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Publication Media Vessels: An Archaeology of Electronic Media(2024-09) Sun, YijunMedia Vessels: An Archaeology of Electronic Media explores the role of media vessels in the evolution of electronic media, tracing their impact from eighteenth-century electrical experiments to the rise of digital media in the twentieth century. Utilizing media archaeology and the philosophy of technology, this dissertation presents a narrative that follows the development of technical objects used for signal relay, culminating in the emergence of user-friendly digital media. Departing from traditional focuses on high technology and hard sciences, this study shifts attention to the media vessel, a modest yet significant technology with feminist implications. By examining the dual role of media vessels as both carriers and holders, the dissertation investigates how electronic media evolved and how these vessels shaped interactions between technical objects, human bodies, and the technological milieu. Positioning media vessels as the center of analysis, this dissertation analyzes their impact on the design of technical systems and emergence of media users in the modern era. It argues that media vessels provide a crucial cultural and technical framework for the transmission, storage, and processing of information within electronic media systems. By exploring the historical significance of media vessels, this work encourages a reevaluation of media evolution and transformation.Publication Trendyol Influencers: Gender, Precarious Work, and Platform Labor at the Intersection of E-Commerce and Influencer Industries in Turkey(2024-09) Karakilic, Alkim YalinThis dissertation investigates the integration between e-commerce and influencer industries in Turkey, and how this integration shapes content creation, digital labor, and platform work. I use digital observations and interviews to examine the Turkish e-commerce platform Trendyol’s (owned by Alibaba) impact on the emergence of new forms of platformized cultural production, digital labor, and labor organizing. By doing so, I raise critical questions about feminization of work in platformized cultural production, platform contingency, and precarity experienced by content creators. Trendyol invested in influencer marketing from its early days to leverage social media entertainment and shoppability to increase platform selling. The large influencer network built by the platform was essential to gain the trust of a consumer base that largely contained women. Even if the platform’s influencer program first appealed to creators due to its flexibility, premise of profitability, and perceived autonomy, Trendyol has the platform power to govern the labor of its creators through the large influencer and sales data it owns. Content creators who helped building a feminine shopping community through different promotional forms, such as promotional live streams, are often perceived as having financial security and living glamorous lives by the audiences. However, Trendyol turned influencing into a gig type of work that is highly platform contingent and precarious, particularly due to the flexible work arrangement and sudden changes in the monetization system. Creators who take part in the Trendyol influencer program experience precarity at multiple levels, including the monetization system, dependence on predatory influencer agencies, algorithms, and the local context. To navigate this precariousness, creators adopt various forms of individual and collective tactics of resistance. The rich case demonstrated by the Trendyol influencers expands on the previous scholarship on creator and platform studies and emphasizes the importance of adopting a simultaneously global and local approach to study the impact of platformization on cultural production and labor relations that arise out of it.Publication FEAST AGAINST FAMINE: THE NEGATIVE OFFERINGS OF SACRED ECOLOGY(2024-05) Huling, Raymond EFolklore is a way to save the world. Major sustainability problems—climate change,mass extinction, pollution, and more—are driving the global human system into crisis. The physical growth of this human system is the cause of these problems. By shunting the energies that feed this growth into spendthrift pursuits, among which folklore holds an important place, we can evade crisis in a fair way. This study brings this sustainability solution to bear on the folklore of food, for two reasons. First, because folklore is a squandering of energy that builds community. Second, because the Food System is the biggest driver of sustainability problems, the sector these problems threaten most, and the one system we cannot live without. I use the Planetary Boundaries framework to bring these dire sustainability crises on the horizon into sharper view. To justify folklore as a solution, I take up recent scholarship that applies the General Economy of Georges Bataille to sustainability, and I then re-work these ideas through Systems Thinking. I call this approach “Sacred Ecology”. Sacred Ecology seeks to avoid sustainability crises through squandering of wealth, thereby starving the system out of physical growth. Pouring our energies into food-based folklore, under the guidance of sacred ecological principles and within scientific frameworks, is a reasonable