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Taylor Swift is a worldwide phenomenon, especially in 2023. She follows in the footsteps of the female pop and rock musicians from the 1980s and 1990s who were lighting up the world with their music. Madonna, Gwen Stefani, the Riot Grrrls, and many more set the foundation for the feminist topics discussed in Swift’s music. They all perform songs of female empowerment and struggles by being sexually provocative and aggressively anti-sexist in their lyrics and performances. These lyrics and performances reflected Second Wave Feminism ideas. Swift takes these same feminist themes and inserts them into her lyrics and performances, but instead of being sexually provocative, she maintains a nice, girl-next-door persona. She also exists in a time vastly different than the female musicians from the 1980s and 1990s. Since the early 2000s, Americans have increasingly used social media in their daily lives, experienced the #metoo movement where women openly shared stories of their sexual assault experiences, and endured a long quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All these experiences are isolating and connect to a loneliness epidemic. People need connection, which is where Swift and her music come into play. By having a nice girl persona, discussing feminist themes that girls and women can relate to, and while living in a time of isolation, she creates a sense of connection amongst her audience in a time when society needs connection more than ever. Provoking this connection amongst girls and women reflects Postfeminism. Additionally, more connection is further needed. After all, Swift is a cis-gender, straight, white, wealthy female, and thus, there is a limit to how much people can connect to her. Nonetheless, there are female pop and rock musicians in the U.S. who are already following in her footsteps and come from more diverse backgrounds. These artists reflect Third Wave Feminism. Some examples include Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Camila Cabello. As time goes

In his article “Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik’s more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, “literal” and “liberal/free” translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given to contextualizing the two Chinese versions and in particular Chen’s rendition. Zhang argues that the Chinese translator’s (self-)censorship plays a role in generating more creativity and agency, sometimes coerced, in literary translation across different cultures and languages and renders literary translation more a creative mission than merely retelling stories in a different language. Viewed in this light, translators are more like creative writers. What deserves more scholarly investigation is their agency and strategies in (re)creating the texts for their target audience in the target language.

In her article "The Malvinas/Falklands War in Transatlantic Narratives: Exploring Collective Memory and Negotiating Self/Other Identity", Andrea R. Bellot examines the remembrance of the Malvinas/Falklands War (1982) through cultural texts for children, presenting a comparative analysis of post-war narratives from both the United Kingdom and Argentina. Through a detailed exploration of "The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman" by British author and illustrator Raymond Briggs (1984), and the Argentine TV cartoon show "La Asombrosa Excursión de Zamba en las Islas Malvinas" (2012), broadcasted on Paka Paka, Bellot discusses how collective memory and national identity are crafted and contested in these representations. While both works aim to critique the absurdity of war, they diverge in their political undertones, engaging with themes of patriotism, collective memory, and political satire. Bellot's analysis employs a comparative literature framework to illuminate the role these narratives play in shaping remembrance and contributing to the ongoing construction of national identities and collective memories in the post-war era. Her findings underscore the significant influence of children's cultural texts in negotiating memory and identity, enriching our understanding of the complex dynamics between narrative, memory, and identity in the context of conflict.

In her article “All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’s Translation of Shui Hu Zhuan and its Effects on Her Writing Career,” Zhihui Sophia Geng focuses on Pulitzer Prize winner and Noble Laureate Pearl Sydenstricker Buck’s All Men Are Brothers, her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan. She examines the reception of her translation and analyzes the significance of All Men Are Brothers to Buck’s literary career. By providing the first complete translation of Shui Hu Zhuan to an English-speaking audience, Buck made a significant cultural contribution to the United States and English-speaking cultural spheres. The panoramic Shui Hu Zhuan showcases a drastically different way of writing from a long and dynamic Chinese literary tradition. Immersion in Shui Hu Zhuan nurtured Buck’s sympathy towards the common people and is instrumental in her choice to focus on the Chinese peasantry as the subject matter of her writing. This keen insight is indispensable to her creation of ground-breaking works such as The Good Earth. In addition, Buck’s reading of classical Chinese fiction had a considerable effect on her prose style. Buck proudly declared that the Chinese novel “has an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western novelist,” and her success as a novelist, in turn, affirms the worthiness of this tradition.

