Rescripting Father-Daughter Dynamics: New Masculinities and Relational Possibilities in Post-Apocalyptic Video Games

The Last of Us and The Walking Dead video games deploy father-daughter relationship pairings between their main characters in ways that disrupt the hegemonic patriarchal understandings of those very roles, though in different ways. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead utilize paternal mentorship in ways that subvert patriarchal ideology’s established patterns for gendered behavior through role-switching and alternative models of masculine care respectively. Where video games too often still cater to an audience that is heterosexual, white, and male, these games feature narratives that challenge the heteropatriarchal messaging common to this medium. The Last of Us does this by disrupting the gender binary of man as strong/protector and woman as weak/protected while The Walking Dead presents players with methods of masculine and/or fatherly behavior that can best be understood as alternative. Additionally, in a medium where Black men are either egregiously misrepresented or distinctly absent, The Walking Dead puts caring, sensitive Black fatherhood front and center

Image Trends in Corporate Environmental Reporting: Bolstering Reputation through Transparency or Widening the “Sustainability Gap”?

As companies discover the monetary benefits of a positive environmental image, a proliferation of green imaging confounds the public sphere. The consequence becomes the disarticulation of terms like environmental excellence, sustainable development, and minimum environmental harm. Because the oversaturation of greening efforts has elicited public distrust, stakeholders need timely and accurate information regarding environmental claims. As a major vehicle for communicating these efforts, corporate environmental reports (CERs) are laden with colorful and sublime images. This study examines the functionality of images found in CERs from 27 industry leaders, applying Sonja Foss’s tenets of visual rhetorical analysis to identify the nature and function of the images and offer an evaluation based on emergent themes. Because images are increasingly important to corporate transparency, the study concludes with several best practice recommendations to serve as ethical image design strategies and to reflect the ways companies address impactful operations

Alien Registration- Harmom, Sarah (Ashland, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/27394/thumbnail.jp