means of either dodging onrushing crises fueled by the growth of the global human system, or, if we fail at those sustainability tasks, of readying ourselves for the long, dark years of resilience it will take to ride these crises out.Publication Muslim Tatar Women's Piety Stories: A Quest for Personal and Social Transformation In Tatarstan (Russia)(2013-09) Karimova, Liliya V.This dissertation introduces and analyzes "piety stories," the stories that Muslim Tatar women in Tatarstan, Russia, share about their paths to becoming observant Muslims. It examines the ways women use these stories to create and represent moral worlds that diverge from those of the mostly secular, historically Christian, society that surrounds them. This study is based on ethnographic research and recordings of stories in Tatarstan's capital city of Kazan and its suburbs over a total period of thirteen months (from 2006 through 2010). While outsiders often see Islam as oppressing women, these women experience Muslim piety as a source of agency and a resource for personal and social transformation in post-Soviet Russia. Piety stories allow Muslim Tatar women to (re)experience their commitment to Islam at the discursive level and to invite others to step onto a path to Muslim piety, thus serving as a form of da'wah, a Muslim's moral duty to invite others to Islam. Through these stories, women perform identities, negotiate group memberships, and contribute to building both local and global Muslim communities. Piety stories serve as a window onto the personal politics of the post-Soviet Muslim revival. Older women, for example, use stories to create coherent narratives of their piety, despite their relative lack of religious practice during the state-endorsed atheism of the Soviet period. Expressions of gender are also intertwined with this political and economic history. Both Soviet policies and the immediate post-Soviet economic collapse required women to work outside the home in addition to caring for their families, and many Muslim Tatar women find the clear delineation of traditional gender roles and rights in Islam liberating. In global and local contexts where Muslim piety is often conflated with political Islam and terrorism, women use piety stories to deal with stereotypical perceptions of Muslims by showing their religious identities and the forms of Islam they practice to be moral. Ultimately, practicing Muslim Tatar women use piety stories as one way--a discursive one--to challenge, re-produce, or legitimize their understanding of Islam and what it means to be a practicing Muslim Tatar woman in Russia today.Publication Intellectual Constellations in the Postsocialist Era: Four Essays(2013-02) Gu, LiIn an attempt to facilitate the task of charting a path toward a radically different future, a future without the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), this dissertation searches back in history by examining China's loss of socialism. The guiding question can be formulated thus: Why did the People's Republic of China give up its socialist mode of intellectual production only to embrace the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), which had been subjected to devastating criticism by progressive scholars in the West since mid-1990s? Situating this rupture of China's approach to intellectual production within the ongoing process of postsocialist structuration in the wake of the waning Chinese socialism, this dissertation focuses on Chinese intellectuals as social mediators and locates the traces of the loss of socialism in various cultural productions during the postsocialist era.Publication The People and Me: Michael Moore and the Politics of Political Documentary(2009-05) Oberacker, Jon ScottPerhaps no one has had more influence on the role of political documentary in the contemporary public sphere than filmmaker Michael Moore. His unique melding of committed political arguments with an ironic reflexive style have changed the very look and feel of documentary film, contributing significantly to the form's newfound popularity. Furthermore, his steadfast commitment to progressive politics has given the issue of socioeconomic "class" the kind of attention it rarely receives within the mainstream media. However, Moore's films have also been the recipient of viscous attacks from his political opponents, and subject to some of the most contentious public debates over the documentary form since the 1960s. This study integrates documentary theory and poststructuralist discourse analysis within a critical/cultural studies perspective to map out the ways in which generic conventions, interpretive strategies and rhetorical maneuvers have often combined to undermine the political goals and cultural legitimacy of Michael Moore and his films. First, I look at the ways in which Moore's own deployment of a patronizing mode of address transforms his films into "fantasies of advocacy"; narratives that invite an imagined audience of fellow advocates to evaluate and judge the lives and behaviors of the working-class subjects depicted on-screen. Such a depiction only works to strengthen middle-class forms of social authority which have worked, historically, to encourage class resentment. Second, I describe the ways in which Moore is also undermined by a mass media system within which progressive