Browsing by Subject "Media studies"
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Item The advertising construction of identity in Lebanese television(2010-08) Nasr, Assem; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Kackman, Michael; Kraidy, Marwan M.; Kumar, ShantiThe Middle East saw much social change in recent tumultuous decades. On one hand, some communities embraced Westernness as part of the inevitable path to development and modernization. On the other hand, there were communities that resisted global trends that were mostly dominated by the West. The latter deemed these trends as a threat to native cultures, religious groups, and local traditions. This made the Arab world a ground for constant redefinition of the meaning of identity. Of the countries in the region undergoing a turbulent debate over what constitutes national identity, Lebanon serves as a good example. Ever since its independence, Lebanon was a nation-state with no sense of nationality to unite its people. As some communities saw themselves more francophone than Arab, others felt a close connection to a pan-Arab nation. Arguably, the Lebanese people found themselves amidst a tension between the two poles. Defining one’s identity required a negotiation between the two extremes. Not only did this negotiation demand a thorough investigation of one’s beliefs, social network, and history, but it also necessitated a diligent ‘performance’ of identity. An individual represented her identity by habits and expressions that she associated with that particular identity. The study at hand is an exploration of the relationship between identity and consumption in the Lebanese society. This project applies a unique approach in that it considers the producers’ agency in the construction of identity. Taking television advertising as a site for inquiry, the study explores how commercial advertisers utilize the tension between the local and the non-local to promote the consumption of the advertised products. Through exploring the values that educate advertising producers’ choices in creating text and meaning, this study applies theories of globalization, postcolonial studies, and consumer behavior through which advertisers manifest an ambivalence of identity. Therefore, by taking Lebanon as an example and focusing on advertising, this study contributes to the debates of globalization and the Arab world by invoking questions of producers’ agency in producing identity references through attitudes, behaviors, and social status associated with the featured products.Item Border as warzone : deviant mexicanidad, gamifying terrorism, and countersurveillance in digital space(2022-09-22) Ramales, Mayra; Auyero, JavierOn August 3rd, 2019, a white supremacist drove from Fort-Worth, Dallas to the border in El Paso and shot and killed 23 people at a Walmart. The shooter would upload a manifesto onto a white supremacist's chat board shortly before the act, disclosing reasons why he felt the need to carry out the terrorist attack against Mexicans. What does the online discourse of these white supremacists show us about their move to transcend from online hate to real world terrorism? How does the construct of the border create a zone for war and destruction for these white supremacists who have gamified terrorism?Item Celebrity and fandom on Twitter : examining electronic dance music in the Digital Age(2012-12) Anaipakos, Jessica Lyle; Kumar, Shanti; Staiger, JanetThis thesis looks at electronic dance music (EDM) celebrity and fandom through the eyes of four producers on Twitter. Twitter was initially designed as a conversation platform, loosely based on the idea of instant-messaging but emerged in its current form as a micro-blog social network in 2009. EDM artists count on the website to promote their music, engage with fans, discover new songs, and contact each other. More specifically, Twitter is an extension of a celebrity’s private life, as most celebrities access Twitter from their cellphones and personal computers, cutting out gatekeepers from controlling their image. Four power player producers in EDM are used as case studies for analysis of the intimacy and reach Twitter provides. Chosen because of their visibility, style, and recognition, Deadmau5, Diplo, Skrillex, and Tiësto represent different EDM subgenres, run their own record labels, have dedicated fans, and are accessible through social media. All use Twitter to announce shows, interact with fans, promote contests and merchandise, and share stories and pictures of their personal lives with their fan followers. Tweets are a direct line for fans to communicate with these celebrities through the reply, retweet (RT), and mention functions on Twitter. Fan tweets to and from these EDM celebrities are also examined by looking at celebrity-fan encounters in the cyber world and the real world, aftereffects of celebrity RTs, and engagement with said celebrities. The internet is the lifeline for this subculture as it changed the way EDM is shared, promoted, and packaged. Twitter and other social media sites give producers the exposure they never experienced with traditional media and allow fans to participate in a global subculture. To sum up, this is a study on how Twitter influenced EDM and personalized the relationship between producers and fans.Item Constructions of masculinity in Adult Swim's The venture bros.