The Politicization of Popular Culture: A Case Study in Reagan and Star Wars

This project examined the use of Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric, specifically the “Star Wars,” “Zero Option” and “Evil Empire” speeches. It answers the question: Why do we know SDI as Star Wars? It also The rationale for the study came from myriad sources, including the historical and political undertones of the Star Wars films and rhetorical criticism of other Reagan speeches. G. Thomas Goodnight’s analysis linked all three speeches together as a reformulation of wartime rhetoric, so that was the rationale for analyzing three speeches. After performing a rhetorical criticism using Burkean identification as the lens, there are several results: Reagan used narratives to build identification; evil empire as a connotation for the apocalypse; and most notably, Star Wars as an invention of Hollywood. Finally, this thesis prognosticates several conclusions, most notably how other politicians use popular culture as a method of identification

Current, January 12, 1998

https://irl.umsl.edu/current1990s/1256/thumbnail.jp

Authoring professional teacher identities: a journey from understanding culturally responsive teaching to identifying as culturally responsive teachers

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the ways in which four elementary preservice teachers came to understand culturally responsive teaching and began authoring their professional teacher identities. It examined the influence of course work and internship at a culturally and linguistically diverse school on their understandings and developing teacher identities. The study employed ethnographic methods of data collection including formal individual interviews, focus groups, audio recordings of seminar meetings, personal documents and artifacts, and observations during intern site visits. Data were analyzed using constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and discourse analysis (Gee, 2005; Rogers, Marshall, and Tyson, 2006). Sociocultural and dialogical theories of identity formation informed the analysis of the preservice teachers’ talk (Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 2005; Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, and Cain, 1998; Rogers et al., 2006). Analysis occurred in two stages; within-case analysis sought to fully understand the individual experiences and understandings of each focal participant, and cross-case analysis was used “to build abstractions across cases” (Merriam, 1998, p. 195). Study findings suggest the understandings of culturally responsive teaching that the preservice teachers came to during teacher education were complex and influenced by a variety of factors including what the students brought with them to teacher education (i.e., their life histories, constructions of race and class, and personal experience with discrimination and knowing culturally diverse individuals), their course work, and the internship experience. Their visions of teaching and their negotiation of the tensions encountered during teacher education were influenced by these understandings, ultimately influencing the trajectories of each participant as they developed professional teacher identities. This study offers insight into the complexity of developing a vision for teaching in culturally responsive ways among preservice teachers. Implications of this study suggest the importance in teacher education of developing experiences for preservice teachers to work in culturally diverse settings, reflect on and engage in meaningful dialogue about such experiences, and reflect on their emerging teacher identities

March 30, 1995

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

Mapping the language of landownership: discourses of property, management and rurality

Hegemonic categorisations have been used to examine rural landownership'. including non-farmer/farmer, production/consumption and productive/postproductive. Evocative in the abstract, a shared dichotomy is unsuitable for examining the complexity of how meaning is given to rural land. To arrive at a more finegrained understanding, transcripts of interviews undertaken with landowners, centred around the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, were analysed using a methodology of discourse analysis. The data was conceptualised in terms of discourses of property, management and rurality. 'Discourse' is here understood to mean vivid images often evoked in metaphor. This discourse analytic approach was useful in examining the way meanings of rural land vary across the course of an interview. Discourses were found adapted according to circumstance, rather than deployed in their entirely 'traditional' form. Discourse analysis allowed exploration and explanation of the processes involved in constructing meaning. For example the use of the part-whole metonymy allowed landowners to talk about part of their property, including management as stewardship, while referring to landownership as a whole. This type of discourse use was strategic. Landowners variously used discourses of stewardship of the environment, farming as a business and accommodation between the two, in different situations within talk to achieve specific, localised effects. It was found that discourses of townies, country people, 'no difference between townies and country people' and townie farmers, constitute a cultural repertoire from which landowners draw. When deployed in talk they create different effects because they relate in various ways to social representations of the rural idyll and urban dystopia. Understanding how meanings of land are constructed in talk is a critical step towards a more informed debate over the future shape of rural landownership

The voice of authority : Evelyn Waugh's fiction

A large part of the extant criticism of Evelyn Waugh's fiction is orientated towards either a biographical or a literary-historical interest: there are comparatively few detailed surveys of the novels themselves. This study attempts such a survey, and in particular examines the tension which inheres in the relationship of Waugh's poised, urbane narrators to the social and moral chaos they depict. I have been interested in the source and management of that poise, the testing, as it were to destruction, of a series of narrative positions. There is a very modern equation to be observed in Waugh's fiction, between the potentially anarchic mode of fiction and what Waugh felt to be the actual anarchy of contemporary civilisation. His novels can with interest be read in terms of a comic exploitation of this equation, and subsequently, as the writer aged, of his attempts to evade its logic, to discover a 'voice of authority'. Apparently secure narrative stances are repeatedly undermined, and a succession of 'realities' compromised - Tony Last's, William Boot's, John Plant's, Guy Crouchback's. It is this awareness and exploitation of the reflexive quality of fiction, and its use in disclosing the nature of his age which lends Waugh's writing its real and enduring interest. I seek to draw out this awareness through detailed examination of the different novels' precise narrative stance, the source of their 'voice', and have been largely content to let stand other commentators' descriptions of Waugh's broader thesis. My method involves close attention to Waugh's language, from the conviction that nuances of tone and the development of marginal allusions and metaphors are the keys to many of his characteristic effects

Constructing the Cable Television Market in Latin America: A Structurational Approach to Organizational Knowledge in U.S. Cable Networks

Scholars with a keen interest in the globalization of media content have examined trends in international entertainment flows, focusing particular attention on the market structures and business realities which sustain information disparities between the United States and other nations around the globe. However, few scholars have connected the operation of international media markets with the methods by which individuals within transnational media companies obtain knowledge about a foreign market for use in decision-making about activities in that market. This study takes a new approach, utilizing structuration theory by conceptualizing cable networks as knowledgeable, reflexive agents that make decisions within existing market and institutional structures. Using data gathered from trade publications, internal company communications, and indepth interviews, this dissertation describes and analyzes how American cable networks gather information from a new market environment, how they process data into market knowledge, and how this information is ultimately utilized in making decisions about market activities. The data were gathered through qualitative, in-depth interviews with 33 individuals working for seven different U.S. cable networks that have introduced new services in countries throughout Latin America. The qualitative data were supplemented with market data published in trade publications and with information from several cable industry observers. Results suggest that the most important types of market information for U.S. cable executives were data from two quantitative, syndicated market research studies of audience/consumer behavior, which were particularly crucial for cementing financial relationships with advertisers and local cable operators. Executives attempted to compensate for information gaps by accepting these current gaps, by estimating certain numbers, and sometimes by investing in their own market research. Very little of the market information gathered was put to use for internal decision-making regarding programming choices. Instead, audience ratings data were used by executives to build their own market reputation and to differentiate their services from their competitors’. Analysis of market data suggests that cable networks owned by large U.S. media conglomerates have begun to far outpace their Latin American-owned competitors, partially by redefining the standards for market performance. The implications of these trends for structuration theory and media globalization are discussed