views are not often welcome. I explain how a number of discursive logics worked to frame Moore at various times throughout his career as an untrustworthy documentarian pushing Leftist propaganda, as an "indie film auteur" providing innovative cinematic experiences to middle-class audiences, and as a savvy celebrity-huckster selling political entertainment to embattled liberals. Finally, I describe how Moore's opponents on the political Right exploited the problematic aspects of both his rhetorical strategies and public reception to paint Moore as a "Liberal Elitist," a move that worked to derail the political effectiveness of Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 election. By describing the complex, public articulations of Michael Moore and his films, this study contributes to the fields of documentary studies, media studies, cultural studies and political rhetoric.Publication Utopian Gender: Counter Discourses in a Feminist Community(2011-09) Flanigan, JolaneThis dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members' use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the "desensationalization" of the body, and egalitarian nudity practices. Additionally, I argue that "calm" communication, as a normative style of communicating on the farm, underprivileges both male and female members of color and of the working class. From the perspective of members, gender was understood to be a category distinct from sex and analyses demonstrated that sex as an identity was a factor in interpretations of gender performances. Sex identities were also necessary for community feminist practice. Communication practices in the community articulated with feminist, health, environmental, and egalitarian discourses to normalize forms of embodiment such as female shirtlessness and public urination to counter dominant U.S. forms. It was found that making sense of normative communication practices required a cultural understanding of how both spaces and bodies were constituted as public and private. Community spaces were understood by members to be either relatively public or private with the public spaces being the more regulated spaces. Members contested the meanings of bodies as public (and therefore able to be regulated) or private (and therefore not able to be regulated). Normative communication practices in the community indicated that members work to preserve boundaries between private bodies in public spaces by developing rules for privacy, confidentiality, and non-communication. Community feminist communicative practices were understood to be liberatory because (1) the small size of the community allowed members to co-create feminist discourses that resignified body parts and gendered identites and (2) the community provided a space in which women could embody feminist discourses as everyday, sensual performances. This study has implications for the theorizing of embodied verbal and nonverbal gender-based cultural communication practices and for understanding community-based counter discourses as well as sex and gender as cultural identities.Publication Gossip Talk and Online Community: Celebrity Gossip Blogs and Their Audiences(2010-09) Meyers, Erin AnnCelebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson’s (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences—and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five–week online fieldwork observation of six heavily–trafficked, commercially–supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media's emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media.Publication Seeing Lesbian Queerly: Visibility, Community, and Audience in 1980s Northampton, Massachusetts(2009-09) McKenna, Susan E.This study investigates the transitioning terms of lesbian visibility and identity in the distinctive spatio-temporal context of Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1980s. Drawing on interviews with a diversified sampling of lesbian-, bisexual-, and queeridentified participants, I consider the coalescing of two lesbian communal formations – a social community and a social audience – as mediating sites for the interrelations between subculture and dominant culture. Informed by the literatures and methods of queer theory, cultural studies, and feminist film criticism, I examine the 1980s queer crossover from lesbian subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation by the end of the decade. The 1980s crossover was a constellation of interlocking factors manifested through the entrance into national visibility of gay liberatory and feminist politics, the incorporation of overt lesbian sexuality into Hollywood and independent films, and the surfacing of the conservative and feminist backlashes alongside “Reaganomics.” These converged in an anti-lesbian backlash produced in Northampton in the 1980s through the interrelations between the rapid revitalization of the city’s downtown and the increasing visibility and concentration of the lesbian population. The emergence into public visibility of a lesbian social community and a lesbian social audience in 1980s Northampton prefigured questions about the desirability of a goal of cultural assimilation for lesbian and gay people along with concerns about the role of consumption in the assimilative process that were to become important to LGBT politics in