Popular culture has had a great deal of impact on our social, cultural, and political worlds; it is portrayed through different mediums, in different forms, and connects the world to ideas, beliefs, and different perspectives. Though this dissertation is part of a larger body of work that examines the complex relationship between popular culture and mathematical identity, this study takes a different perspective by examining it through the lens of mathematical Internet memes. This study was conducted with 31 secondary school participants and used a two-tiered approach (in-depth focus groups and an individual meme activity) at each of the five school sites visited around New York City. Multiple sources of data were used to reveal that students are receiving messages about mathematics from memes in popular culture. In particular, participants described six core themes from the meme inventory: (1) stereotypical views of mathematics; (2) mathematics is too complicated; (3) no effort should be needed in mathematics; (4) mathematics is useless; (5) mathematics is not fun; and (6) sense of accomplishment from mathematics. Participants were also given free rein to create hypothetical mathematics memes. Findings demonstrate that not only are memes being used to depict mathematical stereotypes, thereby reinforcing negative messages, but also support social media practices (liking, commenting, sharing, and creating) that reify negative messages about mathematics with little to no resistance from opposing perspectives. In general, participants described mathematical memes in a specific manner that demonstrates them having influence over students’ mathematical identity but not entirely on the way one may think. Future research implications include explorations of the “new” online mathematical space students are utilizing; to wit, what makes these specific memes go viral? What are common misconceptions? Are commenters learning from their mistakes and other answer responses? Implications for practice include the creation of formal spaces within classrooms and communities for students to debrief their thoughts and sentiments about mathematics, as well as informal opportunities for educators, students, and community members to engage positively about mathematics: because without these interventions the messages found in memes, whether positive or negative, are potentially legitimized through popular culture’s presentations. Moreover, the results of this study also show that students are unaware of the processes and proficiencies of mathematical learning. More specifically, teachers and others must help students understand knowledge is not transmitted by copying notes or that teaching strategies need to account for students being apprehensive to ask questions in a mathematics classroom. Memes can also be used to explore mathematics content, through error analysis and explanation of concepts.

Review of Wilcox, Rhonda V., Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthia Masson, and David Lavery, eds. Reading Joss Whedon. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Print.

This dissertation develops the theoretical framework of “trainwreck feminism.” Forwarded by contemporary women in comedy like Mindy Kaling, Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, and Amy Schumer, trainwreck feminists adopt the trope of the trainwreck—excessive in need, sex, and madness—to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of growing up in postfeminist culture that both insists women are finally liberated and continues to police their choices. Engaging ongoing debates about whether postfeminism is over since feminism is becoming a status symbol for celebrities and public figures, I argue that postfeminism remains a powerful cultural force, and women in comedy are some of its most vocal critics. Trainwreck feminism exposes the misogyny at the core of postfeminist culture, while arguing that feminist activism is still needed. Trainwreck feminism is reflective of a larger rejection of postfeminist culture, a contradictory moment that celebrates feminism’s achievements while insisting the movement is outdated. Trainwreck feminism represents a larger re-politicization of feminism in pop culture. Each chapter examines a different comic and the specific branch of postfeminism they undermine: Mindy Kaling and the postfeminist life cycle, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer and commodity feminism, and Amy Schumer and choice feminism. Ultimately, these women imbue the trainwreck with true feminist potential, pointing a finger at postfeminist culture as a source of women’s madness. Because they are cautionary tales, trainwrecks can highlight the unspoken rules and expectations of femininity. While comedy can have a fairly nasty, depoliticizing relationship with feminism, often turning feminism into a lifestyle or label devoid of political activism, I argue that some contemporary comic texts are actively politicized, inspiring viewers to critique and change the world around them. They do so by appropriating particular vernacular rhetorics that appeal to younger, millennial audiences and using it to demonstrate how postfeminism has failed women. That is, each comic I examine leverages postfeminist sensibilities in order to critique and undermine them, engaging in a trainwreck feminism that highlights the contradictions, absurdities, and misogyny at the heart of postfeminist culture.

As cultural studies has consolidated its claim to constitute a distinct field of study in recent years, debate has intensified about its characteristic objects, concepts and methods, if any, and, therefore, its relationship to traditional disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In History in Australian Popular Culture 1972-1995, I focus on an intersection of cultural studies with history. However, I do not debate the competing claims of 'history' and 'cultural studies' as academic projects. Rather, I examine the role played by historical discourse in popular cultural practices, and how those practices contest and modify public debate about history; I take 'historical discourse' to include argument about as well as representation of the past, and so to involve a rhetorical dimension of desire and suasive force that varies according to social contexts of usage. Therefore, in this thesis I do cultural studies empirically by asking what people say and do in the name of history in everyday contexts of work and leisure, and what is at stake in public as well as academic 'theoretical' discussion of the meaning and value of history for Australians today. Taking tourism and television ('public culture') as my major research fields, I argue that far from abolishing historical consciousness -- as the 'mass' dimension of popular culture is so often said to do -- these distinct but globally interlocking cultural industries have emerged in Australian conditions as major sites of historical contestation and pedagogy. Tourism and television are, of course, trans-national industries which impact on the living-space (and time) of local communities and blur the national boundaries so often taken to define the coherence of both 'history' and 'culture' in the modern period. I argue, however, that the historical import of these industries includes the use of the social and cultural spaces they make available by people seeking to publicise their own arguments with the past, their criticisms of the present, and their projects for the future; this usage is what I call 'popular culture', and it can include properly historical criticism of the power of tourism and television to disrupt or destroy a particular community's sense of its past. From this it follows that in this thesis I defend cultural studies as a practice which, far from participating in a 'death' or 'killing' of history, is capable of accounting in specific ways for the liveliness of historical debate in Australia today.

