Browsing by Subject "Media"
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Item The 5th wall project : projection design applications for transforming education and medical spaces for youth communities(2015-05) Lord, Patrick William; Ortel, Sven; Alrutz, MeganThis paper and project explore how creative applications of existing design and technology can provide a unique service for children anywhere. This project fuses that technology with a belief that youth communities in education and medical spaces deserve access to artistic experiences. By devising original, immersive story performances with two classes from local Austin schools, The 5th Wall Project has begun to develop a process that facilitates educational engagement, and exposes students to design and art where they live and learn. The intention of this project is to continue beyond the performances and residencies completed and documented in this paper. Future applications, such as the installation of this model into pediatric patient rooms is a primary goal of the project that has yet to be explored, but is an integral motivator in the aforementioned investigation of our process.Item A report on the operations of FUSADES : promoting neoliberalism via relationships to parties, governance, transnational institutions, and mainstream media in El Salvador(2018-11-30) Cordova, Sherley Katherine; Auyero, Javier; Fridman, DanielFUSADES is the largest think tank in El Salvador, and has been successful in influencing policy towards a neoliberal direction since it was founded in 1983. Guided by four dimensions--cooperative and competitive relationships with political parties, the revolving-door between governments and think tanks, media presence, and transnational ties--pointed out in think tank scholarship, I point to the ways FUSADES is able to influence policy in El Salvador, and how they are limited by the FMLN’s rise to power. Using Thomas Medvetz’s argument--that think tanks are able to exercise influential power in various ways through their purposeful ambiguity, which allows them to legitimize themselves as objective institutions--I show how FUSADES legitimizes itself as an objective and impartial institution despite their promotion of neoliberal policies. In this thesis, I ultimately argue that FUSADES is a neoliberal institution that has multidimensional influence over Salvadoran policies that shape the country’s political and economic system. Questions I address throughout the thesis are: how is FUSADES legitimized as an “impartial” institution? What are the political implications of their professed impartiality? What allows them to influence governance? How is their influence limited? What explicit and implicit role(s) does FUSADES play in the Salvadoran economy and its political system?Item According to a new study : when bad journalism meets questionable science(2013-05) Burnson, Forrest Matthew; Dahlby, Tracy; Gil de Zúñiga, HomeroAccurately reporting scientific studies remains a challenge for journalists. Often lacking any formal background in science, journalists are expected to communicate the complex findings of scientific research in such a way that average readers can understand. As a result, news coverage tends to exaggerate, misrepresent, or sensationalize the findings of scientific studies. This report examines the common errors that journalists make when reporting on scientific studies, as well as the issues in modern scientific research that contribute to this problem. While total scientific literacy in journalism remains a lofty ideal, the democratizing force of the Internet not only holds journalists more accountable in their reporting, but also provides platforms for skeptics and experts to weigh in on the news treatment that studies receive.Item American capital punishment and the promise of "closure"(2011-05) Dirks, Danielle; Warr, Mark, 1952-Several justifications exist for the death penalty, yet it is only recently that the concept of “closure” has come to serve as a rationale for American capital punishment. This contemporary justification promises murder victims’ families that the execution of their loved one’s murderer should provide them with “closure”—a contested word that typically denotes an end to the pain associated with their loved one’s murder. How and when this new narrative came about has garnered little scholarly attention, particularly as murder victims’ families begin to challenge closure as relevant to their healing. The goals of the current study seek to: 1) elucidate how closure entered the American death penalty debate; 2) illustrate the myriad meanings assigned to closure, identifying how various stakeholders have trafficked in the term’s use; 3) examine how closure has been used politically to legitimize death penalty practices and the state’s right to take life; and 4) critically analyze claims that closure has “symbolically transformed” the American death penalty today. The study employs discursive textual analysis of nearly 2500 American newspaper stories from 1989 to 2008, legislative hearings, legal case histories, academic and popular sources, and archival materials from American death penalty and victims’ rights groups during this twenty year period. The findings illustrate that closure entered death penalty discourse in the late 1980s, and reached a tipping point in news coverage in 2001 with Timothy McVeigh’s execution. While the term was used in nearly every way imaginable, the findings illustrate it was most prominently used in supporting secondary victims’ “right to view” the executions of their loved ones’ murderers and in justifying Timothy McVeigh’s execution for his role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. I argue that the media’s sensational portrayals of such historical moments allowed them to serve as “galvanizing events” ushering in closure as a powerful symbol in justifying the state’s right to take life and the view that executions