the 1990s and 2000s. In this project, I consider the multidimensional and conflictual aspects of assimilation as well as the gender-specificities of lesbian film consumption and the lesbian Sex Wars as part of the crossover from subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation. In spite of the strides in the acceptance of the lesbian population in Northampton in the 1980s, I argue that such changes were laden with tensions negotiated through the contradictions between appearances of tolerance and acceptance versus experiences of discrimination and violence. The constellation of factors that manifested in the 1980s queer crossover provided symbolic materials not only for a realignment of lesbian subjectivity, but also for a realignment of heterosexual subjectivity.Publication Roughly Speaking: A Performance Autoethnography of Occupation, Aesthetics, and Epistemology(2017-05) Boudreau, TylerRoughly Speaking is a performance autoethnography that explores both conditions of storytelling and narrative strategies for producing alternative interpretations and representations of experience, in particular, the occupation of space and subjectivities. Through creative manipulations of voice and style, this narrative performance attempts to challenge dominant notions of authorship, identity, and epistemology, especially those that mask the situatedness of knowledge production and reproduce systemic marginalization of non-normative bodies, voices, and perspectives. Taking as a starting point the narrative form of identity and building upon the mutually constitutive character of social and personal narratives, with an emphasis on embodiment, performativity, and the postmodern condition, this autoethnography is intended to perform the ideological nature of all narrative construction and the ways in which social discourses and narratives compete both in social spaces and within bodies in the formation and reformation of collective and personal identities.Publication Flying with the Storks: Communication, Culture, and Dialoguing Knowledge(s) in Prenatal Care(2014-02) Herakova, LilianaApproximately 6 million women in the U.S. become pregnant every year. Over 4 million give birth. Over 1 million babies annually are born with low birth weights or prematurely - phenomena, statistically linked to both lack of "adequate" prenatal care and to worsened health outcomes (www.americanpregnancy.org). Additionally, maternity "care" in the U.S. has been called a "human rights failure" (Bingham, Strauss, Coeytaux, 2011, p. 189), referring to the trend of increasing maternal mortality, despite the fact that child-birth related expenses in the U.S. are the highest healthcare expense in the country and are also much higher compared to other "industrialized" countries. In this context, the dissertation presented here looks at the construction and negotiation of pregnancy and prenatal care knowledge. Fusing performative, narrative, autoethnographic, and dialogic methodologies, the text looks at and performs interpersonal interactions occurring in varying contexts of pregnancy. The dissertation puts different voices and cultural knowledges in dialogue with one another in order to explore the communicative construction of dominant/authoritative knowledge (Jordan, 1997) and the subjugation of other knowledge streams. I look at health and health care as everyday phenomena, not limited to clinical contexts. Finally, based on this consideration, I propose a relational model of health communication.Publication Women, Convergent Film Criticism, and the Cinephilia of Feminist Interruptions(2016-09) Thibault, Rachel LThis dissertation examines the ways in which female film critics practice film criticism in the convergent age. In original research drawn from ethnographic interviews with eight female film critics and bloggers as well as textual, historical, and reception analyses of criticism, this dissertation argues that women who write film criticism in the convergent era are not only writing from a space of marginalization based on the patriarchal dominance of the film industry, but also face a series of obstacles through gendered and discursive conflicts that are unique to writing online and which do not exert the same impact on male film critics. The findings reveal that women often draw on a feminist impulse to disrupt critical film discourse. I deem this disruption the “cinephilia of feminist interruptions”—a space where women who are knowledgeable about cinema must address issues of representation, identity, misogyny or sexism that interrupt the pleasure of moviegoing and their own writing practice. Women writing film criticism today not only must fight for cultural authority but must defend their knowledge of film, their feminist approach to film and media, and be constantly aware of how the simple fact of their gender shapes how male critics and audiences will receive their criticism.Publication Mashup Archeology: A Case Study in the Role of Digital Technology in Cultural Production(2016-05) McDowell, ZacharyThrough examining the phenomena of the musical mashup against the backdrop of the contemporary American legal and economic situations, this work explores the complicated role of digital technology in contemporary cultural production and how it helps to constitute an agency of the contemporary digital