UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Consistent Sounds of War in Iraq: Iraqi Soundscapes 1979-2006(2024) Salive, Natalie; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the evolution of the Iraqi soundscape from the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1979 to the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, focusing on how sound has been employed as a tool of power, control, and resistance. Chapter One introduces the concept of sonic history, with a specific focus on Iraq's unique soundscapes during the Ba'athist regime. It examines the role of sound as an instrument of warfare and propaganda, delving into how Saddam's regime utilized sonic environments to cultivate a pervasive cult of personality and how changing technologies altered Iraq’s auditory experience. The second chapter provides a detailed analysis of the Ba'athi soundscapes, establishing the sonic contexts within which the regime operated. It discusses the sounds associated with sites of violence like Abu Ghraib, the regime's strategies of censorship, and the pervasive sounds of terror that became normalized during the Iran-Iraq War. The chapter also previews the sounds that foreshadowed the "Shock and Awe" campaign during the 1991 Gulf War. Chapter 3 continues the narrative into the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, examining how the invasion perpetuated and transformed the existing aural environments. The chapter highlights the sounds of military vehicles, weapons, and civilian life, contrasting the propagandistic "sounds of freedom" with the persistent terror experienced by the Iraqi populace. The chapter also revisits themes of censorship and the complex auditory experience of "freedom" in wartime. Finally, Chapter 4 concludes the study by reflecting on the continuity and change in Iraq’s soundscape across these pivotal historical moments, underscoring the role of sound in shaping Iraq’s modern history. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how sound operates within contexts of violence and power, particularly within the framework of modern irregular warfare.Item DIGITAL PLACE-MAKING AND PLATFORM POLITICS: HOW USERS TRANSFORMED AND RECODED THEIR LIVES ONLINE IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19(2024) Phipps, Elizabeth Brooke; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Digital Place-making and Platform Politics: How Users Transformed and Recoded their Lives Online in the Wake of COVID-19 examines the political & cultural turmoil at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where daily life for millions around the world shifted to digital platforms. Digital users turned to the unique affordances of these platforms for civic activism through what I term “digital place-making,” the rhetorical activity involved in cultivating digital places through specific technologies and practices. Drawing from an ecological rhetorical approach and an understanding of digital experiences as transplatform, Digital Place-making and Platform Politics utilizes a methodology that incorporates rhetorical space & place theory, textual analysis, visual analysis, digital ethnographic work, and “in situ” field work to capture the overlapping and simultaneous nature of place-making for digital users. How does digital place-making impact the relations between users, platforms, and political culture? To render digital place-making as a concept, this dissertation navigates through three case studies between 2020-2022. The first chapter looks at the video game platform Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and how users experiencing lockdown conditions in 2020 repurposed the platform as a site for political expression. This first study establishes the foundational relationship between infrastructure, user practices, and their engagement with broader political discourse through place-making. The second chapter builds upon this role of infrastructure and user practice creating place by looking at how the platform Twitch trains streamers on their platform to create places for community, and then how streamers leveraged these places for resistance and activism on the platform itself throughout 2021-2022. This second study illuminates the way rhetorical place is constructed through both discourse and infrastructure, and how digital place possesses vulnerabilities unique to the condition of digitality. The third chapter addresses Epic Games’ fraught commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington, held in 2021 on the popular video game platform Fortnite. This final study serves as a capstone illustration of the unique vulnerabilities that digital place-making poses for public memory and political discourse.Item DISINFORMATION THAT ENTERTAINS: THE ALT-RIGHT’S USE OF POPULAR AND POLITICAL CULTURE STRATEGIES(2024) Montgomery, Fielding Edmund; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project takes seriously the nested relationship of popular culture and political culture, highlighting how that relationship has promulgated alt-right disinformation in the long Trump era. Throughout this study, strategies of conspiracy, horror, and dog whistles are examined, as well as considering audiovisual concepts like realism and mimesis. Such alt-right disinformation establishes reactionary frames of racism, misogyny, and anti-governance. This work looks at both sides of the popular/political culture relationship, examining cinematic films, political campaign advertisements, and social media posts. I conclude by offering satire as one potential counterstrategy against alt-right disinformation that also resides in the nested relationship between popular and political culture.Item Exploring Changes in Communication between Native English