are a form of “therapeutic justice.” Despite closure being used to support certain death penalty practices, the analyses presented here provide little support for the notion that closure has “symbolically transformed” American capital punishment today as has been suggested by some scholars. Closure is a small blip in print news coverage and does not resonate strongly with Americans’ support for capital punishment in national opinion polls. The study concludes with a critical examination of the role of closure as a contemporary, and empirically unchallenged, justification for the death penalty—one that serves as an empty promise for murder victims’ loved ones.Item Another time, another place : archival media content as temporal consciousness and collective memory(2015-05) Britt, Terry Lynn; Bock, Mary Angela; Adut, AriInternet-based video streaming services have arisen in the past decade not only to provide new ways of engaging with current media content, but also with media content of the past, including news archives, movies, and television shows. This ability to “dial up” the mediated past almost at will with a broadband Internet connection suggests new ways for viewers of such content to use it in constructing temporal consciousness, which refers to how someone experiences and perceives time; and temporal frameworks related to the online content. Likewise, online media archives can be used in the formation and preservation of collective memory. Utilizing a targeted focus group study of 18-30-year-olds and their reactions and memories triggered by viewing selected archival news and entertainment content found online, the study contained within this master’s thesis proposes to explore elements of online media archives that might assist viewers in building a type of mediated temporal consciousness – time awareness and structuring through the consumption of media content – as well as collective memory. Consideration of these possible effects may better define the social value of media archives and their accessibility to future generations of potential viewers. Additionally, qualitative investigation of these concepts can help us to understand more about the mind’s ability to connect media content with personal experience and memory, as well as understand more about new media’s sociological and psychological significance as a depository for archival content. Without a method of preserving and presenting archival content, especially pre-digital content on aging, decaying source materials, large periods of time and history represented through news and other media content may become irrevocably lost.Item Austin media in the digital age(2012-05) Gomez-Garcia, Oscar David; Gil de Zúñiga, Homero; Alves, Rosental C.This report first explores the changes journalism is experiencing since the advent of the Internet in a broad manner. Second, and more specifically, it aims to shed more light on the mechanisms that are used by the very diverse Austin-area range of outlets and journalistic corporations, and the way they are embracing and adopting new technologies. To that end, it also tries to analyze the current Austin media ecosystem in depth, focusing on some of the most representative local media outlets and interviewing some of the more relevant personalities that are making all of these changes feasible.Item Class negotiations : poverty, welfare policy, and American television(2014-08) Murphy, Nicole Lynn; Beltrán, Mary C.Television impacts the shape of our common culture by depicting our societal fears, myths and hopes in a constantly shifting and negotiated manner. There is a glaring lack of research regarding media representations of children/adolescents in poverty. The study of this intersection is critically important for understanding societal discourse around education, healthcare, government assistance programs and even the opinions and practices of teachers and administrators. Children under 18 years of age represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty in the United States. Among all children, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. In this thesis, I trace discourse in the mainstream news and popular culture regarding children and poverty through welfare debates and policy changes in the U.S. from the 1990s and 2000s through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Subsequently, I analyze the construction of this discourse on narrative television in the shows My So Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995) The O.C. (FOX, 2003-2007) and Shameless (Showtime, 2011-). Through this mapping, I examine how gender, sexuality, race, and age are mobilized in constructing televisual representations of poverty; as well as how shifting discourses and depictions make transparent society’s anxieties regarding poverty.Item Climate change framing in the New York Times : the media’s impact on a polarized public(2015-12) Goff, Paepin D.; Jensen, Robert, 1958-; Wilson, KristopherWhile the threat of climate change grows stronger along with the consensus of scientists about the certainty of anthropogenic causes, researchers observe an opposite effect in the public’s acceptance of climate science. While climate change is a salient topic in society, the media’s presentation of climate change has varied over time and the public remains politically divided on the issue. This content analysis of 134 New York Times’ climate change articles between 2001 and 2013 identified six different types of media frames associated with climate change coverage and investigated the presentation of scientific information within those frames. This study also investigated the congruence between scientific consensus regarding climate change, the public’s perception of current scientific knowledge and the way climate change is talked about in the media.Item Communicating U.S. Latine Activism(2023-05-12) Wintermeier, TrentThis exhibition examines how U.S. Latine