subject, oriented towards participation and access. This research comes together in four parts, first weaving together against an understanding of the cultural and technical background as well as the legal and social backdrop that helped to birth the mashup, setting the stage for understanding the different powers at play. Secondly, through considering the construction and determination of culture and cultural production through media in the first instance this work puts those backgrounds into a framework of understanding how these different power structures influence culture. Third, through an understanding of how the mashup functions culturally via these power structures it begins to reveal some of the influences and how they have begun to take hold. Finally, I question what it is that these experiences and technical media are doing within this larger framework that is already controlled through aging and outdated legal and economic frameworks, outlining a framework that helps to understand the architectural determination of the mashup within contemporary society and why this phenomena persists despite legal and economic pushback. Through this exploration I argue that these technologies are turning the subject against these legal systems and towards sharing cultures as the experience with digital technology undermines legal stipulations. This work makes new contributions to understanding not only the role of digital technologies in cultural production, but also the role of digital technologies in the formation of the modern digital subject. Blending cybernetic theory, contemporary media studies, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, this work makes headway toward understanding the complexities of the modern cybernetic subject and how technology plays a role in determining the horizon of opportunities.Publication A Soulful Egg Can Break a Rock: A Case Study of a South Korean Social Movement Leader's Rhetoric(2016-05) Sul, EunsookThis dissertation introduces and analyzes Ven. Hyemoon’s rhetoric emanating from his leadership of the civic group, the Committee for the Return of Korean Cultural Property in South Korea. On the surface, he seems focused on retrieving cultural artifacts, pillaged by the Japanese colonial invasion. His work, upon deeper analysis, emerges to be about regaining a Korean cultural and national identity that is historically grounded, civically engaged and morally reflective. This study is informed by multiple theories (i.e., framing, narrative, social semiotics, critical geography, rhetoric, and social movement) to examine aspects of a phenomenon in depth – involving nationalism, social movement, rhetoric, repatriation, colonialism, and cultural resources – that work together to dissect or dismantle the complex construction of meanings and processes of specific social movement rhetoric. The central focus is on the examination of Hyemoon’s discursive construction of what it means to be authentic Koreans within the context of South Korea situated within a post-colonial, post-cold war, and post-democratizing movement as well as within global capitalism. The primary focus is on how historical, cultural, and moral landscapes mediated by Korean cultural artifacts are constructed and represented to the public in Hyemoon’s rhetoric and performance. In particular, the ways in which Korean collective-identity landscapes are depicted by relating cultural artifacts to specific places in history is considered. Moreover, the study examines discursive and performative practices and strategies that Hyemoon has adopted and developed to construct and represent his message by using linguistic, visual, and other material signs and symbols. Each chapter explores Hyemoon’s discourse by adopting different theories and focusing on specific events. The study concludes that Hyemoon’s discourse and performance appeals to the Korean public, engaging this audience in associating particular cultural assets with experiential, historic, and social collective memory. Most importantly, he reframes the meaning of cultural artifacts while also searching for cultural assets in terms of morality and civic agency. By offering a new interpretive framework, this work also finds that Hyemoon’s activism is effective in specific historic, political contexts of South Korea, in particular during the extension of the previous democratization social movement that had become quiescent.Publication “Race talk” in Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study of Two Texas Chambers of Commerce(2016-05) Shrikant, NatashaThis dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly identifies with a racial group, while the NCC identifies with a geographic region (“North City”) associated with a White affluent identity. Discourse analysis of audio and video recorded data gathered during fieldwork illustrates that, in this community, there are two prevalent discourses about race. One form of ‘race talk’ – practiced by Asians, minorities more generally, and White people who work with minority groups – can be characterized as explicitly addressing race as constitutive of professional identities. A second form of race talk, practiced by White NCC members, can be characterized as not explicitly discussing race and therefore implicitly invoking White identity as constitutive of professional