561 research outputs found

    “Who asked for this?”: authenticity and race-centered corporate social responsibility

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    The purpose of this study is to conceptualize and operationalize race-centered CSR, a combination of corporate social responsibility and corporate social advocacy concerned with repairing racial relationships and inequities, and test perceptions of authenticity of race-centered CSA. Authenticity in CSR and CSA has assumed a universal consumer, however authenticity, as a cultural construct, suggests that social identity can motivate how groups of people come to understand it. As corporate social responsibility efforts increasingly center race, race itself becomes a new measure by which to understand how those efforts are seen as authentic. The study surveyed 586 Blacks and non-Blacks using a modified version of Alhouti, Johonson, and Holloway’s (2016) consumer perceptions of CSR authenticity scale, Sellers et al.’s (1997) Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) scale, and adapted measures using the concepts of reconciliation and cultural commodification to conceptualize race-centered CSR and perceptions of authenticity of race-centered CSR. Two new scales were developed to measure perceptions of commodification and reconciliatory discourse as antecedents for race-centered CSR activities. Findings of this study suggests that there are universal understandings of authenticity in race-centered and of what commodification of Black culture is in the context of race-centered CSR. More importantly, the recognition of commodification of Black culture is related to perceptions of authenticity of race-centered CSR. In addition, there are subtle differences in demographic drivers for Blacks and non-blacks, particularly political ideology (conservative Blacks vs. liberal whites) and education, age, and marital status of Black respondents in perceptions of authenticity of race-centered CSR. This study contributes to The study contributes to the body of literature on critical approaches to corporate social responsibility

    Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries

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    This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique. This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention. Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking. Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation. Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets. Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentℱ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance

    Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

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    Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access

    MRCIAC: A Mixed Reality Conversational Intelligent Agent Companion in Cars for Supporting Travel Experience

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    This thesis investigates how a Mixed Reality Conversational Intelligent Agent Companion in Cars (MRCIAC) can enhance the travel experience of individuals in unfamiliar cities by addressing four main problems: difficulty finding popular locations, lack of a travel buddy, complex in-car human-machine interaction, and neglecting passenger experience. The research approach includes three methodologies: Research Through Design (RTD), Prototype Iteration, and Descriptive Design Evaluation. The study creates and evaluates three types of prototypes, including mobile applications, Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR), to demonstrate the potential of mixed reality intelligent agents to revolutionize human-computer interaction in transportation and improve the travel experience. The outcomes of this research demonstrate the potential of MRCIAC to provide a companion for the owner and passengers on a trip. It is hoped that further research in this area will lead to exciting new developments and improvements in transportation

    Grounds for a Third Place : The Starbucks Experience, Sirens, and Space

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    My goal in this dissertation is to help demystify or “filter” the “Starbucks Experience” for a post-pandemic world, taking stock of how a multi-national company has long outgrown its humble beginnings as a wholesale coffee bean supplier to become a digitally-integrated and hypermodern cafĂ©. I look at the role Starbucks plays within the larger cultural history of the coffee house and also consider how Starbucks has been idyllically described in corporate discourse as a comfortable and discursive “third place” for informal gathering, a term that also prescribes its own radical ethos as a globally recognized customer service platform. Attempting to square Starbucks’ iconography and rhetoric with a new critical methodology, in a series of interdisciplinary case studies, I examine the role Starbucks’ “third place” philosophy plays within larger conversations about urban space and commodity culture, analyze Starbucks advertising, architecture and art, and trace the mythical rise of the Starbucks Siren (and the reiterations and re-imaginings of the Starbucks Siren in art and media). While in corporate rhetoric Starbucks’ “third place” is depicted as an enthralling adventure, full of play, discovery, authenticity, or “romance,” I draw on critical theory to discuss how it operates today as a space of distraction, isolation, and loss

