POLITICS AND PERFORMATIVE AGENCY IN NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which social media in Nigeria functions through online signifying practices as a strategy of demarginalization and subaltern resistance. I engage with this perspective by framing Web 2.0 platforms as enablers of citizens’ right to public and performative speech. Interested in the ways in which netizens imagine the nation and perform political selves and identities through viral and popular images on social media, my dissertation underpins a reading of social media that is grounded in an expanded conception of speech, visual and/or verbal. This approach enables me to take cognizance of the voices and perspectives secured by the decentralized capacity of digital media for everyday citizens with access to the Internet. Engaging with how social media re-centers alternative perspectives to prevailing orthodoxies, I explore the ways in which marginal groups, mostly relegated to the periphery of governmental power, emerge in performative spaces of public discourses through digital cultural signifiers such as the selfie, viral Internet memes, and humorous political cartoons posted online. I show that despite the limitations of cyberspace and the uneven access to internet technologies in some parts of Nigeria, social media is a discursive, if not contested, space of cultural production from which postcolonial subjects ‘author’ media narratives that revise, resist, and challenge exclusion and marginality. By analyzing the significations of user-generated cultural forms, mostly fictional images (Internet memes) and actual performative representations (the selfie) produced as vectors of digital activism and resistance, the dissertation highlights the varied ways in which social media functions as a rearticulating mechanism for a more inclusive appearance of young people and women in Nigeria’s public sphere. I analyze the production and circulation of these images within a framework that positions them as supplemental performative strategies to digital activism. Extrapolating the economy of meanings inherent in these images begins, for me, by unsettling the postmodern assumption that mediatized culture is futile for resistance. The refutation of such arguments is necessary to consolidate the claim that the capacity for agency and representation, which social media affords excluded or oppressed populations is more pertinent than the positivist and teleological expectations some scholars have of digital articulations of dissent

Legal Shadows: An Examination of Evidence in State v. Zimmerman

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-century Cinema: Cosmopolitan Hopes in the Films of Globalisation

Esta tesis doctoral explora discursos utópicos cosmopolitas—ecológicos e igualitarios—en el cine en lengua inglesa del siglo XXI. El primer capítulo examina el estado de la cuestión de la utopía en los estudios utópicos, la sociología y los estudios fílmicos. El segundo capítulo aborda una revisión de expresiones de utopismo cosmopolita en películas de tres periodos históricos distintos con el fin de contextualizar el renacimiento de la utopía en el cine contemporáneo. En concreto, se analizan una selección de textos fílmicos del periodo comprendido entre los inicios de la industria cinematográfica a finales del siglo XIX hasta la década de 1920, el cine reivindicativo de los años sesenta y la inclinación antiutópica del cine producido desde 1970 hasta el fin de la década de los noventa. Los tres capítulos siguientes combinan el análisis teórico y textual de películas contemporáneas, partiendo de perspectivas concretas—espacial, ontológica y política. El capítulo tres trata el renacimiento de horizontes utópicos cosmopolitas en los espacios ecocríticos de películas apocalípticas contemporáneas como Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). El capítulo cuatro se centra en protagonistas fílmicos que representan transformaciones ontológicas guiadas por ideales ecológicos y de compromiso social, como es el caso del personaje principal en The East (Zal Batmanglij, 2013). Por último, el capítulo cinco analiza estrategias políticas ecofeministas y cooperativas en la serie fílmica The Hunger Games (2012-2015) dentro del marco contextual de los movimientos sociales globales contemporáneos. En su conjunto, la tesis argumenta que, tras un fin de siglo marcadamente antiutópico, cinematográficamente hablando, un gran número de películas contemporáneas articulan discursos utópicos cosmopolitas que plantean la necesidad de desarrollar marcos sociopolíticos, modelos de progreso y modos de comportamiento individuales que nos conduzcan a un futuro global sostenible e igualitario. Este horizonte cosmopolita se presenta de forma recurrente en las películas analizadas como una alternativa a filosofías y paradigmas político-económicos neoliberales y patriarcales, basados en lógicas dialécticas, opresivas y extractivas.<br /

The great delusion

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of nature, and how to visualize the imperceptible

New Chinglish and the Post-Multilingualism challenge: Translanguaging ELF in China

Building on the extensive ELF research that aims to reconceptualise English as a resource that can be appropriated and exploited without allegiance to its historically native speakers, this article explores the issue of English in China by examining New Chinglish that has been created and shared by a new generation of Chinese speakers of English in China and spread through the new media. This new form of English has distinctive Chinese characteristics and serves a variety of communicative, social and political purposes in response to the Post-Multilingualism challenges in China and beyond. I approach New Chinglish from a Translanguaging perspective, a theoretical perspective that is intended to raise fundamental questions about the validity of conventional views of language and communication and to contribute to the understanding of the Post-Multilingualism challenges that we face in the twenty-first century

Otro Mundo es Posible - Transcultural Tongues and Times of Change

In an era of economic globalization shaped by hegemonic capitalism, resistance movements introduce different alternatives for a life beyond capitalism. The powerful and dominant system logic criticizes such movements for being utopian dreamers with no pragmatic sense of plausible social change. The 'ontology of the possible' for emancipatory social change is dominated by the coloniality of power and epistemic violence of modernity. Time becomes a powerful measurement tool developed by Western clocks in order to measure the successes and failures of social movements and categorize their impact on social change. Based on the analysis of an ethnographic research with the campaign for Marichuy in Mexico, I argue that this indigenous movement constructs a conception of time related to social change, which challenge the Western notion of a measurable evolutionary timeline. Such iconoclastic strategy of indeterminacy becomes their emancipatory potential, which envisions the possibilities for emancipatory social change. The purpose of this study is to contribute to a global conversation with scholarship and activism. Through a combination of theoretical literature and ethnographic data material, this thesis intends to challenge the status quo conception of time horizons for change

The investigation of murder in France and England: a comparative account

This thesis – based on 13 months' fieldwork observing specialized murder squads and justice personnel - examines the processes and practices of murder investigation in France and England. There is relatively little, particularly ethnographic, research in this field and my work is - to my knowledge - the first comparison of how these countries, often contrasted as instances of the archetypal inquisitorial and adversarial criminal justice systems, respond in practice to criminal homicide. The thesis includes a detailed analysis of two similar cases that occurred in the French and English research sites. The cases are followed from the discovery of the body to the end of the trial. Highlighting two emblematic events within each process - the case conference in England and the reconstitution (or reconstruction) in France - I also explore the epistemological and sociological assumptions behind investigative procedures. Although some of the activities observed in the two countries were similar, key differences were also found in the methods by which the investigations were progressed and recorded, the involvement of detectives at various stages of the investigation, the manner in which the media were used, and the way in which the offender and victim were treated - all of which affected how the investigators viewed their work and the nature of what formed the substance of the cases. A key theme discussed is the way the words used to describe similar processes and roles revealed the different ways in which the two countries viewed the criminal justice process. In my conclusion, I suggest that part of the reason for the differences relates to the way the two societies conceive of the criminal. In England the criminal is seen as someone outside of society and this attitude to criminality affects all those who deal with it – including murder investigators. In France, crime and the investigation of murder has an accepted role in 'normal' life