identities. Overall, these forms of race talk illustrate how Asian identity is constructed as foreign, local, and diverse, and White identity is constructed as an invisible, non-raced identity and as an authentic, Texan identity. Furthermore, these forms of race talk reproduce boundaries between White and non-White businesses and position Whiteness as the normal, taken for granted professional identity, and minority identities as marked, ‘other’ identities in the business community.Publication Assembling Creative Cities in Seoul and Yokohama: Rebranding East Asian Urbanism(2016-05) Kim, ChangwookBy investigating institutional and cultural practices as well as the consequences of the creative industry-led development policy in Yokohama, Japan and Seoul, South Korea, this dissertation critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy-driven urban development and considers social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within creative city policy discourses and practices. This dissertation intervenes in the conventional understandings, which consider the influx of neoliberalism as the key to explain the rapid global circulation of creative city policy, typically based on cities in the West. By considering the policy transfer as endless processes of “translation” from the viewpoint of Actor-Network Theory, rather than a linear replication process, it shows that specific institutional and cultural practices—such as the historical legacy of the East Asian developmental state and its relation to capital and civic society—are necessary not only for properly locating the meaning of neoliberalism but also for evaluating the complexity of neoliberal political projects in East Asia. By conceptualizing creative city policy as "new urban governmental techniques", it argues that the creative cities of Japan and Korea are test sites not only for neoliberal creative economy but also for new forms of governing and being governed with significant implications for fostering certain types of subjectivities such as "creative citizen" and "creative labor". Under this framework, ultimately this dissertation contributes to re-orient the current debates on the global creative city policy from a question of “How can we develop effective creative city policy?” implemented by urban planners, capitals and state officials to that of “How can we invent and share creative city politics?” raised by creative workers, activists and citizens.Publication Bootstrap Boricuas: A Family Performing and Exploring Cultural Assimilation(2016-05) Correa, EllenThis dissertation involves myself, my two brothers, and our mother embarking, over several years, on a journey to explore the meanings we and others ascribe to our identities as second and third generation Puerto Ricans. Engaging a methodology I dub dialogic ethnography, the study produces a critical interweaving of family history, identity stories, and dialogue, within the context of U.S. racial/ethnic hierarchies. The purpose is to reflect on the ethical implications of our daily performances of cultural assimilation.Publication Of Wolves, Hunters, and Words: A Comparative Study of Cultural Discourses in the Western Great Lakes Region(2016-05) Cerulli, TovarThis study is a description, interpretation, and comparison of talk about wolves. The study is based on diverse data—including in-depth interviews, instances of public talk, government documents, and letters to the editor—gathered over three years. An overarching research question guides the study: How do hunting communities create and use discourses concerning wolves? The study is situated within the ethnography of communication and, more specifically, the framework of cultural discourse analysis. The study employs cultural discourse analysis methods and concepts to describe and develop interpretations of how participants render wolves symbolically meaningful, and of beliefs and values underpinning such meanings. One finding of the study is discovery of five distinct discourses: a discourse of conservation and management, two discourses of predator control, an Ojibwe discourse of kinship and shared fates, and a discourse of coinhabitation. Major descriptive and interpretive findings within each, respectively, include central imperatives to (1) recover and maintain viable wolf populations while addressing wolf-human conflict, (2) reduce an overabundant wolf population unjustly forced upon local people by outsiders, (3) manage the wolf population for the benefit of the people, especially deer hunters, (4) ensure the future of brother Ma’iingan whose fate parallels ours, and (5) appreciate wolves as members of intact, wild, natural places and communities. Major comparative findings include contrasting conceptualizations of the following: human-wolf relations, interactions, and boundaries; wolves’ effects on deer; wolf “management”; (in)appropriate reasons for hunting or trapping wolves; the (ir)relevance of an ethic of utilization in hunting or trapping predators; wolves’ larger symbolic meanings. A broader comparative finding is resonance between two groups of discourses (2-3 and 4-5), revolving around contrasting hubs. This research demonstrates that hunters, hunting communities, and related institutions speak about wolves in distinctly patterned ways that (A) differ from one another, (B) are deeply rooted in