Communication Department Masters Theses Collection

Bullying on Teen Television: Patterns across Portrayals and Fan Forum Posts

Walsh, Kimberly R. — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:56:27 PST

The primary goal of this thesis was to provide a snapshot of the portrayal of bullying on teen television. Drawing from contextual factors studied in the National Television Violence Study (Smith et al., 1998), a content analysis of 82 episodes (representing 10 series) and 355 acts of bullying was conducted to examine portrayals of physical, verbal, indirect, and cyber bullying in terms of bully and victim social status, motivations, humor, punishments/rewards, character support for bullies, harm shown to victims, interventions by third parties, and anti-bullying episode themes.

The analysis revealed significant differences across bullying types for all variables except third party intervention, with portrayals of physical and verbal bullying identified as most “high-risk” (i.e. depicting bullying in ways that research suggests increase the likelihood of negative effects), and portrayals of cyber bullying identified as least “high-risk” for the majority of contextual elements. More generally, the analysis demonstrated that a substantial amount of bullying on teen television sends some concerning messages to young viewers, including the notion that bullying can be funny, harmless, and go without punishment.

Complementing the content analysis, an exploratory textual analysis of 294 online fan posts related to bullying portrayed on Glee was performed to capture a representation of potential audience interpretations and intertexts (consumed alongside the television text). The analysis pointed to four major themes across posts: categories of bullying, messages about bullying promoted by characters, contextual elements of bullying, and feelings about characters involved in bullying.

In terms of audience responses, the themes highlighted how some fans think critically about bullying portrayals and their implications, distinguish between different types of bullying, and identify with characters. In terms of intertexts, the trends suggested that fans might be exposed to a variety of messages that both criticize and support high-risk depictions of bullying, and defend and rebuke bullying behavior (depending on the characters involved).

Combined, the content analysis and textual analysis underlined the importance of media bullying as a topic of scholarly inquiry, revealing that teen bullying is a unique and complex media phenomenon that audiences respond to and interpret in a multitude of ways.

Networked, Collaborative, and Activist News Communities Online: A Case Study of Reddit and Daily Kos

Soha, Michael — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:52:51 PST

Participatory democracy depends on formations of community and social relations, places and spaces for critical discourse, and the organizational and technical capacity for collective action. This study seeks to better understand how these processes are at work in the virtual realm, and more broadly examine the changing nature of political information and discourse in the online context. Toward this end, I examine two sites that embody different yet highly successful models of user participation, collective content production, and increasingly, political action: the political blogging community of Daily Kos and the social news site Reddit. This study is based on three broad theoretical frameworks of community, discourse, and action. I use work by Michele Willson (2006) to explore how community exists in the virtual realm. Drawing upon the scholarship of Jurgen Habermas (1991) and more recent adaptations and extensions of Habermasian public sphere theory from Aaron Barlow (2006), I ask can online communities set the foundation for a public spheres, and if so, how do they function as virtual public spheres? Building upon understandings of online community and virtual public sphere(s), I utilize work by Manuel Castells (1997) and Jeffrey Juris (2005) to understand how community and discourse can enable collective action. These lines of analysis provide the structure through which I examine Daily Kos and Reddit. Using ethnographic methods, I place the voices and perspectives of users within this theoretical structure to produce a comprehensive look at the function of collaborative online political information communities.

Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the 'War on Terror': A Narrative and Discourse Analysis of the Army Field Manual 3-24

Boudreau, Tyler — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 07:04:46 PST