(2012-08) Garcia, Feliks José; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-; Fuller, JenniferThe increasingly popular Adult Swim series, The Venture Bros. (2003-present), created by Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, is an animated series that interrogates established paradigms of masculinity. Combining narrative elements that are easily attributed to American action films with those of adventure cartoons, the creators of The Venture Bros. create a world where comic book and fantasy adventures coexist. The scope of this thesis narrows and focuses on the ways in which representations of masculinity are constructed and function within the series. What are the various types of masculinity represented in the series? Are the representations of masculinity reproductions of hegemonic masculinity? How is an awareness of dominant representations of masculinity and maleness expressed in The Venture Bros.? This thesis explores how previous scholarship on discourses of dominant representations of male masculinity sheds light on ways to analyze the various masculinities in The Venture Bros.Item The creative (and magical) possibilities of digital Black girlhood(2016-05) Barner, Briana Nicole; Beltrán, Mary C.; Chen, GinaImages of Black women in the media have relied on hurtful stereotypes that have traveled through time and space to be mapped onto the bodies of generations of Black women. The hashtag #BlackGirlMagic turns this dynamic on its head and gives Black girls and women a new vocabulary to combat this form of oppression in the media. The act of creating hashtags that can be shared, blogged and inserted into real and digital conversations and spaces is an act of resistance. Activism no longer solely takes place in physical space. This research will examine the ways that Black women have used digital and new media to provide counter narratives of their representations in traditional media. I will examine the ways that the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic has been used across social media platforms (mainly Twitter, but also Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr). This work will also explore the creative possibilities and potentials within digital Black girlhood studies. I am interested in exploring the fluidity of Black girlhood and womanhood, and how this is being explored in digital spaces, such as the popularity of the #BlackGirlMagic by both adult women and Black girls. These spaces allow Black women the freedom to reimagine their own Black girlhood. This work will utilize Black feminist, hip hop feminist, Black girlhood studies and hashtag activism theoretical frameworks to analyze the implications of this hashtag in the representation of Black women and girls on the Internet.Item Gender, power, and performance : representations of cheerleaders in American culture(2012-05) Wright, Allison Elaine; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-; Davis, Janet M.; Smith, Mark C.; Kearney, Mary C.; Todd, Janice S.This dissertation reveals that the various, often conflicting media representations of cheerleaders are responsible for the many ways gender and power are refracted through the lens of American popular culture and on the bodies of American youth. Beginning in the circumscribed nineteenth century world of elite male privilege, the history of cheerleading is intimately connected to the discourse of masculinity in America. It is not until almost one hundred years after the activity’s birth that its primary narrative changes from one of masculinity to one of power. This project calls attention to the ways in which sociohistoric context impacts representations of cheerleaders. My interdisciplinary project draws on sources from the popular press; children’s, adult, and mainstream literature, film, and television; material culture; and interviews with cheerleaders themselves; and engages with existing cheerleading scholarship as well as literary criticism and feminist scholarship. Each chapter interrogates a different, related trend in the cultural representation of cheerleaders, including: competing narratives of victimization, im/perfection, and popularity; a third wave feminist vision of gendered superpower; prescriptions of beauty and behavior; pornography and its connection to the professionalization of cheer; and the performance of representation by actual cheerleaders. Taken together, these chapters trace patterns of representation, fraught with nuance and complexity, to provide a picture of a shifting cultural icon whose relationship to larger social movements is often reciprocal and who challenges societal expectations of gender and generation over three centuries.Item Haunted homes and restless ghosts : (in)visible structures of power and violence in American haunted house films(2021-05-06) Springman, Laura Alyssa; Nault, CurranThis thesis explores depictions of suffering in American haunted house horror films and considers how hauntings can draw attention to systems of power and violence in our real world. Through textual analysis of The Amityville Horror (1979), Poltergeist (1982), THIR13EN Ghosts (2001), and The Amityville Horror (2005), I argue that an intersectional, necropolitical lens sheds light on the ways systems of violence, death, and memory operate in the American context of the horror film. Drawing from the insights of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, in conversation with scholarship on hauntings, death, and the horror genre, I consider the ways violence functions in regard to both who is depicted as suffering, but just as importantly who is not. In doing so, I foreground the complex manner in which these films can both victimize the living, while also re-subjugating the dead. Further, I interrogate how real-world instances of violence in and around the home are made both visible and invisible within these limited white depictions of haunted homes. Taken together, my four case studies demonstrate the ways in which ghosts in haunted house horror films can unearth