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In this thesis, I analyze the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019). Although these characters are not intended to represent human beings but are fictional nonhuman species, examining them through the lens of racialization defamiliarizes them and reveals how children's media not only perpetuates specific caricatures of people of color but subtly naturalizes what race is as an assemblage of visual, verbal, performative, and affective components. While scholars studying racial representations in children's animated films often focus on how animated characters speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce visual aspects of race, this interpretive framework does not address the ways in which race goes beyond the surface, nor does it address complex interactions between race, gender, and sexuality. Rather than asserting that nonhuman animated characters are certain races, my term "submerged racialization" suggests that animated characters are not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies but are aggregates of what it is to be racialized in historically specific ways that are co-constitutive with gender and sexuality. These features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, overdetermining how the characters perform without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions enact a multi-layered submerged racialization as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, addressing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization underlying today's most popular children's franchises, I stress that race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us. / Master of Arts / What race are the Minions? While this may seem a strange question, scholars of children's animated films have often described the race of nonhuman animated characters based on whether they speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce certain visual characteristics, such as black skin. However, I argue that the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019) are "submerged racialized figures" and not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies. These characters demonstrate what it means to be racialized in historically specific ways that intersect with their gender and sexuality. Their racial features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, affecting their representation without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions demonstrate a multi-layered submerged racialization throughout the franchise as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, changing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization within today's most popular children's franchises, I demonstrate how race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us.

Humans thrive on placing everyday perceptions into discrete categories. These categories, including genres in popular music, help us understand the world around us and process new information in a relatively efficient way. But music theorists often take genre for granted, by which I mean most scholars rarely unpack how social and musical categories work together to codify and reinforce often racial and gendered lines placed between categories of people and music. In Reconceiving Genre, I address some the methodological issues around genre in popular music. This dissertation argues for a reframing of genre and what these labels can convey. Through different generic case studies in each chapter, I develop a framework for analyzing genre from multiple musical and cultural traditions. I critically examine social and commercial constructions of popularity and authenticity in relation to artist’s presentations of gender, race, class, and sexuality— positionalities that are often taken for granted in popular music analysis. This dissertation’s most distinctive contribution to both music theory and popular music studies is that it dismantles the idea that genre is only a marketing label that conveys details about an artist’s musical style, and challenges assumptions that genre is “dead” or beyond repair to be a meaningful tool. These assumptions dull the transgressive force of how we can use genre to understand issues of authenticity, popularity, and society more broadly. In short, my project demonstrates that genre categories can reveal as much about an artist’s identity as they can about a piece’s musical features. Thus, theories of genre need to account for identities like race, gender, and sexuality of artists, listeners, and even analysts in order to be fully inclusive, meaningful, and accessible.

In spite of the popularity of technologies that facilitate distance learning, institutions still educate students who gather together in shared physical spaces. But now even these traditional settings for learning are more collaborative and technology-rich environments. Qualitative methods in the sociolinguistic tradition allowed me to attend carefully to the vocal and non-vocal interactions of students engaged in a computer supported collaborative authoring assignment. Three research questions guided my inquiry: 1) In what ways did students negotiate roles and responsibilities?; 2) In what ways did students negotiate access to their assignment?; and 3) what was the nature of discourse in computer supported collaborative authoring? I conducted microanalysis of the communication in online discussions and face-to-face discourse throughout an entire semester of one graduate level course entitled The Psychology of Teachers and Teaching. My data revealed that the online discussion forum, physical proximity to the computer during face-to-face collaboration and instructor influence shaped the students’ roles and responsibilities as well as their entry into the assignment. I propose a model illustrating how students negotiate entry into computer supported collaborative authoring assignments and discuss its implications for teaching and learning. / text

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

The increasingly global environment has spurred the economy in the United States as well as the economies in nearly every other nation. Although the U.S. remains the world leader in the global economy, research shows that the United States is at risk of losing its place as the world leader in science and innovation. Policymakers have recognized the need for research addressing global competitiveness. President Bush signed the America Competes Act, which calls for increased investment in innovation and education to improve U.S. competitiveness and President Barack Obama has named a platform, "Science, Technology and Innovation for a New Generation" which will extend and prioritize the efforts to improve math and science education. K-12 U.S. students are graduating from high school unprepared to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in college. Without STEM degrees they will be unable to pursue technology jobs after graduation. Statistics show that the U.S. is failing to produce as many graduates in STEM as other countries. In an increasingly global world, without graduates in STEM courses the U.S. is at risk of losing its position as the economic world leader. Government, industry and academia all agree that the U.S. needs to address education on a K-12 level to ensure that U.S. students are equipped with twenty-first century skills to compete in a twenty-first century global economy. Twenty-first century students are different from students of previous generations. Researchers argue that changes in the environment, specifically an increased exposure to technology, have changed the brains of twenty-first century students; twenty-first century students learn differently. However, twenty-first century students are being taught with an instructional curriculum that was designed for a previous generation that did not have the same exposure to technology. This is causing a digital-divide that is hindering the achievement of students. The instructional curriculum needs to be updated to meet the needs of twenty-first century students. This thesis addresses this need from a technical communication perspective by arguing that the instructional design of twenty-first century learning materials should be improved by adhering to guidelines for twenty-first century learning characteristics and twenty-first century technology use. The guidelines support a national goal to improve K-12 achievement in order to increase U.S. STEM graduates and increase the U.S.'s ability to compete in a global economy.