Speakers (NES) and Non-native English Speakers (NNES) with the Aid of Facial Expression Recognition Feedback in Group Videoconferencing(2023) Yang, Jialun; Lee, Heera; Master in Information Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the frequent communication challenges in group meetings between native English speakers (NES) and non-native English speakers (NNES) is confusion experienced by the NNES while communicating in English with the NES. To address this, I proposed integrating a facial expression recognition tool with a video conferencing platform to help NES enhance their ability to identify NNES’ confused moments and promote effective communication with NNES. The study was conducted on a video conferencing platform to investigate how precisely the NES and the facial expression recognition tool identify the confused moments of the NNES in comparison with the self-report of the NNES. Furthermore, this study explored the impact of such identification on how the NES adjusted their communication approach when interacting with the NNES in subsequent group meetings. The findings revealed that the self-reports of NNES played a significant role over the facial expression recognition tool, enabling the NES to better perceive the confused moments of the NNES. As a result, the NES gained a better understanding of the NNES and improved their ability to communicate effectively during the meeting. Although using the facial expression recognition tool to detect the NNES’ confusion during the meeting was underestimated by the NES in this study, it provided me a valuable opportunity to investigate the context of how NNES, NES, and the tool identify the confused moments of the NNES. This highlighted the importance of considering the NNES’ self-reports and their facial expressions within the context to improve the current facial expression recognition tool.Item Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage(2023) Starr, Brittany Noelle Schoedel; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga. While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public discourse. Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins), cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically, and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists model through their digital rhetorics on social media is part of a genealogy of feminist rage that envisions and enacts a more inclusive, more livable world.Item Living a Participatory Life: Reformatting Rhetoric for Demanding, Digital Times(2023) Salzano, Matthew; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Living a Participatory Life explores how people navigate demanding, digital times where social movements and digital media meet, in the context of what media scholars refer to as the participatory condition. The participatory condition describes how participation is an inherent, inescapable condition of digitality with its always-on and always-prompting media; it is distinctly different from the participatory cultures theorized of the blogosphere and Web 2.0. In the participatory condition, the digital is demanding, and our demands are digitized. What does it mean to live a participatory life in the participatory condition? How should we practice rhetoric (as a productive and critical art) during demanding, digital times? To aid in answering these questions, this dissertation offers a format theory of participation. I theorize four key concepts—parameters, imperatives, trans-situations, and sensibilities—to define participation as a formatted rhetorical practice that modulates affect and sensibilities within a formatted ecology. In the following three chapters, I locate three participatory sensibilities from advocates for social change across intersectional issues: Disparticipants, offering participatory dissent at the Women’s March; Fictocritics, generating criticism of the YouTube manosphere; and Installectuals, transforming Instagram during the Summer 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism. Each illustrates the ramifications of the participatory condition and how advocates for social change navigate it. The dissertation concludes with a provocation to learn from these sensibilities and begin reformatting our own participatory lives.Item Féminisme sur Instagram : un bilan mitigé(2022) Danos, Clara Clémentine Alice; Orlando, Valérie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online feminism was birthed alongside the Internet in its infant stages. With the years, it evolved into a virtual fight on social media and especially on Instagram. The goal of this thesis is to analyze content created by French feminists on Instagram and decide if it could be identified as a fourth wave of feminism in which women would rule the virtual world emancipating themselves from patriarchy in virtual life, in hopes of a more equitable society offline. Presently, alterations in combat against this ubiquitous foe are becoming more accessible, pedagogical, and aesthetic. However, these adaptations corrupt the core of feminism itself; lost consistence in the process with a lack of references, novelty, and anti-capitalist spirit. These inhibitors actively preventing the progression of a fourth wave. Consequently, feminists currently navigate the parameters of male engineered social media and experiencing an Instagram that is complicit in masculinist abuse through internal politics and outside actors.Item Beyond Resistance: Performing Postdramatic Protest(2022) Scrimer, Victoria Lynn; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As its point of departure, this dissertation takes stock of the fact that activist performances like sit-ins, marches, banner drops, rallies, and occupations are deeply informed by dramatic theatre in both the