Language and ideology in West, Macaulay, and Woolf

At the outbreak of the First World War, the archaic principles of nationalism and masculinity ruled Britain. These principles placed on men expectations that had become unrealistic due to the changed nature of warfare. The new horrors of war and the loss of the masculine characteristic of self-control produced a high frequency of combat trauma. For such victims of the war, the healing of psychological conditions required the assignment of meaning to their trauma, accomplished through the communication of loss to the civilian population. The problem was the inability of most non-combatants, including medical doctors, to comprehend ideas outside of the language-supported ideology that governed perception of reality. Instead of empathy, traumatized veterans were met with demands of conformity to the standards of masculinity established long before the war. Veterans who dissented from the official line of God, King and Country were silenced by the very society they fought to protect. Women writers, however, were free from the strictures of masculinity and were thus able to act as proxies to their counterparts. Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf challenged the dominant assumptions of war trauma and masculinity, each identifying language and anachronous ideology as the primary means used to promote conventional thought and silence discordance in society

A System Dynamics Model Investigating the Efficacy of Non-Kinetic Policy Strategies on the Diffusion of Democratic Ideologies in China

Shaping the next century of global politics and power, United States-China relations comprise one of the most significant bilateral relationships in the world. A new era of unrestricted warfare is one example of how aggression from China could be very costly for the United States. The growth of democratic ideals within China decreases the risk of detrimental impacts according to democratic peace theory. This thesis explores a multifaceted system of relationships that regulate the diffusion of democratic ideology within China, as defined by a proxy-measure characterized as human rights by Freedom House. Relative deprivation theory coupled with an adapted Bass diffusion model are leveraged as constructs leading to the emergence of a social movement influencing Chinas system of government. Non-kinetic policy strategies directed towards reforming government are assessed utilizing system dynamics. Subsets within system dynamics theory, goal dynamics incorporating soft variables, are investigated and implemented within the model as a means to evaluate interactions between actors while accounting for competing objectives. The resulting model provides a pilot operational assessment of driving factors, marrying both policy and strategic influence objectives with mathematically structured analysis as applied to this realm of research. Results suggest areas of study for future development that potentially further United States objectives within China. Thus, this research illustrates the value of applying a system dynamics approach to connect quantitative and qualitative factors in a way that provides a more thorough understanding of complex geopolitical interactions

The dark side of the internet: a study about representations of the deep web and the Tor network in the British press

The imaginary of the Deep Web is commonly associated with crime, crypto markets and immoral content. However, the best-known Deep Web system, the Tor Network, is a technology developed to protect people’s privacy through online anonymity, in the context of the contemporary culture of surveillance, thus enabling civil liberties. To understand this contradiction, this thesis looks at the British press representation of the Deep Web and the Tor Network. An extensive empirical research study unveils how newspapers portray these technologies, by looking at meanings, uses and users. In order to meet this goal, this research conducts a content analysis of 833 articles about Deep Web technologies published between 2001 and 2017 by six British newspapers – tabloids Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Sun, and quality newspapers Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Times – and a critical discourse analysis of 58 reports mentioning the Tor Network, issued by the same newspapers, between 2008 and 2017. The findings demonstrate that the British press represents the Deep Web in a sharply negative way, through negative concepts, definitions and associations. This portrayal attributes opacity to the Deep Web, engendering distrust of its uses and propagating user stereotypes that reflect an overall criminalisation of privacy. Also, the press presents a hyper- panic approach by consistently connecting this new medium to well-known social anxieties and portraying these technologies as undesirable, immoral and illegal. Hyper-panic is the theoretical contribution of this thesis and can be explained as the way in which media panic (the Deep Web, in this case) multiplies moral panic (for instance, terrorism, paedophilia and drug consumption). Specifically about Tor, this work concludes that the media present multiple aspects of this system, from discussing the ways in which one can enable civil liberties, to condemning criminals hiding behind technology, addressing the inherent ambivalence connected to the uses of online anonymity, i.e. it is neither completely bad nor completely good. The general synopsis about Tor, however, is still negative. Finally, the consistent association by the British press between the Deep Web and criminal and antisocial behaviours promotes a dissociation between the Deep Web and the Web itself, in that cyberspace is separated between negative uses (the Deep Web) and positive uses (the Web), instead of being understood as a nuanced whole