In her article “Exotic Construction of an Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’s Creative Translation of Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-Poems and its Influences,” Yuqun Fu discusses Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-poems and her identity as a woman intellect in the patriarchal and feudal Song Dynasty of China. Due to Kenneth Rexroth’s feminist perspective and Sappho complex as well as his own pursuit to excel in the hipster stylistics of the newly prospering Beat writers, Rexroth turns to the Eastern women poets to fuel his own cause, especially in his idiosyncratic way of interpreting and translating Li Ch’ing-Chao. His translation focuses on gender identity and displays the manipulation of a mainstream culture to a nonmainstream culture. He misinterprets some frequent images and narrations in Li’s poems by singling out some love poems and supplementing some sexual implications and hence shapes the peculiar imagery of a heterogeneous ancient Chinese woman figure with the bold and unveiled expression of her own bodily desires and feminist emancipation with the mysterious veil of ancient Oriental mysticism. His translation of Li has profound influences on his own poetry in terms of themes and writing techniques. In addition, his version of Li has influenced some of his peers and subsequent translators, some Beat writers, and contemporary writers in the U.S.

In her article "Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy," Lidan Lin examines Ezra Pound’s influence on Samuel Beckett. In their dealings with China, Pound and Beckett are both indebted to such sinologists and cultural transmitters as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, Louis Laloy, and Laurence Binyon who introduced Chinese culture, literature, and arts to the Western world through translation and their writings about China. Lin situates the Pound-Beckett connection in the broad cultural context of the early 20th century. She argues that while modernism’s turn to China as a cultural paradigm was collectively brought about by writers, museum curators, and publishers, Beckett’s appropriation of China was part of this paradigm. In mapping this paradigm, she traces it to the 18th- and 19th-century phenomena of Chinoiserie and suggest their cultural and aesthetic continuity.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between degree of social networking site (SNS) use and optimism/pessimism means scores from the optimism/pessimism instrument (OPI) for SNS users who are age 18+ and live in the United States. The purpose of the study was also to determine how the main type of platform used, main type of content viewed, and number of connections mediated and/or moderated this relationship. The research problem was that SNSs are becoming a prominent form of media and little research has examined how the degree of exposure to SNSs cultivate psychological states, especially in relation to the mediating or moderating effects of platform, content, and number of connections. A correlational, quantitative research design was used with a cross-sectional, analytical survey to gather data on user demographics, SNS use data, and OPI mean scores. A total of 6 research questions were asked including 16 hypotheses that were tested. Inferential statistics were used to test the assumptions of regression, and multiple linear regression, ANOVA, stepwise linear regression, SPSS Process, and SmartPLS4 were used to determine the relationships between variables and mediating/moderating effects therein. Results demonstrated that there is a significant positive linear relationship between degree of SNS use and optimism/pessimism means scores, wherein optimism is negatively partially mediated by content and positively partially mediated by number of connections, and pessimism is positively partially mediated by content. Future studies should further examine the mediating effects of specific types of content on user attitudes. The implications of the study showed a potential need for regulating certain types of content to counteract the negative mediating effect content has on optimism and positive mediating effect content has on pessimism based on average hours per day used.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the cinematic semiosis of God, to understand how God is signified through the film medium, and to explore possible effects of this signification on the American Christian mythos. This qualitative study was conducted as an artifactual analysis study. The selected artifacts were three films and two works of literature. The film artifacts were Shadowlands, Bad Times at the El Royale, and The Tree of Life. The literature artifacts were A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis and The Book of Job. The practice of close reading was given to each artifact for data collection. Each artifact likewise underwent two stages of analysis: semiotic, based on the logics of C. S. Peirce, and the tetradic laws of media, based on the media ecology of Marshall McLuhan. The analysis found that semiotics is a viable research philosophy for cinematic signification and that McLuhan’s tetrad works in tandem with semiotics to explore the effects of signifying God through the medium. Also, the findings suggest that the potency of a sign is found in the semiosis, or semiotic process, of a sign and not in the classification of the sign. The implications of this study offer alternative perspectives on the purposes and practice of Christian cinema as well as the usability of media ecology theory in cinema studies.

Fake news is an old phenomenon that has become a new obsession and a menace to society due to technological advancement and the proliferation of social media, which has changed traditional journalism norms. As the spread of false information has increased these past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for information consumers to distinguish between facts and fakes. A comprehensive systematic literature review to extract themes revealed the major factors responsible for spreading fake news. This qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis (QIMS) aims to better understand and offer solutions to combat fake news. This Ph.D. dissertation will serve as a guide for ethical communication practice and a reference for future research studies.

FIM111 Screen Studies and Practice project 2 part 2 (group) examplar - expository documentary.

FLM171.1 Introduction to Cinematography and Location Sound project 1.

This paper goes beyond celebrating podcast growth in Brazil, analyzing 511 Brazilian podcast producers (2015-2020). Using a semi-structured form, the survey focuses on outlining the profile of female producers. Drawing from gender, cultural, and political science literature, it explores how producer presence aligns with intersectional practices in Brazilian feminisms. Results indicate that women podcast producers in Brazil mostly have a college degree, variable income and identify as feminist, contributing to a unified community that engages with and challenges the political and human rights agenda, expanding discourse through communication access.