historically transmitted expressive systems and in historical relationships among groups of people, and (C) evolve over time. This research suggests that intergroup conflicts regarding wolves and other predators (e.g., coyotes) are deeply cultural and—more broadly—that wildlife conservation is deeply cultural: informed by science, but rooted in values and meaning.Publication Lost-and-found Photos: Practices and Perceptions(2016) Wemmer, Todd JPersonal photographs become separated from their original owners in a number of ways, due to time or tragedy, sometimes ending up in strangers’ hands. Dealers, collectors, curators, bloggers, scholars, and families actively seek what are frequently called “orphaned,” “abandoned,” or “found” photos and present them to the public in multiple formats. This dissertation offers an analysis of the practices and perceptions that surround these presentations, and it argues for use of a more inclusive term (“lost-and-found”) to describe personal photos that are connected to both finders and losers. Data were collected in three primary ways: (1) examination of the current contexts in which “lost” photos appear (e.g. books, websites, newspapers), (2) interviews with collectors of “lost” photos, and (3) the project’s website, designed to collect anecdotes from those affected by “lost” photos. Dominating this field of study are the perspectives of those who find personal photographs. The choices photo-finders make regarding the presentation and interpretation of photographs differ in clear ways, enabling me to group their practices within five categories which are evident across all formats examined in this study: Museum Curator, Archivist/Preservationist, Essayist/Editor, Reuniter, and Dealer. What unites practitioners across these discrete categories is the act of compiling and displaying “lost” photos within public archives, where new presentations of old photos invite myriad interpretations, conversations, and possibilities. Since the perspectives of those who have lost personal photographs have been largely missing from this field of study, I created tools to capture the viewpoints of photo “losers.” The project’s website, Lostandfoundphotos.org, provided a space in which contributors shared stories of personal photos they had lost, challenging notions of finder-collectors who often see themselves as the sole appreciators of “lost” photos’ true value. Most importantly, this project gave a literal voice to photo-losers through an audio component—a voicemail system which recorded contributors’ stories of lost personal photographs. This aural element offers a new medium for the examination of the visual, and it provides an emotional depth which, it is hoped, may inspire an enlargement of lost-and-found photography practices to accommodate the perspectives of both finders and losers.Publication A Tale of “Ku” (Bitter) V.S. “Tian” (Sweet): Understanding China's “Yiku Sitian” Movement in the 1960s and 1970s from the Perspective of Cultural Discourse Analysis(2016) Ge, Xinmei“Yiku sitian” is a political movement prevalent in P. R. China in the 1960s and 1970s. It means, literally, to “recall bitterness” and to “reflect on sweetness”. It identifies a particular type of social practice commonly enacted publicly and privately for people to recall how “bitter” life was in “jiu shehui” (the old society) and how “sweet” life was in “xin shehui” (the new society). This study examines “yiku sitian” as a cultural and communicational practice. Its theory and methodology draw upon the ethnography of communication, cultural terms for talk, and cultural discourse analysis. The study is guided by the following two questions: How can we understand “yiku sitian” as a cultural and communicative practice? What cultural discourse is actively associated with this practice? Descriptive analyses discover the identification of “yiku sitian” as a communicative act, event, and style; as a cultural scene complete with its own sequential structure; as given shape through personal narratives; and as deep messages about the expressive mode, degree of structuring, tone, and efficaciousness that are in use in this practice. Interpretive findings include eleven semantic dimensions that are active in the system of cultural meanings of “jiu shehui” vs. “xin shehui”; and two sets of cultural premises defining appropriate ways of being, relating, acting, feeling, and political positioning from both orthodox and alternative perspectives. The former view placed people into different categories of “jieji” (class) and related them with each other in “jieji guanxi” (class relationship) as either “jieji dixiong” (class brothers) or “jieji diren” (class enemies). “Jieji jiaoyu” (class education) was conducted to cultivate “jieji ganqing” (class feelings) of “aizeng fenming” (love and hate clearly demarcated). The latter view depicted Chinese people as actually forced into participating in various “jieji douzheng” (class struggles) and coping passively with their assigned ways of being, acting, relating, feeling and political positioning in the 1960s and 1970s. This study is concluded with examination of Lei Feng, a nationally famous “yiku sitian” role model in the 1960s and analysis of his “yiku sitian baogao” (yiku sitian public speech) as a demonstration of the strength of this communication practice.