Humor in Lolita and Its Film Adaptations

Detta examensarbete behandlar humoristiska element i Vladimir Nabokovs roman Lolita samt hur dessa element återgetts i Stanley Kubricks och Adrian Lynes filmatiseringar. Syftet med studien är att analysera funktionen hos dessa element i Lolita och att understryka vikten av att bevara dem i nytolkningar av romanen. Diskussionen kontextualiseras av tidigare akademisk forskning kring romanen samt av en översikt av den symboliska rollen konceptet “Lolita” fått i populärkultur. Centrala begrepp och relevanta teoretiska frågor inom humor- och adaptionsforskning behandlas även kort. Romanen och filmatiseringarna analyseras enligt närläsningsmetod mot denna teoretiska ram. Studien påvisar att humorn i originalversionen är mångfasetterad och att den inte bara uppfyller en rent estetisk funktion, utan också spelar en viktig roll för tolkningen av berättarrösten. De viktigaste motiven i denna studie är desamma som berättaren använder sig av: det vill säga romantisk litteratur, dubbelgångartematik och diverse bärande idéer i psykoanalysen. Studien visar att humor, ironi och motstridigheter uppfyller en central funktion i och med att dessa element skapar en kritisk undermening som ifrågasätter berättarrösten. Dessa element har också en satirisk nivå som är riktad till läsaren och hens benägenhet att påbörda simplifierade och dikotomiska tolkningsmodeller på litteratur för att förenkla eller rent av sudda bort obekväm tvetydighet. Analysen av filmversionerna av Lolita demonstrerar humorns centrala roll. Kubricks film framhäver de humoristiska elementen och liknar därmed till ton och budskap originalet, medan Lynes film förbiser humorn och skapar en banal och etiskt problematisk version, trots att den är bokstavstrogen i andra avseenden. Examensarbetet påvisar att humorn i Lolita har en funktion utöver formskönhet samt åskådliggör vikten av att bibehålla dessa element i nytolkningar av romanen. Humor i Nabokov’s Lolita utgör en viktig aspekt av romanen som även bidrar till dess status som modern klassiker

BEYOND “OVER-THE-TOP” TELEVISION: CIRCUITS OF MEDIA DISTRIBUTION SINCE THE INTERNET

My dissertation analyzes the evolution of contemporary, cross-platform and international circuits of media distribution. A circuit of media distribution refers to both the circulation of media content as well as the underlying ecosystem that facilitates that circulation. In particular, I focus on the development of services for streaming television over the internet. I examine the circulation paths that either opened up or were foreclosed by companies that have been pivotal in shaping streaming economies: Aereo, Netflix, Twitter, Google, and Amazon. I identify the power brokers of contemporary media distribution, ranging from sectors of legacy television—for instance, broadcast networks, cable companies, and production studios—to a variety of new media and technology industries, including social media, e-commerce, internet search, and artificial intelligence. In addition, I analyze the ways in which these power brokers are reconfiguring content access. I highlight a series of technological, financial, geographic, and regulatory factors that authorize or facilitate access, in order to better understand how contemporary circuits of media distribution are constituted. I consider access as a regulatory issue, a foundation of business models, a design concern, and as a function of interoperability that facilitates communication amongst platforms, devices, and other systems of networked technologies.Doctor of Philosoph

Negotiation-as-active-knowing: an approach evolved from relational art practice.

This PhD research offers a new conception of negotiation that attempts to re-imagine the roles of and relationships between artist and participant-other in social art practice. Negotiation is implicit in art practice, and is often used without elucidation of its exact processes. This research addresses the gap through an articulation of negotiation that brings both artist and other to new positions of understanding. The resulting construct, negotiation as active knowing, becomes a mode of knowing the world, others and otherness and distinguishes itself from more goal orientated definitions. The research draws on phenomenology and social art theory: Merleau-Ponty (2002) positions the perceiving body-subject as immersed and mobile within an environment. Shotter (2005) differentiates between aboutness-thinking and withness-thinking. Kester (2011) describes the dynamic between the one and the many in the reciprocal creative labour of collaborative art practice. This literature yields three core qualities that are relevant to negotiation-as-active-knowing: durational immersive involvement, relational responsiveness and calibrative interplay. The research maps these qualities onto the domains of ground (context), contact (encounter) and movement (art work / process), that are drawn from the researchers experiences in social engagement for over 15 years. Negotiation-as-active-learning is tested through three case projects: Networking and Collaborations in Culture and the Arts (NICA), Burma 2002-2007; Galway Travellers Project, Republic of Ireland 2009-2010; and Imagining Possibilities/Thinking Together, Mongolia 2009-2011. Each project inflects and develops the conceptual framework; initially as a critical concept used retrospectively and increasingly as a generative concept that forms the dynamic of the work. The research concludes that the three core qualities of negotiation-as-active-knowing are intertwined and mutually supportive and cannot be practised in isolation of one another. Negotiation-as-active-knowing may potentially be effective both within the arts and more widely, in social, cultural life, in dealing with difference, or to possibly pre-empt conflict

Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals, and the Mass-Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915

Vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States, from roughly the 1890s through World War I. In fact, it can reasonably be called the first truly mass form of entertainment in the United States, and perhaps the world. This dissertation examines how vaudeville grew as the first national, large-scale form of amusement in America. It attempts to locate the rise of this first form of mass entertainment within an era when powerful businessmen in many industries were beginning to market products and services to a national market as well. Furthermore, this dissertation examines some of the key promotional practices used by the vaudeville industry. Chief among them were consistent claims of purity and wholesomeness with regard to the content of vaudeville acts. It was promised that no act seen in vaudeville would offend a theatregoer. At the same time, however, vaudeville was clearly full of acts that were sexually provocative, titillating, and reminiscent of the burlesque hall stage. Thus, what begins to emerge is a picture of promotional and marketing practices that promised moral purity, while the product that vaudeville offered was often times anything but pure. This work attempts to explain this rift by comparing the marketing practices of vaudeville to those of other large industries at the time. It will be seen that the tactics used by the vaudeville chiefs—promises of purity, wholesomeness, and sterility—were much like the claims employed by dozens of other early mass-marketers, who claimed their products were, above all else, clean, safe, pure, honest, and free from taint of any kind. In promoting their products as such, it is argued herein, early mass marketers were in fact trying to allay anxieties over the participation in mass-scale commerce and were preparing the American populace as a responsive mass market that had no qualms about buying its goods and services from large, faceless commercial entities headquartered, in many cases, in cities hundreds of miles away. Such tactics not only permitted the vaudeville chiefs to introduce the first form of mass entertainment into the American market, but also allowed them to offer an increasingly ribald and sexually tantalizing array of entertainment to the American public (much of which is detailed in this work), thus liberalizing views of sexuality in general and the female body in particular (even though it also led to the further objectification of the female body). Finally, this dissertation closely examines a number of popular female performers, such as Eva Tanguay and Annette Kellerman, who used their body and their sexuality to craft a successful mass entertainment product

Reproductive Subjects: The Global Politics of Health in China, 1927-1964

In the middle third of the twentieth century, the distinct aims of international health organizations, new imperialisms, transnational feminisms, and Chinese state-building converged on the reproductive functions of Chinese women. Reproductive Subjects probes the reciprocal relations among these diverse actors to ask how and why childbirth and mothering in China proved integral not only to Chinese state-building, but also to early ventures in international health and a realignment of global political power in the decades surrounding the Second World War. Reproductive Subjects moves between scales, reading local, provincial, and national public health reports in China alongside the correspondence of international organizations and the writings of Chinese health professionals who studied and worked throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the 1920s to the 1960s. By bringing together these dispersed archives, Reproductive Subjects outlines a global conjuncture—characterized by the flourishing of international organizations, unequal relations between putatively autonomous nation-states, the woman question, and the ascendancy of biomedical public health—that imbued Chinese women’s reproduction with global political significance. This project demonstrates the multifaceted political utility of maternal and infant health (MIH) resulting from the linking of demographic measures of mortality to medicalized notions of women’s shared yet variable capacity to reproduce and nurture. Though often framed within the rhetoric of Chinese nationalism, Chinese MIH remained critical to the broader work of foreign and international actors to manage international health and trade in the Pacific. These aims proved compatible—in fact, integral—to contemporaneous efforts to forge a Chinese state with the territory, population, and administration required for legibility to an emerging international order of nation-states. Chinese-government propaganda emphasized scientific mothercraft as gendered service to the state. However, Chinese feminists in alliance with an international maternalist movement reframed the “facts” of maternal and infant mortality as evidence of state failure and demanded legal protections for health and welfare. By tracing the careers of health advocates whose lives crossed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Reproductive Subjects further demonstrates how the personnel and precedent of Nationalist-era MIH programs proved critical to the later management of both mortality and fertility in Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the Cold War world.PHDHistory & Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137160/1/hubbardj_1.pd

Inside Barefoot Economics

"... the practice of barefoot economics requires more than simply the lived experience of poverty-related phenomena. In contrast to the prevailing positivist paradigm within the scientific discipline of economics that tends to cultivate particular ways of economic thinking by taking their linguistic presuppositions for granted, barefoot economics involves challenging one's own horizon of possibility for economic thought by putting commonly accepted academic jargon in abeyance.'