If a country’s podcast scene could be described as a vibe, Pakistan’s would be “dude bro”; that is, politically and culturally right-leaning masculinist narrative. The format is simple: like The Joe Rogan Experience which has over 15 million subscribers and over three billion views in Pakistan, there’s a host and a guest. In addition to Rogan, other popular pods are The Pakistan Experience, Pakistonomy, Thought Behind Things, Talks that Matter, Mooroo, The Pivot, Junaid Akram’s Podcast. The conversations usually revolve around the guest’s life, their political views, the economy – whether Pakistan will default or not, will the IMF give another tranche for relief, will donor money bring in dollars and other burning subjects. There’s also How Does This Work, Misaal (a tech/start-up podcast), Policy Beats, Climate Mahaul (Pakistan’s first podcast on Climate Change), Dragon Road (exploring Pakistan’s relationship with China) and Mosiki which looks at music, freelancing, and other “fun” things. All this changed in December 2020 when the first episode of mine and Saba Imtiaz’s Notes on a Scandal – Pakistan’s first true-crime podcast – made its debut.

Radiophilia, the new book in The Study of Sound Series, discusses radio in the context of recent literature about affects and emotions. Informed by various traditions within media and cultural studies, and guided by the work of Lauren Berlant and Arjun Appudarai, it approaches ‘radiophilia’ -love for, or strong attachment to, radio—as a wide-reaching concept that includes groups practices and social moods and that can be practised in public spaces and communities, beyond interior and domestic set-ups.

At that moment, I think Leslie was not only really happy, but even proud. It is Tuesday evening, 18 May 2021, and we are sitting together on a table in front of the stage in a studio at the German broadcaster, WDR. Not in front of the table, not next to the table, but on the table. Our legs are dangling and we let them dangle. Because we are really exhausted. The whole team is. We have just finished the last live event on stage and we’ve actually made it. Four days of the International Feature Conference in Cologne. Sven Preger remembers colleague, friend, and award-winning documentary maker, Leslie Rosin.

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds for the present and future. And third, she proposes a strategy for challenging reductive narratives of the past and fostering more nuanced models of remembrance. The review analyses each of these steps with the aim of sketching out Mihai’s contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on complicity and implication in violence.

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment for the beat generation and even the entire American literary community at large then and after, by means of his delicate transcreation of Han-shan images in line with American expectations at the time as well as by means of his skillful tradaptation of the realistic elements of self-expression, self-identification and self-actualization in Cold Mountain Poems and also by means of his profound exploration of the Chan Buddhism aesthetics and philosophical mediation in classical Chinese landscape poems and Chinese hermit culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul’s travelogues and the historiography of Pipes’ history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in the 1950s, largely eclipsed in Lacan studies by interests in the ‘Late Lacan’ period of the Sinthome, the knots, jouissance and the semblant. Here I extend (and refine) arguments I began in Does the Internet Have An Unconscious, determining that algorithms in Lacanian theory help us understand the split subjectivity of internet discourse.

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology and instead proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and theories of ‘the political’ and ‘being-in-common’ from Jean-Luc N

This essay examines several prominent memes that have circulated on Right-wing social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memes coordinate what I describe as a mode of interpassive humor, which positions those who “believe” in the crisis as naïve dupes, infantilizing those subjects who have fallen prey to the idea that they should take the pandemic seriously, and thereby delegating fearfulness to the other so that reactionary Covid-19 denialists may continue with their lives unaffected. The essay thereby seeks to draw suggestive lines of affiliation between studies of digital memes, evolutionary mimetics, and psychoanalytic theory, pointing to the algorithmic spread of disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic as a case of interpassive humor.

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only occur after we understand it at the nexus of where the group impinges on the individual. I revisit one of psychoanalytic theory’s primary gambits, interrogating the effect the social has on the individual psyche, to examine the fact of the social itself as a problem. Working from this premise, this essay has two ambitions: 1. To show that social media is always already a site to see the psyche as understood by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, meaning that social media is space for the psychoanalytic conception of the psyche prior to any intervention on behalf of psychoanalytic theory/ theorists; and 2. To show what we gain by reflecting that argument back on to psychoanalytic theory itself.

