Understanding Unfolding Change and the Value of Strategic Unification in Recent USU Information Technology Functional Realignment

This is a qualitative case study of the 2005-2008 Utah State University Information Technology reorganization from the perspective of key change advocates. The study identified and documented the unfolding change process involved in the reorganization in terms of dissatisfaction, executive changes, internal executive strategic planning, implementation and initial impacts, and continuous in situ strategic planning. The study also answered a set of supporting concluding questions indicating increased value to the institution in areas of customer service and confidence, organization, financial resources, planning and policy, security, and increased/improved services and service functions

Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue

Rethinking misogyny: men’s perceptions of female power in dating relationships

My PhD research explores the role of men’s subjective accounts of interactions with the women they date, especially with reference to whether they experience women to have power in dating relationships. It comprises a qualitative analysis of the responses gained from semi-­‐structured interviews conducted with 20 British men and 10 Pick Up Artists (men who attended classes to learn how to increase their confidence when dating women) all aged 21-­‐40. Current debates around gendered power are largely focused on female subjectivities, and are core to political and theoretical differences between second and third-­‐ wave/post-­‐feminisms. I argue that in order to understand the workings of (heterosexual) gendered power relations, we must pay attention not only to issues of structural power but also to men’s perceptions of the lived experiences of such relationships. At a time of increased uncertainty about gendered identity and increased pressure to see the ‘self’ as a project, such perceptions may be both very varied and at variance with accepted structural analyses of gendered power. Following three introductory chapters in which I trace the debates around masculinity and a contemporary social order focused on risk and individuality, I analyse the interviewees’ responses in order to explore how the men position themselves within the gender and dating discourses that are available to them. The effects of what Ulrich Beck described as ‘individualism’ and the use of ‘constructed certitude’ are explored, as is how the men deal with conflicting ideas borne out of living in an age when ideals from both hegemonic and inclusive masculinities co-­‐exist. Whether men acknowledge their own insecurities or whether they focus on perceived external triggers, such as female culpability, and whether men respond to insecurities by focusing on an active process of overcoming them (thus remaining inside hegemonic ideas), is also a focus. Subject areas explored include the role of homosocial behaviour in dating, the gendered dating process, the power of female beauty, men's bodily anxieties, media representations of dating, men's body image, unwanted pregnancies and female aggression. I conclude that we cannot dismiss men's perceptions of female power in dating as mistaken, as has been argued. If men's realities include such perceptions, then their un/willingness to relinquish 'more' power needs to be understood if equality between the sexes is to be increased

Power and performativity in prison: exploring male sex workers' experiences and performances of gender and sexuality pre/during/post-incarceration

This study explores the narratives of men who become male sex workers after being in prison. This study looks at prison as a fluid space for sexual expression and gender performativity, which is ironic given the view of prison as punitive and repressive. Sex within the South African prison system is silenced and taboo particularly within the Number prison gang where sex is heavily regulated, ritualized and fiercely guarded. The research question asks how do men who are or become male sex workers construct and perform their gendered and sexual identities in prison and on the street? This qualitative study employs the organizing metaphor of dramaturgy to explore how prison as a social setting (stage) impacts on the gendered and sexual performances of men (actors) who have been incarcerated. Drawing on Foucault's theories of the repressive hypothesis and peripheral sexualities (1990), Butler's theory of performativity (1990) and Gagnon and Simon's scripting theory (1973) this study illustrates theoretically how prison sex culture and male sex work can be theorized from a feminist standpoint perspective. This feminist study is located in the social constructionist paradigm. It is underpinned by grounded theory and narrative methodology to explore the narratives of men who have been incarcerated and continue into sex work post-release. Biographical interviews were conducted with 15 men who were participants in a male sex work support group. Findings revealed two overarching themes in the narratives that explain how men construct and perform their gendered and sexual identities in prison. Renegotiation was the process where the subject engaged in an internalized monologue with self, constantly exploring and (re)constructing the gendered and sexual self in response to the shifting contexts of prison and the streets. Negotiation was the process where the subject engaged in an external dialogue with others. Through interactions with others, they were able to perform gender and sexuality publicly. By framing it within the discourse of dramaturgy, this study shows an alternative view of prison sex culture. (Re)imagining prison as the 'stage', prisoners as the 'actors', prison rituals as the 'script' and identity performances as the 'act', we can begin to envision an alternative script and narrative of prison unfolding

British and American Chinese children's negotiation of popular cultural texts in bilingual and bicultural contexts

This PhD thesis presents an investigation of how British Chinese and American Chinese children, situated in bilingual and bi-cultural context, negotiate the meaning of a popular culture text, Yugioh within their sociocultural practices. The research draws on two theoretical frameworks, reception analysis and New Literacy Studies. Data were collected from surveys, diaries, participant observations and semi-structured interviews with children and parents in the UK and US, over a sixteen-month period from October, 2002 and February, 2004. It is argued that the children’s appropriation of popular culture texts in cross-cultural context is subject to the interwoven effects of a variety of and interconnected situational factors and follows the pattern of product life cycle. In each phase of product life cycle, the children draw on textual and symbolic meanings of Yugioh texts to represent their understandings and interactions with their social world. The analysis shows the textual meanings are used to facilitate the practice of Yugioh activities and literacy learning while the symbolic meanings are to serve different purposes in the children’s socialisation, identity formation and childhood development