abstract: Through ideologies of gender identity, gender as performance, sexuality, and the transgressions thereof, this document serves as a memoir inside of a memoir. I made a pop concert dance piece through a western dance aesthetic with my thesis paper detailing the experience. What did that look like? Throughout this paper, I will explain my thought process, expectations, and experience through writing, which is a more challenging task for me. I am not an academic writer, but rather a rebel with a cause. My cause is to transgress the system in any way I’m able - through words, dance, and expression. As opposed to the artistic dance piece itself, this paper’s purpose is one of both selfish intent and catharsis. Given this, I approached my thesis paper with the same mindset used when developing my piece, in that I rebel fighting against the heteronormative standards that have run my life. I don’t fill this document with regurgitated theory. Moreover, this document morphed into a cathartic platform for me, a purging of counter-hegemonic principals and ideals. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Dance 2017

The aim of the essay is to investigate the style of the dialogue in the movie Pulp Fiction and also to see if and how it changes depending on the context of the movie. The intention is to do this within a sociopragmatic theoretical framework. The manuscript has been used, along with the DVD with the movie itself.

The purpose of this study is to examine the possible theoretic and (f)actual role(s) of pop-culture icons in peace and evelopment-related global issues, using the qualitative research methods of text- and discourse analysis. Do pop-culture icons have a role to play at all in this field? If so, what is that role? What are these celebrity activists currently saying and doing on the international development scene and what are their analyses like? What are their current and historical functions? There is support in the academic literature suggesting that celebrity activists can possess vast power resources (scope of influence), (soft) power and (charismatic) authority, which in turn enables them to influence the attitudes and values of (especially young, receptive) people. The findings also show that the most successful celebrity activists have a global reach, as well as access to the international arenas of political power (e. g. the G8 and the World Economic Forum). Celebrity activists seem to be able to "sell" messages in a way that the politicians and officials of today cannot. When they speak, people listen. They further employ a two-level outreach, as they connect with political and economical elite groups as well as with the masses of world citizens in a way that politicians and officials, whose influence is more often limited by traditional nation state boundaries, cannot. I argue that the celebrity activists should be seen as a complement to the civil society and the work of NGO's and INGO's, since it is by further enhancing their work and strengthening their agendas that most of them act.Celebrity activists offer an alternative to the political establishment, which is viewed by suspicion by large groups of citizens, and can play a role in empowerment, inspiration, education, information, awareness raising, fundraising, opinion building and lobbying and function as diplomats, spokespersons, ambassadors, entrepreneurs, convenors and heroic voices.

In this thesis, I’m working from the premise that postmodernism hitherto has been associated with the left. The next line of argument is, however, that this relation is contingent and that there is no necessity in postmodernisms association with left-wing ideas and political ambitions. To challenge this assumption, I intend to demonstrate that the Alt-Right, a far-right movement, at least in some respects can be considered as postmodern. If there is indeed cause to think of the Alt-Right as postmodern, then we would have to rethink postmodernisms political inclination. I intend to operationalize this by looking at the Alt-Right’s views on the changeability of politics and the social world, and pop culture, through the lens of a set of postmodern ideas. In particular, postmodern ideas concerning language, discourse and culture, and in doing so get a grip on whether it is correct to view the Alt-Right as postmodern or not. If a connection between the Alt-Right and postmodernism indeed exists, then we would have to rethink the necessity in the left-wing nature of postmodernism.

This thesis examines the pop cultural representation of white-collar migrant women (WCMW) through the popular Chinese TV series Ode to Joy. Focusing on various aspects of their lives, this TV series raises many issues about the experiences of WCMW, including perceptions of them as “outsiders” in the megacity, gender inequality, and the tensions between female migrant identity and urban status. This study analyzes those issues by drawing on intersectional theories which examine structural inequalities from the perspective of the interactions of multiple axes of social categories. This thesis asks three major questions: In what way does Ode to Joy represent the experiences of WCMW?; To what extent do issues raised in Ode to Joy impact the wellbeing of WCMW in large cities?, and; What are the “joys” in Ode to Joy for WCMW? In addition to collecting data from the TV series, this study interviewed WCMW informants to provide first-hand accounts of their experiences in an urban culture. By critically analyzing the representation of WCMW characters’ experiences in Ode to Joy, this thesis provides insights on understanding the status of those women in a contemporary Chinese urban setting, thereby filling a gap in academic literature on the pop cultural representation of China’s white-collar migrant women in a Chinese megacity. / Graduate

Archaeological communication often seeks avenues to take in order to convey information to a public. One of these is video games, yet many articles do not delve into the effect that games have on people, taking for granted that people will learn something. This text aims to understand a group’s view on the past after it has gone through a transformative state such as a video game adaptation. With the web page Twitter offering a digital place of discussion, posts and comments will be analyzed in relation to the aim. The literary theory death of the author, interpretation and authority will help understand how the important aspect of accuracy is utilized amongst Twitter users. The findings conclude that accuracy is an important aspect of recreation amongst twitter users. It is to be employed in authentic portrayal of the past, meaning that the users seek to see a true representation, in contrast to a story taking liberties. Twitter users seek a definitive past, or a correct past, that should seek to emulate archaeological information in detail.

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Perverted in Neon is collection of short fictions engaged with various facets of modern popular culture. In its stories, a washed-up rocker enlists the aid of pigeons to deliver messages to his estranged wife; a writer obsessed with finding out what “really” happened to Andy Kaufman is pushed into the fringes of his own life; a kid on restriction discovers a secret level to a video game that threatens to change the nature of his reality; a woman on Airbnb advertises her home—and her life—to potential house renters. The characters throughout this collection tread among the desperate and downtrodden, often seeing some faint impression of hope in the distance, something worth continuing to fight for. Perverted in Neon challenges traditional distinctions of literary genres, often incorporating elements of non-fictional pop culture into fictional worlds, and vice-versa. The stories throughout aim to interrogate some notion of emotional maturity, or lack thereof—characters who think they understand the world, but quickly realize that they understand only their most immediate desires. / MFA

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