In recent years, a growing list of content creators have published videos announcing that they are leaving YouTube, taking a break, or reducing their upload schedule (Alexander). Many of these young creators state that their decision resulted from burnout, caused by a relentless schedule and obsession with YouTube’s algorithm and analytics— tools essential to success on this highly competitive creative platform (Srnicek). Its opaque algorithm, however, induces anxiety; an affect described as that which “arises when the subject is confronted by the desire of the Other and does not know what object he is for that desire” (Evans 12). Here, the Other is conflated as both audience and algorithm, insofar as what videos trend or are recommended is a complex merging of user-engagement and vetting by the algorithm. Attempting to discover the desire of the Other, creators examine data to speculate about what content will gain the most views. While some creators opt to chase trends and use clickbait titles, others avoid the algorithm’s detection and suppression by omitting key words known to be flagged, while others embrace defeat and instead drive their channels using drama and negative affect (Berryman and Kavka). Drawing on Lacan’s psychoanalytic clinical structures and theory of anxiety, this article examines how each of these approaches to navigating the platform represents a neurotic and sometimes perverse response to the algorithmic Other that is influenced by a neoliberal notion of creativity that privileges growth over its socially transformative power (Mould).

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the algorithmic architecture of social media platforms, demonstrating how these digital spaces lock in and over-code desire through recursive feedback loops that amplify extremism. Following this will be an exploration of the excess of desire that is cut off and left as a remainder partial object, termed the “fascist abject,” and what role this process plays in the production of subjectivity.

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity in performance theory, readers can perceive how the spatiotemporal dimension and audience-performer relationship are manipulated and how the four realms of African orature are reflected in these two novels and thereby help decipher their specific political connotations. Achebe and Adichie’s writing practices have indeed created a new purpose for orature in Nigerian literature.

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan’s ‘hysterical’ position in accordance with Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence – delegated yet reluctantly disavowed – offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization.

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads us to rethink the relation between science and literature. This paper examines Terada's poetics as well as his research in physics in order to see how one can associate the Two Cultures separated from each other for such a long time.

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but are disciplined and policed by platforms into adopting modes of adult sexuality that are shaped by ideology and the social. Platforms resemble a child – caregiver relation that is further complicated by other users who, from the perspective of the individual user, occupy the position of siblings. The user – sibling relation is marked by competition as well as moments of care and cooperation. As users work, chat, share, like, and practically live online and via networked objects, their forms of usage mimic, or come close to, the sensual-affective rhythms of sexuality itself.

In the American silent movie era, women were not associated with the ability to perform stunt work, drive an automobile without a man present, or be much more than a supporting face in a film, despite the fact that there were more female film writers, directors and producers than male in that era, the importance of “automotive citizenship,” and the added difficulty of women’s stunt work (women performed high risk stunts like jumping from buildings, etc., but they had to do it in gowns, and bikinis); today, women and minorities are highly under-represented in boardrooms, director’s chairs, and a startling number of fields across the country, impacting everything from human rights, to mental health, to the percentage of a dollar earned. Community programs that demonstrate anyone is capable of achieving their goals in the fields of their choice are imperative. For two semesters, I worked with multiple community and national partners (the LaPorte County Historical Society (IN), the Barker Mansion (IN), the Henry Ford Museum (MI), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (CA), and more), to learn about the need for representation, research the life of silent movie actress Anita King, uncover artifacts connected to her, bring her to life in a new museum exhibit in LaPorte County Indiana (her hometown), and create community programming. In addition to the museum exhibit that was created, a historical monument was placed, a traveling exhibit was started, original Anita King silent films were restored, and public learning activities were initiated (e.g., grade school viewings of the restored films, public reflections, community celebrations). From these experiences, and the resulting reflection, I learned about the importance of promoting ideas of competency, independence, and endurance for all people, and continue to carry this through my work as a graduate instructor, volunteer, and organization leader.

A central feature of European urban landscapes, the square represents the public space par excellence. At the end of WW2 and in the immediate postwar time, the role of cinema in representing and reimagining urban squares was crucial. Through film images, they became the stage and the mirror of a Europe in transition. This contribution, examining Italian, French, German, and Czechoslovak cases, posits the square as an essential iconeme in postwar nonfiction cinema and visual culture, acting as a fil rouge to visually retrace the path of Europe from war to peace, and into new forms of political tension.

This thesis examines the relationship between blood and oil, that is, the multitude of ways in which the petromodernity industries harvests and threatens vitality. The introduction of this thesis is concerned tracking how petromodernity is a byproduct, offspring, or extension of colonialism. In this way, petromodernity can be thought about as “petro-colonialism.” Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” informs the argument that the way thay petro-colonialism came to be and also maintains itself is by utilizing the “killer story.” This thesis also employs autorheoretical techniques informed by Lauren Fournier to show how petro-colonialism or “oiliness” sticks to its subjects. This thesis examines the metaphor of the vampire as just one example of a killer story which utimately upholds petromodern and colonial sensibilities like white supremacy, gender inequality, and the valorization of innovation and expansion.