    Complexity Science in Human Change

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    This reprint encompasses fourteen contributions that offer avenues towards a better understanding of complex systems in human behavior. The phenomena studied here are generally pattern formation processes that originate in social interaction and psychotherapy. Several accounts are also given of the coordination in body movements and in physiological, neuronal and linguistic processes. A common denominator of such pattern formation is that complexity and entropy of the respective systems become reduced spontaneously, which is the hallmark of self-organization. The various methodological approaches of how to model such processes are presented in some detail. Results from the various methods are systematically compared and discussed. Among these approaches are algorithms for the quantification of synchrony by cross-correlational statistics, surrogate control procedures, recurrence mapping and network models.This volume offers an informative and sophisticated resource for scholars of human change, and as well for students at advanced levels, from graduate to post-doctoral. The reprint is multidisciplinary in nature, binding together the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and neuroscience

    Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle

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    This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting. This is an open access book

    Play/writing histories: investigating the dramaturgical potential of architectural drawing practices in exploring the hidden histories of built spaces. An architextural study of the Citizens Theatre

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    This practice research project investigates the dramaturgical potential of architectural drawing techniques and proposes ‘architexting’ as creative methodology for exploring the hidden histories of built spaces. Architexting exploits the relationship between architectural drawing and playwriting as allographic practices, identifying generative territory in their mutual preoccupation with shaping provisional spaces. I suggest that architexting can be used as a tool for a spatial approach to historiography that is organised by site rather than time. In doing so, architexting seeks to reveal and celebrate diachronic communities separated by time but created and connected by the places they share. This thesis is in three parts. In the first, ‘Project Plan and Methodology,’ I provide an overview of my interdisciplinary approach. In the second, ‘Site Analysis,’ I excavate relevant theoretical fields including architectural theory, dramaturgy, historiography and cultural geography to construct a theoretical framework for architexting. The third section, ‘Portfolio,’ forms the practical output of this project and consists of three architexts: Blueprint, Perspective and Axonometric or How to Build a Place from Memory, each with accompanying critical reflections. While architexting is a methodology that may be applied to any building, this project specifically investigates the hidden histories of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow which, in 2018, underwent the most significant redevelopment in its 144-year history. My architexts have been created using material from oral histories and workshops with over sixty adults and young people connected to the Citizens theatre, as well as archival material from relevant collections held by the Scottish Theatre Archives at the University of Glasgow

    Grasp Your Pain: A Tangible Tool to Explore the Logging and Assessment of Pain

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    Pain is a subjective and innate experience that can be difficult to describe. Chronic pain is associated with decreased quality of life, and it is prevalent in cancer populations. With a growing elderly population, the global cancer burden is expected to rapidly advance in the coming years. Expressing pain and symptom experiences is essential for patients to receive proper treatment and care. Self-reporting tools are useful and reliable measures of patients' symptoms. A commonly used assessment form in palliative care is ESAS-r, the revised Edmonton Symptom Assessment System. It lets the patient rate a list of symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 10, depending on their intensity. Research suggests that ESAS-r only captures a snapshot of the patients' symptom profile, and that is burdensome to patients and clinical staff. There is a need for self-assessment tools that are easy to use, non-intrusive, and can be used in situ. The research in this thesis explores the use of a tangible tool (Grasp), and squeezing as an input method to log pain/symptoms experiences. Grasp consists of a small stone-like object. When squeezed, it logs the time and duration of the interaction. Squeezes are then visualized on an accompanying interface. Through a Mixed Methods Research approach, a pilot study and clinical trial were conducted. The former gathered participant (N=8) opinions on Grasp, and the use of squeeze duration to log experiences. The latter explored the implementation of Grasp alongside ESAS-r in a cancer ward (nurses = 6, patients = 8). Two broad research questions were examined: RQ1: How can tangible interaction through Grasp support the logging of experiences? and RQ2: How do palliative cancer patients and nurses experience Grasp as a tool for the logging, assessment, and communication of pain and symptoms compared to ESAS-r? Findings from the pilot suggest that there is potential in using Grasp and squeeze duration to log events, and that interacting with the tool potentially can help distract or externalize from negative experiences. Participants from both studies found Grasp easy to use, and visualizations intuitive and meaningful. Nurses and patients were generally satisfied with Grasp as a tool, and it helped paint a wider image of the patients' symptoms compared to ESAS-r alone. However, patients were sometimes too ill to use Grasp, and the research was limited by barriers related to clinical environments. Further research is needed to explore the potential of tangible interaction and squeezing as an input method with other patient groups. There is also the aspect of the affective interaction that should be investigated further.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF
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