way activists design these actions and in the way audiences read them. The dissertation argues that these performative arrangements, narratives, images, and tropes are naturalized to the extent that they have come to constitute a sort of Gramscian common sense that can limit our ability to imagine other ways of thinking and being. The dissertation seeks a conceptual alternative to those limitations. Combining performance analysis, interviews with artists and activists, and autoethnographic accounts of my own experiences as an environmental activist, the dissertation illustrates the limitations of dramatic representation in activist performance and then explores how Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre—theatre that eschews the hallmarks of dramatic theatre—might provide alternative models for activism and new ways to talk about and understand the successes and failures of activist performances as they play out in the 21st century.Item Transversal Media: Power, Peril, and Potential in the Ever-Expanding 3D Multiverse(2021) Bauer, DB; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, communities of practice, and applications. With highly compatible file formats, they move across a multitude of 3D-friendly devices, like virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality projections, and now with the 3D printer, can enter the physical world, more often than not, as plastic. Transversal technologies, like 3D scanning and computer-aided design (CAD), grant an unprecedented control and access, in both magnitude and kind, to the spatial, material, and physical world. Because of this, media illustrate the biopolitical complexity and nuance of the term capture—long used in media praxis—whose meaning can imply both a desire to do justice to a subject, often by means of representational accuracy, and also a desire to do violence to by means of seizing, possessing, or trapping. In turn, this project explores the many affective, epistemological, and aesthetic contours of meaning and impact when transversal media are read through the lens of capture. Organized by five major keywords—making, transversal, play, capture, and preservation—this project illustrates the far-reaching impact of this particular media type that does particular things in this particular moment. Specifically, this project coins the term, transversal media, to discuss this unique media ontology and concretize it through hands-on creative practice and the work of artists, designers, scholars, and activists by centering the methodological richness of hands-on making, creativity, and play. It also addresses the connections between technical affordance and theory, culture, and ethics, as media scholars have modeled with other emerging media formats of the past, like McLuhan on television, Deleuze on film, and Sontag on photography. This approach reveals how various interface affordances and applied practices converse with, and with varying implications, the people, places, and things they mediate. Overall, this project addresses how cultural ideologies are reflected in the design, practice, and rhetoric of 3D transversal media, and how this media genre pushes notions of materiality, embodiment, and power into new realms of thinking, doing, and being.Item CONTAINER TECHNOLOGIES AS LOGISTICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: HOW MARIE KONDO, THE CONTAINER STORE, HOLLINGER BOXES, AND DOCKER SHAPE OUR WORLD(2021) Bickoff, Kyle; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is situated at the intersection of digital studies, critical information studies, and cultural studies—I argue that containers undergird the logistical infrastructures of modern capitalism and social life, and they shape the way we think. By understanding our world through this framework, we can apply the perspective to understand problems we face in memory institutions, cloud computing, the retail sector, the culture industry, and even in the ongoing global pandemic, COVID-19. The first chapter considers physical containers, with a focus on the ‘Hollinger box’ (an omnipresent cardboard storage box at memory institutions), which has a design history rooted in World War II and the US’s fight against fascism. The second chapter focuses on Docker, a digital container system, which accelerates containers in cloud computing—I present a protohistory of digital containerization in computing history and look to the role of speed to accelerate information and global capital. The third chapter locates its discussion at a retail site, The Container Store, which facilitates consumerism and the commodification of containment. The fourth chapter looks to Marie Kondo and her KonMari Method. Kondo’s ‘joy’ is rooted in consumer culture, individualism, and storage in containers; her ‘tidying festivals’ are celebrations of capitalism. By tracing the interconnected histories behind these container systems, the dissertation demonstrates how the logic of containerization becomes embedded in our memory institutions, digital technologies, retail systems, and consumer culture. Containers in our society are subsumed by preexisting systems in capitalism: logistics and consumerism, in particular. Container technologies play a central role in our logistical infrastructures: wielded properly, containers hold the power to help us resolve many of our most pressing problems, and they can help us to improve the way we allocate resources equitably, rather than the reverse. But containers do not afford us a quick fix—rather, they offer us insight and a framework to understand the world we live in. Containers, when understood as key to the logistical infrastructure that undergird modern life, offer us the tools to reorganize our world and build it into something better.