktad mot män och faller inom ramen för The male gaze. Analysen visar dock att framställningen av kvinnor har föränmdrats över tid, men att det fortfarande är en bit kvar innan de stereotypiska porträtteringarna inte längre en del av The Legend of Zelda. / Even tough the game industry is one of the fastest growing markets it´s still critized for being sexist and dominated by men. Previous research, about gender in video games, has shown that a majority of game developers are men, and due to that alot of the games are created to please men. Research also show that women are rarely portrayed and in the instances they are, they are often described as helpless and weak. The studys prior to this one are focused on games that are marketed for an adult audience but very few enlighten gender in games made for children. Therefor this study are focused on the portraying of women in the video games series, The Legend of Zelda, wich is a game targeted to children. With the use of a semiotic method women in the game serie have been looked upon, to answer the question with the help of various gender theorys. This study also tries to answer if the portraitation has change over a time period. The study shows that the game serie almost every time portray women, and their bodies, in a stereotypical way. The analysis also show that the games are made for a male audience, and therefor falls into the theory of The male gaze. Furthermore the portrating of women has changed over time but it´s still a long way to go until the stereotyped woman is no longer a part of The Legend of Zelda.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / When discussing and addressing child soldiering in Africa, both in print or in film, there are a number of key factors that need to be considered. For example, taking into account the root causes for both recruitment and voluntary enlistment - which include the changed nature of weapons and warfare, the breakdown of law and order, and intolerable levels of poverty, unemployment and also the social pressures on children to engage in armed conflicts. By bearing these factors in mind when delving into this complex subject matter, helped in ascertaining the ways in which certain modalities of thinking about Africa, as well as her child soldiers, influence Western perspectives, convictions and beliefs via a variety of media. However, for this particular dissertation, the focus is turned entirely to the Afro-pessimistic / Afro-optimistic cinematic representations of African child soldiers in three case study films: Ezra (2007), The Silent Army (2008) and War Witch (2012). These films were closely analysed at the hand of certain research question which ultimately allowed for both researcher and reader to keep an open mind when being confronted with the different faces of Africa’s children on screen.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study documented the process of mobile Digital Storytelling with a particular focus on the development of civic awareness and voice as well as the participants’ strategies to address multiple audiences of digital stories and to distribute their video creations through pre-existing peer-networks.

Bibliography: leaves 110-120. / This minor dissertation is undertaken to examine the cross-cultural similarities that are revealed by motion pictures through analyzing the work of Akira Kurosawa and contrasting it with selective mainstream cinema texts. Kurosawa is a critical case in point due to his welding of Occidental and Japanese ideas into his films, and his origin from a hybridized Japan, a society which historically has freely absorbed and embellished itself from numerous cultures, including America, Korea, China and Europe.

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 78-82). / by James Bowie Wilson. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies / S.M.inComparativeMediaStudies Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-237) / Daniel C Hallin and Paolo Mancini's Comparing Media Systems (2004) has been hailed as an important contribution to understanding the inter-relationship between the media and political systems. The work was, however, based on a study of 18 stable, mature and highly developed democracies either in Europe or in North America. As an emerging democracy that has recently undergone dramatic change in both its political system and its media, South Africa's inclusion poses particular challenges to Hallin and Mancini's Three Models paradigm. This thesis focuses on the South African print media and tests both the paradigm's theoretical underpinnings as well as its four principle dimensions of analysis: political parallelism, state intervention, development of a mass market and journalistic professionalisation. A range of insights and a number of modifications are proposed. This thesis is based on interviews with South Africa's most senior media executives and editors, a comprehensive study of the relevant literature and 15 years of personal experience as a political analyst, columnist and parliamentary correspondent covering South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The thesis sheds new light on the functioning and applicability of the Three Models comparative paradigm as well as on the development and future trajectory of South African print media journalism.

MA

This thesis project accompanies the 2019 photographic portraiture series entitled Becoming. Using James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston as departure points, both the photo series and this academic explanative seeks to explore the question of what does it mean to become? Or in other words, what is the imperative to be who you are, to actualize within a space that demonstrates a regular investment in the destruction of bodies that are Black and queer. Through a set of five individual interviews, the questions of what does it mean to be who you are? why is it important? how do you become through your creative work? serve to create space for knowledge production, combatting what Spivak dubs as epistemic violence. Guided by the principles of post colonial life writing, African and Black feminist thought, Black queer theory, and art as an emancipatory tool, this thesis centers voices often theorized about yet rarely heard and argues that creative work more broadly offers a path for liberation. The published work of Becoming, both the photographs and interviews, can be found at http://www.becomingphotoseries.com/ and fulfils the creative media aspect of this dissertation/creative project.

Media studies has recently witnessed an upsurge in theoretical and empirical work that investigates the moral-ethical implications of the mediation of suffering. The research focus has largely been limited to representations of distant suffering by global media to audiences in the Global North. Contrary to the above, this work focuses on the mediation of suffering by media in the Global South. This study is underpinned by the understanding that suffering is also a proximal (local) phenomenon and mundane (everyday) phenomenon. It is against this backdrop that this work uses the B-Metro tabloid's mediations of child abuse in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe as a case study. The study espouses a holistic view of mediation where mediation is the social circulation of meaning across the moments of production, text and reception. Roger Silverstone's concept of proper distance is used to evaluate the extent to which the BMetro's representations of child maltreatment are successful in engendering an ethic of care among its readership. Methodologically, the study triangulates focus group data about the context of production, with a textual analysis of the child abuse stories and focus group data about the reception of the same. Findings from the context of production point to an overreliance on legal, social and cultural elites for news about child abuse. Data shows that B-Metro journalists are torn between compassion and institutionalised compassion fatigue about child abuse. Findings also point to the prevalence of a gendered perception of child abuse among the journalists. Textual analysis data revealed that the editorial discourse identifies the ethic of care and the ethic of voice as being instrumental in the fight against child abuse. Further, the texts exhibit a patriarchal, gendered and heteronormative conception of child abuse. Reception data shows that it is more plausible to think of media users' responses as being located along a continuum whose range spans compassion fatigue and an ethic of care. A typology of witnessing is used to capture readers' responses to the mediations of child abuse. The tabloid genre was found to be simultaneously enabling and disabling the successful activation of an ethic of care. The thesis concludes by advancing a dialectical view of mediation that explores the equivalences and ambivalences between the moments of production, text and reception.

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