real-world instances of past and present American violence.Item Heroes of the past, readers of the present, stories of the future : continuity, cultural memory, and historical revisionism in superhero comics(2014-05) Friedenthal, Andrew J.; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation is a study of cultural memory, exploring how superhero comic books, and their readers and creators, look back on and make sense of the past, as well as how they use that past in the creation of community and stories today. It is my contention that the superhero comics that exist as part of a long-standing "universe," particularly those published by DC and Marvel, are inextricably linked to a sense of cultural memory which defines both the organization of their fans and the history of their stories, and that cultural memory in comics takes the twinned forms of fandom and continuity. Comic book fandom, from its very inception, has been based around memories of past stories and recollections about favorite moments, creators, characters, etc. Because of this, as many of those fans have gone on to become creators themselves, the stories they have crafted reflect that continual obsession with the histories -- loosely termed "continuity" by creators, fans, and comic book scholars -- of these fictional universes. Often, this obsession translates into an engagement with actual events from the past. In many of these cases, as with much art and ephemera that is immersed in cultural memory, these fans-turned-creators combine their interest in looking at the history of the fictional universe with a working out of actual traumatic events. My case studies focus on superhero comic books that respond to such events, particularly World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11.Item Hostile relations : representing Arabs and Muslims in historically based war films(2017-04-27) Belcher, Samuel Ross; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-; Atwood, Blake RThis thesis seeks to expand previous research on representations of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood cinema by analyzing how recent historically based war films represent the aforementioned populations in their retelling of history. Drawing inspiration from Stuart Hall’s (1980) theory of encoding and decoding, as well as Marcia Landy’s (1996) writing on historically based film, this study inductively analyzes both the manner of retelling history and the encoding of Arabs and Muslims across multiple themes, namely: Space, Characterization, Violence, Language, and Civilians. In applying this lens to the films American Sniper (2014), 13 Hours (2016), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016), and War Dogs (2016) a tendency to vilify, silence, and simplify Arabs and Muslims emerges. To provide context, the study utilizes work by scholars like Jack Shaheen (2001; 2008) and Evelyn Alsutany (2012) that previously documented representational methods for Arabs and Muslims. This thesis also places these films in conversation with the academic discourse on politics of fear and media framing to reveal a greater significance from their retelling of history, given the importance of politics of fear to the political decisions surrounding the historical context of each film. By reanimating these stories with generally negative and reductive representations of Arabs and Muslims, and asserting the importance and necessity of US military action, these films validate the politics of fear process, further entrenching the xenophobia attributed to Arabs and Muslims. While War Dogs challenges these ideas, at times, significant trends develop across the films to justify this reading.Item Interview with the southern vampire : reviving a haunted history in contemporary film and television(2015-05) Austin, Katharine Griffin; Frick, Caroline; Fuller-Seeley, KathrynIt is difficult to imagine a time without vampires, a fixture of Western popular culture since the nineteenth century. The vampires of today, however, are a far cry from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker’s creation is a monster, a metaphor for all things feared by Victorian culture. Contemporary vampires, on the other hand, are increasingly depicted as marginalized figures striving for redemption and human connection. Within this shift from monster to social outcast, a peculiar trend has emerged: vampire fiction set in the American South that deliberately addresses the region's haunted history. As mythical beings, vampires often serve as mediators for an era's particular anxieties or fears. So why does current Western society need not just sympathetic vampires but sympathetic Southern ones? What particular concerns do these Southern vampires negotiate? And how does a Southern locale engender this purpose? To answer these questions, I first consider how such media engage with the Southern Gothic. Chapter one focuses on HBO's True Blood (2008-2014), examining how Southern vampire texts negotiate race and class structures and promote the possibility of a modern, integrated Southern society. Chapter two compares Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) and The Originals (The CW, 2013-Present) to explore how Southern vampires mediate feelings of collective guilt and motivate (or avoid) reparation efforts. To understand not only the elements but also the cultural import of this regionalized media trend, I next extend these readings with an examination of audience reception. Chapter three focuses on viewers of The Originals, surveying the diversity of audience engagement with the series as well as identifying recurring trends within that diversity. In combining all three threads of analysis, I conclude