This thesis analyses the television program known as 'Super Girls', which aired on Hunan Satellite Television from 2004-2006 in the Peoples' Republic of China. In the West, this program is sometimes referred to as 'Chinese Idol' because of its similarities to the globally popular television format, 'Idol'. Although 'Super Girls' shares many similarities with 'Idol' there are also equally important differences. This thesis examines these differences as a way of theorising the how the program negotiates the localisation of a Western television format. First, the program is placed in the broader context of the increased liberalisation and commercialisation of the Chinese television industry. Secondly, the thesis analyses the concept of format television and presents the logic behind the global shift toward producing this type of programming. Next, specific aspects of Super Girls are analysed in detail to bring out how the program functioned culturally in the context of China. These aspects of Super Girls include, the way the program represents the changing role and potential of television from the PRC to contribute to negotiations on Chinese identity that take place among the various symbolic universes of Cultural China, including the global Chinese Diaspora. The thesis also explores the nature of the celebrities produced by the contest through isolating their meaning and significance within the Chinese context. The thesis argues that the contest winners are celebrated for their individuality and come to stand for the rise of 'ordinary power'. The thesis also examines the ways in which Super Girls embraces its audience through new modes of address and offering new types of agency for its audience. As a result, Super Girls offers insight into how Chinese culture is now shaped by a rise of 'ordinary empowerment' where the bottom-up cultures are hybridised with the traditional high culture in television broadcasting.

Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema is a project in cultural time travel. It cuts up linear cinematic narratives to develop a hop-scotched history of youth, Generation X and (post) youth culture. I focus upon the pleasures, pedagogies and (un)popular politics of a filmic genre that continues to be dismissed as unworthy of intellectual debate. Accelerated culture and the discourse of celebrity have blurred the crisp divisions between fine art and crude commodity, the meaningful and meaningless, and real and fictive, unsettling the binary logic that assigns importance to certain texts and not others. This research project prises open that awkward space between representation and experience. Analysts require methods and structures through which to manage historical change and textual movement. Through cinema, macro-politics of identity emerge from the micro-politics of the narrative. Prom politics and mallrat musings become imbued with social significance that speak in the literacies available to youth. It grants the ephemerality and liminality of an experience a tactile trace. I select moments of experience for Generation X youth and specific icons – Happy Harry Hardon, Molly Ringwald, the Spice Girls, the Bitch, the invisible raver, teen time travellers Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, and the slacker – to reveal the archetypes and ideologies that punctuate the cinematic landscape. The tracked figures do not configure a smooth historical arc. It is in the rifts and conflicts of diverse narratives and subjectivities where attention is focused. This research imperative necessitates the presentation of a series of essays arranged in a tripartite framework. The first section proposes theoretical paradigms for a tethered analysis of filmic texts and Generation X. The second segment explores sites of struggle in public spaces and time. The final section leaves the landscape of post-Generation X to forge the relationship between history, power and youth identity. I particularly focus on the iconography, ideologies and imaginings of young women to lead the discussion of the shifts in the experience and representations of youth. By reinserting women into studies of film, it is imperative to stress that this is not a dissertation in, and of, women’s cinema. Rather, it serves as an historical corrective to the filmic database. The existing literature on youth cinema is disappointing and narrow in its trajectories. Timothy Shary’s Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema and Jon Lewis’ The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture exemplify the difficulties of capturing the complexities of individual films when they are collated in artificial and stifling categories. At one end of the analytical spectrum is the critique that comes with the caveat of ‘it’s just another teen movie’. Jonathon Bernstein’s monograph Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies is one such example which derails into acerbic diatribes and intellectual dismissal. The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study by Peter Hanson is a more successful project that is interested in the influences that inform a community of filmmakers than arriving at a catalogue of generic themes and narratives. There is an emphasis on the synergy between text, producer and readership. I continue this relationship explored by Hanson, but further accent the politics of film. The original contribution to knowledge offered by this doctoral thesis is a detailed study of (post) youth popular culture, building into a model for Generation X cinema, activating the interdisciplinary perspectives from film and cultural studies. With its adaptability into diverse media forms, cultural studies paradigms allow navigation through the expansive landscape of popular culture. It traverses beyond simple textual analyses to consider a text’s cultural currency. As an important carrier of meaning and sensory memories, cinema allows for alternative accounts that are denied in authorised history. As a unique form with its own visual literacy, screen theory is needed to refine observations. This unique melding of screen and cultural studies underscores the convergent relationship between text, readership, production and politics. This doctoral thesis activates concepts and methods of generationalism, nationalism, social history and cultural practice. There is a dialogue between the chapters that crosses over text and time. The 1980s of Molly Ringwald shadows the dystopia of Donnie Darko. The celebrity status of the Spice Girls clashes with the frustrated invisibility of the female raver. Douglas Coupland’s vision of Generation X in 1991 has evolved into Richard Linklater’s documentation of post-youth in the new millenium. Leaping between decades through time travel in cinema, I argue that the nostalgic past and projections for the future evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in an electronic version. Also available from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 388-403). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-191). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Carla Poindexter. Includes bibliographical references (p. 31).