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) was published in 2006 and used by the military to consolidate counterinsurgency strategies and tactics and correct the growing military problems in Iraq. However, rather unusually, this military doctrinal publication was also heavily publicized through a wide array of media to the American public giving it an important role in political discourse and the rhetorical history of the U.S. ‘war on terror’. Beyond its military application, the FM 3-24 can be understood as a rhetorical device used by the Bush Administration to repair a collapsing ‘war on terror’ narrative and shore up plummeting public support for the war in Iraq, which had reached its lowest levels at the time of the manual’s publication. Still more important is the language in the text itself, which bears a conspicuous tone of benevolence, historically uncharacteristic to military doctrine. Despite this ‘spirit of goodwill,’ the FM 3-24, in fact, functions as a segment of the ‘war on terror’ narrative and an ideological vehicle for American global hegemony directed primarily toward American audiences. This view is justified by three main trends in the text: One, the manual omits mention of, or minimizes, the moral and political impact of military invasions on foreign countries that necessarily precede counterinsurgency operations; two, it relies fundamentally on legal arrangements with occupied countries that favor American prerogatives; and three, it reduces counterinsurgencies to a simple dichotomy between good and evil, the latter role being assigned to anyone who opposes the United States, which therefore denies the political complexities of that opposition. The FM 3-24 is a prescriptive document that has been 1) designed to militarily extend or reinforce American global power through counterinsurgency operations and 2) used politically to reproduce or justify particular attitudes in the American public that will foster support for those operations.

Linguistic and Cultural Contact Phenomena in a Mandarin Class in the U.S.

Zhang, Dan — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:59:03 PDT

This study explores English language pragmatic phenomena in the Mandarin speech of a native Chinese language teacher as she interacts with American learners of Mandarin in a university classroom setting. I document and analyze her use of English backchannel 'mm hmm' in interactions that are otherwise in Mandarin, and I document and analyze the transfer of American interaction rituals and English syntax to her Mandarin language interactions with students. In this context, her patterns of communication both reflect and constitute cultural worlds. These pragmatic transfers to her Mandarin reflect her cultural and communicative assimilation to America, but they also serve to constitute pedagogical contexts that are familiar to American students and may facilitate their learning, and they serve to constitute a sojourner Chinese scholar identity for the teacher.

Bringing the Frame Into Focus: How Cable News Pundits Protect the Glass Ceiling

Cassidy, Kathryn M. — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:58:55 PDT

In many nations, the 21st century has been about women in politics. Not only are they running for prominent political offices, but they are winning them. The trend toward success for American female politicians has been slower to progress, however, as no women have been elected to the U.S. Presidency to date, and social science research suggests persistent gender biases exist in their news coverage. In order to explore the potential role that media play in continuing this gender disparity in U.S. politics, this comparative study investigates how cable pundit programs – a dramatic, partisan genre of “news” that has risen in popularity since the 2008 election – frame female candidates for the highest national office. A content analysis of pre-election coverage of three prominent U.S. politicians on the national scene, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, on The O’Reilly Factor, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show reveals a small incidence of gendered coverage across these shows overall. Among said coverage found, however, trends in the data suggest that conservative programs employ more gendered frames than liberal programs, and that those frames are particularly negative when referring to liberal candidates (Clinton), and positive when referring to conservative (Palin and Bachmann) candidates. Further, the gender of the pundits, the gender of the cable network production staff members, and the political party affiliations of executive staff/owners correspond to the frames employed by these programs in unique ways.

Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography

kumar, hari stephen — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:28:14 PST