that vampire texts set in the American South perform a complex and at times paradoxical function, promoting feelings of nostalgia for an imagined South as well as engendering processes of critical self-reflection.Item News on film : cinematic historiography in Cuba and Brazil(2016-05) Hahn, Cory A.; Salgado, César Augusto; Berg, Charles Ramírez, 1947-; Borge, Jason; Leu Moore, Lorraine; Roncador, SoniaThis dissertation is a comparative project that traces the co-evolution of film realism and communications media in Cuba and Brazil. Beginning with the end of Italian Neorealist-inspired movements in both countries in the late 1950s, I examine the ways in which filmmakers from each tradition incorporate radio, print, and televisual journalism into their cinematic narratives. Foundational directors whose bodies of work span and connect the popular filmmaking booms of the 1960s and 1990s—such as Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Eduardo Coutinho—expose the political and technological systems that form public knowledge and guide civic debate. My research dilates on two internationally celebrated periods of film production concurrent with two shifts in news media paradigms: from radio and print journalism to television and from television to the internet. I argue that the renewed interest in news technologies within Cuban and Brazilian films at the beginning of the twenty-first century orients the viewer not to material fact as it is captured on film or coded by digital cameras, but by laying bare the systems of power that control news media content.Item “Nothing’s been the same since New York” : the Marvel Cinematic Universe's engagement with 9/11 and the War on Terror(2015-05) Bograd, Natalie Kate; Perren, Alisa; Schatz, ThomasThis thesis explores how the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has engaged with 9/11 and the War on Terror since its inception in 2008. This thesis examines industrial and cultural factors affecting the way these post-9/11 superhero films engage with contemporary sociopolitical concerns and argues that the Marvel Studios films both attempt to engage with said concerns and also sanitize and rework references to terrorism, war, torture, and destruction in order to remain palatable for the widest possible audience (including a family audience and a growing international market). In contrast to other superhero franchises, several of which intentionally play on post-9/11 feelings of vulnerability and terror, the MCU films and television series use a combination of humor, a brightly colored comic book aesthetic, and impressive visual spectacles in order to ensure that the primary focus is on entertainment. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the characters, ideological content, and visual elements of the MCU as they relate to 9/11 and the War on Terror.Item Now streaming everywhere : an examination of Netflix’s global expansion(2018-05) Halprin, Amanda Mary; Perren, Alisa; Frick, CarolineThis thesis explores how Netflix’s market positioning strategies evolved as the company began expanding globally. Netflix began offering its streaming service outside of the United States in 2010, when the company introduced its service to the Canadian market. The company’s second wave of expansion began in 2011, when Netflix introduced its service to the “Latin American” market. During these first two waves of expansion, Netflix initially used U.S.-centric positioning strategies to introduce its service to these markets. However, after encountering problems in Brazil—Netflix’s biggest sub-market in the Latin American market—the company realized it had to shift from using U.S.-centric positioning strategies to using glocalized positioning strategies. As Netflix began this positioning shift, it also began employing a new tool to help execute its positioning strategies: original programing. Netflix used original programming as a way to position itself glocally as the company continued its international expansion efforts. This research considers the challenges Netflix began to face as it broadened its global expansion efforts and sought a larger subscription base. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to use Netflix’s international strategies as a means of understanding the larger transformations taking place within the television industry and as a means of understanding the evolution of cultural form in the post-network era.Item Pushed to the edge : how push notifications and their notificatory flows impact daily life and culture(2020-05-06) Wright, Andrew Fischer; Scott, Suzanne, 1979-Mobile phone push notifications are simultaneously one of the most prevalent media forms and one of the least critically considered. This thesis argues for a deeper look at the push notification with a critical eye for what sociocultural impacts and influences this form can have by grounding it within a cultural historiography of opaque computing and notificatory machines. By performing autoethnographic methods on my iPhone and the notifications that I receive, I introduce new valences for the push notification that extend beyond the screen of the phone. I examine three flavors of particularly prevalent notifications that have the ability to transform the ‘user’ into a ‘user hyphenate,’ whether this be through disrupting a user-player’s daily life with an in-game message, playing with a candidate’s identity to encourage campaign contributions for the user-voter, or changing the way that the user-inhabitant sees the neighborhood around them through messages sent by geolocalized social network platforms Nextdoor and Ring Neighbors. This thesis introduces a series of methods for closely reading individual notifications, chronologically grounding collections of notifications reading their ‘notificatory flows,’ and considering the narratives they tell us about the places around us through their ‘notifictions.’ Most importantly, this thesis calls for more critical consideration of a notificatory future.Item Radio for the millions : Hindi-Urdu broadcasting at the crossroads of empire(2015-08-25) Huacuja Alonso, Isabel; Chatterjee, Indrani; Minault, Gail, 1939-; Ali, Kamran; Kumar, Shanti; Coffin, Judith“Radio for the Millions” is a transnational history of radio broadcasting in Hindi and Urdu in South Asia. It focuses on specific moments of intense cultural and political change when debates about broadcasting came to the forefront across the late colonial period through the immediate post-independence era (1927-1971). Following the outbreak of World War II, British colonial administrators, despite their initial distrust of radio, turned to the new medium in a belated and improvised attempt to garner Indian support for the Allied Forces. In the decades following independence in 1947, the new leaders of India and Pakistan similarly attempted to foster allegiance to governments and to fashion national identities through state-run broadcasting networks—AIR and Radio Pakistan, respectively. Both imperial and national radio campaigns, however, met with mixed success. Sometimes, they were rejected by listeners altogether. Other times, government radio projects won immediate success, only to politically backfire soon after. British imperial and later Indian and Pakistani state-run stations, however, were not the only ones on the airwaves. During WWII, pro-Axis and revolutionary stations, including Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Radio, but also radio programs in Hindi-Urdu from Japan and Germany, filled India’s airwaves bringing news of the war from an Axis perspective to listeners in India. After independence, commercial stations such as Radio Ceylon changed the soundscape of the post-colonial subcontinent, making film music an integral part of people’s everyday lives. In the following pages, I argue that it was these stations, which contested state-run radio’s linguistic, cultural, and political campaigns, that won the hearts and minds of listeners in South Asia. “Radio for the Millions” demonstrates that the medium of radio was never merely a tool of the colonial government or its Indian and Pakistani successors, and highlights the varied ways in which the medium not only escaped governments’ grip, but also made it possible for broadcasters and listeners alike to build lasting connections across state-imposed bordersItem Reading the pitch : historical racialized narratives in U.S. mass media coverage of international baseball(2019-12-06) Osmer, Lauren Melanie; Hunt, Thomas M.; Ozyurtcu, Tolga; Todd, Janice S; Bartholomew, John B; Regalado, Samuel OBaseball, informally termed “America’s Game,” has become the world’s game. Through the advent of globalization baseball has spread internationally, reproduced throughout the globe while becoming individualized into the cultural context of each country where it is played. In the United States, the changing landscape of baseball participation has meant both rising international competition and an influx of international players to all levels of baseball in the U.S., from little league through the professional level in Major League Baseball (MLB). Much of the cultural impact of these changes has been represented through media, where newspaper, magazine, television, and online coverage all create, transmit, and reproduce narratives about baseball: who is participating, why and how they play, and what that means in the broader socio-cultural context of the United States. In this work, I examine the racialized narratives in baseball coverage of international players and community members in U.S. media from three distinct contexts by using a thematic analysis. First, I examine the media narratives surrounding Cuban players in MLB from 1991-2010 in five nationally published sports magazines, and demonstrate that these narratives often correlate with historically racialized narratives applied to Cuban migrants to the United States broadly, and not just within the sporting context. In the second piece, I study the media narratives surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s arrival to MLB from Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the Japanese professional league, and find historical narratives to be generally reproduced, albeit heavily dependent on the context of the political relationship between the U.S. and Japan. In the third study, I analyze the media coverage of the establishment of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and the eviction and uprooting of the Mexican and Mexican-American communities in Chavez Ravine and the racialized narratives produced and reproduced therein in coverage of the Los Angeles Times, as well as the influence the paper itself and local politics have on these narratives. Through three separate contexts (the experiences of a common nationality, an individual player, and a community and neighborhood) and time frames (the 1990s and early 2000s, 2017-2018, and the late 1940s onwards), the results of these three studies demonstrate the recurring presence of racialized narratives in the media coverage of international baseball, the political and economic influence on those narratives, and highlight the ways in which sports media coverage does not just “stick to sports,” but also communicates ideas about cultural identity, citizenship, and national belonging.Item Reconciling contradictory feminism Law & Order : Special Victims Unit and the