Life in today’s world is characterized by complexity and rapid change. Twenty-first century skills and especially mathematical understanding are supposed to crucially contribute to meeting the demands of our world since mathematics offers strategies to structure or simplify complex problems. An open question is which teaching practices are appropriate to provide all students with such skills and to broaden the participation of underprivileged students. The present article explores these aspects by focusing on complex tasks, a practice that can be considered highly accepted in the context of mathematics education all over the world. We will concentrate on the perspective of the German mathematics education community as the foundation of our considerations. Based on an analytical investigation of mathematical literacy and twenty-first century skills (such as creativity, critical thinking, or problem-solving), we will address central ideas and characteristics of complex mathematical tasks. To complement the analytical approach, we will illustrate their characteristics as well as possible intersections with twenty-first century skills by presenting an elementary school teaching experiment. Finally, we will critically discuss the potentials and pitfalls of complex mathematical tasks from an abstract perspective and conclude by debating practical consequences for organizing mathematical learning-teaching-processes.

This dissertation studies a critical facet of Chinese politics, inspections by higher Chinese government to villages. Principally, it looks at how village economic development determines government inspection decisions and how inspections, once conducted, impact village politics. Specifically, I argue that villages perceived as destabilizing to the Chinese regime, villages with higher levels of economic inequality and villages located at the two extremes of economic development, should see more inspections. In addition, I argue that inspections, in return, drive village politics: they increase village leaders' governing efficacy and raise villagers' political awareness. This theory has received strong support from both field work and quantitative empirical tests using the Chinese Household Income Project (2002) dataset.

Life writing has traditionally been organized into two main subfields: autobiographical writing, focused on the self, and biographical writing, focused on one or more other human beings. Yet, many contemporary texts from different linguistic and cultural contexts defy or complicate such a clear-cut distinction. The present dissertation investigates a group of such texts, which I have called “bifocal narratives.” With this term, I indicate works that, as in an ellipse, hinge upon two foci at once – an autobiographical narrator and a biographical other – and take shape around the relation between these two poles. The dissertation offers both a historical interpretation and a morphology of this form. It does so by comparing three literary contexts (Italian literature, French literature, and Anglophone literature of the North Atlantic) and combining theoretical argumentation, panoramic analyses of a vast corpus, and close readings of individual works. Drawing on bifocal narratives’ amphibious nature as both literary and documentary writings, in the Introduction, I propose to interpret the bifocal form through a twofold lens: as part of a growing interest in the intersubjective formation of identity and the self/other relationship in life writing and life writing criticism; and as a mise en abyme of trends and tensions at work in contemporary literature more at large. In the latter respect, I view bifocal narratives as embodying both a heightened interest in individuality and a tangible difficulty among writers in speaking as characters different from themselves. I link both aspects to a crisis of traditional humanistic ideologies and the mandate of intellectuals in European and North American cultures. In the first chapter, I offer a panoramic view of bifocal narratives by delineating their main manifestations and highlighting some of their defining traits (for example, a strong heuristic tension or a tendency to structure the self/other relationship in polarized terms). In the following three chapters, I focus on three main subgroups of bifocal narratives: hyper-narrative bifocal works, bifocal texts between poetry and prose, and essayistic bifocal narratives. These three clusters of texts allow me to investigate some crucial aspects of the bifocal form, which are particularly evident in these various subsets: the role of narration in shaping a sense of the self, and a serious use of intertextuality; a complex vision of the speaking “I” that complicates a clear-cut division between fiction and nonfiction, an original use of textual blanks, and a deep literary work on both language and documents; and the complication of the auto/biographical model via the alternative paradigm offered by (literary) portraiture, as well as a multilayered approach towards the (post)modern literary and critical traditions. In doing so, I also provide extensive close readings of five main works: Via Gemito (2000) by Domenico Starnone and Limonov (2011) by Emmanuel Carrère; Jane: A Murder (2005) by Maggie Nelson; and Out of Sheer Rage (1997) by Geoff Dyer and Qualcosa di scritto (2012) by Emanuele Trevi. Besides illuminating various aspects of bifocal narratives, these readings also aim to offer original interpretations of these works.