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

Meat and Meanings: Adult-Onset Hunters’ Cultural Discourses of the Hunt

Cerulli, Tovar — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:22:48 PST

This study is a description and interpretation of talk about hunting. The study is based on data gathered from in-depth interviews with twenty-four hunters in the United States who did not become hunters until adulthood. A single overarching research question guides the study: How do people create and use discourses of hunting? The study is situated within the ethnography of communication research program and, more specifically, within the framework of cultural discourse analysis. The study employs cultural discourse analysis methods and concepts to describe and develop interpretations of how participants render hunting symbolically meaningful, and of what beliefs and values underlie such meanings. The major descriptive findings include recurrent patterns of talk concerning: connecting with land and nature, spirit, other people, human ancestry, and human nature; taking responsibility in ecological, ethical, and health-related ways, both through hunting and through other practices such as gardening; being engaged, present, alert, excited, and challenged; killing for appropriate reasons, in appropriate ways, and with appropriate feeling; and living and acting in response to a modern world that diminishes human experience, brutalizes animals, and harms the natural world. The major interpretive findings include hunting being linked to other practices such as gardening, and being spoken of as a deeply meaningful pursuit practiced for the feelings of connection, engagement, and right relationship that it fosters, and as a physically and spiritually healthful remedy for the negative effects of modern living and of industrial food systems. This research demonstrates that hunting and talk about hunting can be underpinned by common beliefs and values shared by hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters. This research also suggests that adult-onset hunters and their discursive practices may be of unique value to wildlife agencies and conservation organizations, to other adult onset-hunters, and to both scholarly and public understandings of—and dialogues about—the practice of hunting.

Media and Immigration in Post-9/11 America

Yakupitiyage, Thanushka N. — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:10:06 PDT

This thesis examines the discursive arguments made by activist and advocacy organizations that are active supporters or opponents of immigration in the United States. This project especially considers the role of new media as a way for different organizations to distribute their perspectives, construct knowledge, and organize support around their stances on immigration. While old media such as television, radio, and print continue to be important in framing the issue of immigration, new media such as websites and social networking, as well as media technology such as text messaging, are starting to reorganize and expand the spaces in which these controversial debates take place. In recognition of the complexity and divisiveness of the immigration debate, this thesis takes into account a diverse group of organizations that focus on different aspects of immigration including the role of temporary migrant workers, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants. In the post 9/11 era controversy over immigration has been renewed and heightened. Immigrants and migrants moving from the Global South have especially been targeted by pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric dispersed by the media, politicians, and civil society groups. This thesis analyzes how culture, the economy, and citizenship, as well as race and racism are framed by both immigration critics and advocates as a means of impacting legislation, swaying public opinion, and in constructing a vision for the future of immigration and immigrants in the United States.

It's My Passion, That's My Mission to Decide, I'm Going Worldwide: the Cosmopolitanism of Global Fans of Japanese Popular Culture

Pradhan, Jinni — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 09:19:37 PDT

This study examines the academic concept of pop cosmopolitanism—an interest in global popular culture that leads to start of a global perspective and provides an escape route out of the parochialism of local community/culture—as posited by Henry Jenkins in its lived, experienced context. The online English-speaking overseas fandom of the Japanese male pop idol talent agency, Johnny & Associates, framed as a community of pop cosmopolitans, serves a case study to evaluate this concept. These global fans demonstrate through their engagement with and investment in a form of Japanese popular culture that they are able to obtain a competency in Japanese culture that would have not otherwise been available to them. The obtainment of this cultural competency is driven by the personal notion of fandom, with emotional affect and identification between the fan and the fan object at its core, and access to new media technologies such as the Internet. However, it is noted that Jenkins's original definition of pop cosmopolitanism does not account completely for the complexity of the lived experience and a distinction of local pop cosmopolitanism and comprehensive pop cosmopolitanism is necessary. Furthermore, the pop cosmopolitans studied discount the idea of escape embedded into Jenkins's definition and instead emphasize the positive influence of their pop cosmopolitanism on their own (fandom) identity construction.

Vilification in Fox's "24"

Drew, Shara M. — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 09:15:07 PDT

This paper explores vilification in the popular counterterrorism show, Fox’s "24." A critical, in-depth analysis of three prominent antagonists from the show illustrates the different ways in which they are vilified. Each of the three characters is examined to understand which type of villain he or she embodies in "24," which of the show’s moral codes the villain affronts, and how he or she is punished or treated as a result. The analysis considers the broadcast of the show’s first six seasons in relation to neoconservative and Christian Right values that characterized the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. It finds that the show’s characterizations of all three villains—an Islamic extremist, a femme fatale, and a shirking bureaucrat—reinforce dominant xenophobic, patriarchal, and hypermasculine values, which underscored the Bush administration’s war on terror.