queers who love it(2016-05) Hicks, Helen Logan; Livermon, Xavier; Khubchandani, KareemLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit is a locus of the production of feminist anti- rape discourse as well as messages promoting carceral justice. These contradictory ideologies are somehow reconciled by queer viewers of the show. I use interdisciplinary methods and a variety of feminist and queer theories to investigate this peculiar reconciliation. First, I analyze the narrative of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit through a queer critical lens of reading media. Then I examine the fans and the industry players of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the context of the show’s problematic messaging. The conversation between the contradictions of the show and the populations who are fans of the show but who also suffer under the same conditions I criticize in my narrative analysis is important to the larger feminist conversations about rape culture, capitalist media enterprise, and queer and feminist self-identification and community building.Item The instance of the post in the digital unconscious : rhetorical subjects after posthumanism(2020-05-14) Cowan, Jake Austin; Davis, Diane; Boyle, Casey; Gunn, Joshua; Spinuzzi, Clay; Rickert, ThomasJoining an active conversation within rhetorical theory and beyond about the agency, boundaries, and conditions of possibility for contemporary subjectivity within online environments, this dissertation aims to articulate the transformative capacity of digital media for contemporary rhetorical subjects. Positioned at the intersection of rhetorical studies, media ecology, and poststructuralist criticism, this project attempts to break with rhetoric’s abiding humanist inheritance, including many of the foundational presuppositions about a writer’s autonomy, being, and consciousness that have historically subtended rhetorical theory. Couching my argument within the evocative wordplay and enigmatic lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this research complements work by a growing number of rhetoricians from various other-oriented vantages who contend that the conventional belief in a rational and independent human mind at the center of communicative practice is no longer tenable in the face of emergent ecosystems of online presence and digital rhetoric. Technological developments such as these not only have not only threatened the accustomed priority of human being, but can moreover provide novel ways of inventing and enacting an original posthumanist subjectivity, I argue, especially when approached from a psychoanalytic standpoint that emphasizes the convolutions of anfractuous signification, indestructible desire, forged onto-epistemology, and a tropical unconscious. To this end, I suggest that Lacan’s reconfiguring of the classical Freudian unconscious as a cybernetically structured symbolic network of signifiers that he characterizes as the extimate Other provides one avenue for rethinking how modern media affect the means of communicating with and conceiving of one another (as well as ourselves), helping rhetoricians to theorize a compositional practice that embraces rather than represses the various ways technological developments disturb and displace customary notions of solidified and singular human being. From a position that grounds rhetorical subjectivity not according to static sovereign selfhood but in the precarious disruptions of the Other and taking the figure of the social media post as my model for posthumanism, this project opens a way for rhetoricians to reconceive pedagogical practice from a perspective that would relinquish customary commitments to raising consciousness and objective reason in favor of the jocose and allusive contingencies of a hybridized digital unconsciousItem Toward a storytelling systems analysis model : a situational analysis of three global crowdsourced documentary media projects(2016-05) Moner, William Joseph; Strover, Sharon; Doty, Philip; Frick, Caroline; Stein, Laura; Straubhaar, JosephThis study investigates three participatory documentary projects that emerged in the 2011 to 2012 time period. Each project utilized crowdsourcing to generate primary source material for their respective endeavors. The projects — Life in a Day (2011), One Day on Earth (2011), and 18 Days in Egypt (2012) — are analyzed through situational analysis, a qualitative analytical framework that builds from grounded theory method, social worlds/arenas theory, and actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the relationships between human actors, non-human actants, spatial and temporal components, and political economic factors within a situation. Using this method, I created a situational map for each documentary system, finding that each emerges from a distinct economic system where value is determined through different treatments of the “crowd” and its contributed media, data, and stories. Subsequently, using political economy of communication theory (Mosco, 2009) and the concepts of structuration, spatialization, and commodification, I identified several control mechanisms apparent in each of the projects. These control factors – commodity control, spatial control, and structural control – and their subcategories – content and labor control (commodity), technological, temporal, and circulatory control (spatial), and contractual and organizational control (structural) – draw from the analysis of three very different economic systems and storytelling intents. The study offers a preliminary framework for a participatory systems analysis approach to grapple with technological and economic concerns in shared media production spaces.