activists employ three communication techniques–sound bites, hooking, and flagging–throughout multiple media to connect civil, labor, and LGBTQ+ movements from 1965 to 2003.Item Consuming and performing Black manhood : the Post Hip-Hop Generation and the consumption of popular media and cultural products(2011-12) Williams, Adam Clark; Watkins, S. Craig (Samuel Craig); Moore, Leonard N.Thirty-three young Black men of the Post-Hip Hop Generation (ages 18-25) in Austin, TX, participated in a qualitative study centering on questions investigating Black manhood, media use, and the consumption of popular cultural products. Further, the researcher examined representations of Black men throughout music videos, films, and MySpace profiles. The purpose of this study was to enhance our knowledge about how Black manhood is being defined, conceptualized, and expressed by young Black men, and how significant media and cultural consumption plays a role in their lives. This study probes six questions: RQ1: How do young Black males interpret the images and messages about Black men from mainstream media? RQ2: What types of cultural products are being consumed by young Black men? Why do they consume them? RQ3: How do young Black males define Black manhood? RQ4: Do these cultural products influence the ways that young Black men define/express Black manhood? If so, how? Focus group sessions were conducted throughout the study, which were video recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions were then imported into a qualitative software program known as Atlas.ti, where statements related to the purpose of the study were coded and analyzed. These coded statements were then compared to observations made by the researcher from the examined media representations.Item Cosmetic surgery media, marketing and advertising requires more regulation(2010-05) Nelson, Katelyn Christine; Drumwright, Minette E.; Love, BradThe marketing, advertising and mediation of cosmetic surgery in the United States has become a controversial issue. The debate began with the normalization of unrealistic beauty images due to excessive exposure to cosmetic surgery in the media and consumer self-diagnosis. Surgeons use aggressive marketing tactics for preventative procedures and prey on insecurities. Moreover, the proliferation of cosmetic surgery in the media in conjunction with misleading advertising has created an environment where consumers have false and unrealistic expectations and perceptions of cosmetic surgery. This article discusses the history of cosmetic surgery, marketing and advertising tactics as well as mediated theory to understand the ethical issues involved in elective surgery. The goal of this paper is to suggest regulation and protection for vulnerable audiences.Item Creating while Black : digital participation, digital expressions, and cultural capital among Black teens in Austin, Texas(2017-05) Williams, Adam Clark, III; Watkins, S. Craig (Samuel Craig); Straubhaar, Joseph; Kumar, Shanti; Thomas, Kevin; Moore, LeonardAustin is recognized for its plurality of cultures and technology-rich landscape. Thus, it is home to various youth digital literacy programs and resources targeting its socially and economically disadvantaged population. These efforts help to narrow the gap in digital participation between the city’s privileged and disadvantaged classes. My dissertation explores the participatory cultures of Austin’s Black youth within production-based spaces to determine how their digital expressions allow them to accumulate or utilize cultural capital. Cultural capital has been used in different contexts to understand the complexities of wealth amongst marginalized groups. Taking an ethnographic approach, this study draws from focus groups and interviews of Black teens (aged 13 to 19; both male and female) to qualitatively analyze their digital expressions and the perceived benefits of these expressions to their lives, future opportunities, and career paths. I seek a deeper understanding of how and why this youth demographic engages in creating particular digital contents as well as the significance of the cultural capital that they generate and utilize as a resultItem Cruces : multimedia experiments along with immigrants in the US-Mexico borderlands(2022-05-11) Tobón Franco, Carlos Mario; Campbell, Craig A. R., 1973-Cruces is a short film exploring the geographies and stories composing Latin Americans' challenges to reach and live on US soil. By weaving together oral histories, environmental sounds, and the landscape, the film's structure highlights the constitutive elements of transit, such as trains and rivers, and the obstacles immigrants face in their transit, such as forests, deserts, and border regimes. Recorded during 2019 and early 2020, this multivocal ethnography comprises the distributed yet relational geographies of immigrants' quests and settling, reflecting a raw exploration of the regions and testimonies in the midst of one of our age's defining, challenging, and politicized phenomena. In this MA report, I discuss different topics related to Cruces conception, research process, and editing. First, I talk about the set of personal and contextual events in Colombia that related my life to immigration, the US-Mexico border, and the United States. Secondly, concepts regarding testimonies, sounds, images and the long cinematic take, and the politics behind immigrants' representation are discussed. Third, film excerpts and conversations are taken as starting points to discuss immigration, borderlands, and the US surveillance policies in the US-Mexico border areas and the inland-US cities. Connections to prisons, risky geographies, hyper and invisibility, and necro-politics and existence are explored. The document is closed with a chapter containing extended ideas about media creation, research, and public anthropology. Furthermore, debating future personal work and describing how the border premises are dramatically expanding, north and south of the international line, with surveillance, displacement, and precarity far away from the international limit.Item Cultivation Theory And Violence In Media: Correlations And Observations(2019-05-01) Obert-Hong, Christine; Lewis, RobertCultivation Theory represents the idea that people’s perceptions of the real world are unconsciously influenced by their consumption of media. As technology has improved and increased, so too has the amount of information various platforms are able to spread. However, there is an imbalance between the amount of violence depicted in media and the amount that occurs in real life, leading to unrealistic perceptions of a mean world. Most cultivation research is not experimental. For my thesis, I decided to conduct an experiment of my own using YouTube clips emphasizing violent or fearful content, using a variety of established practices and questions, as well as some of my own. Although result were not conclusive, a few patterns consistent with Cultivation Theory were observed in this online context.Item "Deal or No Deal?" : negotiating the commodification and representation of Latinx race/ethnicity in 21st century U.S. gameshows(2023-04-20) Arteaga, René X.; Beasley, B. Alex; Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969-In this research project, I interrogate whether the increased representation of Latinx minorities in mainstream U.S. television shows, and gameshows more specifically, can lead to possibilities of challenging or disrupting the structural power of white corporate hegemony. I do this by exploring how American mainstream television networks, advertisement agencies, and white corporate culture more broadly work in the 21st century to commodify race and ethnicity by portraying racialized minorities through stereotypical but highly marketable images. I am aligned with scholars, such as Shalini Shankar, Arlene Dávila, and Isabel Molina-Guzman, who are critical of post-racial-era television producers’ strategies for appropriating racial minorities’ cultural differences in their television shows without acknowledging the racial and economic inequalities that can underpin racial difference. Ultimately, I illustrate how fleeting moments do exist in which “racial minorities” can disrupt white corporate hegemony through television before their “unruly” behavior is co-opted by mainstream media and rendered unthreatening. Thus, I argue, we must pay more attention to these moments of disruption and study the radical potential that they carry.Item Defending Pussy Riot metonymically : the trial representations, media and social movements in Russia and the United States(2013-05) Kolesova, Ekaterina Sergeyevna; Cloud, Dana L.During August 2012 the issues of women's rights in Russia attracted attention of the U.S. newspapers, which was an unusual occurrence for this unprivileged region in feminist theorizing. In my thesis I explore the rhetoric around the Pussy Riot trial and verdict. I argue that international media rendered the protest metonymically, thereby reducing its political content to human rights and Cold War frames. I explore the usage of historical references in the narratives, based on these paradigms. The oppressiveness of the Russian government is constructed through Cold War rhetoric by references to Stalinism, which masks the neoliberal content of this case. The confrontation is represented as a clash of cultures based on the contrast between democracy and oppressive regimes, with Pussy Riot as martyrs for Western values and Putin as an Oriental dictator. I argue that this rhetoric has troubling implications for social activism, that democracy could be only achieved through non-violent and individualist symbolic activism which relies on the Western standards. The second part of my thesis analyzes how social movements in the U.S. and Russia interact with each other and influence each other's tactics through interaction with media representations of the Pussy Riot trial and dominant narratives regarding activism. My support for this argument comes from an analysis of the U.S. and Russian movements' responses to the Pussy Riot trial. Embracing a complex combination of political meanings, these events were significantly determined by prolific mass media coverage and mediated interaction between activist groups.Item Division on the Divide: Shaping Political Rhetoric and Its Responses on the Border(2020-05) Guerra, Michael MatthewToday the issues that plague our borderlands and the immigration system as a whole are inescapable. We are constantly bombarded by rhetoric from opinion leaders on both sides of the issue from dozens of different forms of social media. Some people choose to act based on the way that this rhetoric portrays themselves, or their homes, or the way that the people subject to the policies in question are treated. This chain of events that starts with an idea, that then gets delivered, and then prompts a response from the community is the main subject of my inquiry. How does most of the Rhetoric prevalent today spread? How has it spread historically? What effects can negative political rhetoric have? To answer these questions the Thesis is broken into six sections. I start with background information on how Latinos and Mexican Americans have been treated over time, progressing into what rhetoric historically has had the power to do. From there, I move into modern rhetoric, where it comes from and what it can do. By establishing some truths on the matter, I hope to be able to clarify some of the potential consequences of the path that we are headed down.Item Engrained : the legacy of familial Black narratives, Black joy, and Black resistance counteracting generational White supremacy in media(2022-05-16) Horsley, Harold D., II; Barreto, Raquel; Smith, Ya'KeFrom my perspective, one thing that people don’t understand is that in a way Black people are always having to put on a costume to adapt to environments that don’t work for them. In the workforce, in schools, and throughout various areas of everyday life Blackness was not celebrated in public forums, unless it was by Black people. Because of that, I had a foundation that was planted by the people that raised me which gave me a greater sense of self worth–it was engrained within me. This thesis is a selected written analysis of different chapters of my life that exposed me to different self-actualized mediums, like race, gender, class, sexuality, and education that would inadvertently affect me nearly day to day. These mediums would influence how I think of myself as a living being and as an artist that results and how I move through the world as a living being and as an artist. The paper and the documentary (the performative aspect of my thesis) were both created from Black narratives of my own and my family’s. The written portion of the thesis is from my first-person account of my life when examining the segregated cultures I navigated as a child up until now whilst focusing on my viewpoints as a growing academic. Some writings are a series of essays written from classes I was enrolled in or audited at the University of Texas when researching the origins of race theory and media influence of the evolution of race theory within the United States and westernized culture. A large focus of the thesis is on the portrayal of Blackness in the American theater and the portrayal of Black womanhood in media and how it has evolved over the last century within the United States. The documentary is a visual representation of multi-generational Black women in my family that helped raise me, guide me, and encouraged me to make a difference in how I create and present myself, present my art, and use my voice. Since television and film are the most accessible artforms to Black Americans in the past and now, I asked questions relating to Black representation within their childhood and adulthood when focusing on broadcasting network shows.Item Establishing media as scene partner to the producing interdisciplinary artist(2015-05) Belock, Ryan Allen; Isackes, Richard M.; Ortel, Sven; Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul; Beckham, AndreaThis thesis asks how practice-as-research methodologies can inform producing interdisciplinary artists in the context of contemporary performance production. Recognizing a growing trend of self-producing artists, I demonstrate how creative artists can balance aesthetic goals with organizational concerns. Taking a case study approach, I draw on the growing trend of artists relying upon themselves to perform most, if not all functions of a small production company in addition to mastering their primary craft. I look at modern examples of performers who rely heavily on projection design and test several roles in the devising, designing, promotion, and execution of an original media-driven story. Sources indicate the avenues where artists may find themselves most successful are those in which they must serve in several capacities to the production, including the wearing of many hats. It becomes therefore important for the interdisciplinary artist to maintain flexibility in order to assume other roles in addition to those specific to their craft. Through the lens of a producing artistic director, I consider the following main questions: How may theatre technicians navigate the threshold of technological competence and artistic integrity? Where and when (if at all) does the artist (performer) become the technician and vice versa? What common languages (i.e. Viewpoints, Semiotics, musicianship) can be formed to aid in the cohesion of collaborators from different disciplines (i.e. music, design, movement)?Item Gay American gothic : a movement returns to its past(2016-07-29) Araiza, José Andrés; Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie; Jensen, Robert; Bock, Mary A; Landuyt, Noel; Byrd, RobertThis discourse analysis seeks to understand how depictions of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) people within news coverage changed over the past 60 years and what those depictions mean for the future of a group of individuals who still face violence and bigotry and struggle to gain equal access to laws and rights. News stories are a salient tool to translate the unknown to known. This research approaches news stories as social constructions, which often times reflect existing power structures and shape social reality. Through the qualitative analysis of news coverage from four historically significant moments in Austin, Texas, this research demonstrates the path that gay and lesbian people experienced in the media—from being portrayed as sexual deviants to a homonormative monolith in the form of patriotic, domesticated, depoliticized, and desexualized couples. The news discourse over the past five decades demonstrated how stories slowly shed all radical politics from the gay liberationist past and adopted an assimilationist orientation. Bisexuals, transgender people, individuals who suffered from and died because of AIDS, and all other queer people who don’t adhere to the homonormative construct have been symbolically annihilated throughout history and continue to be. Journalists from mainstream, collegiate and alternative publications continue to utilize reporting practices that marginalize and delegitimize LGBTQ people. Nearly 70 years after making their first appearance in the mainstream press, framed as perverts and deviants, LGBTQ people continue to be subjected to homophobic discourse. By understanding changing news frames through the past six decades, this analysis attempts to weave an explanation of how the depictions may have and may continue to perpetuate false perceptions of LGBTQ people. This research interrogates the very power of the press, as an institution of power in society, to reflect hegemonic values, not challenge them.