Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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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 Augmented Dissent: The Affordances of ICTs for Citizen Protest (A Case Study of the Ukraine Euromaidan Protests of 2013-2014).(2016) Lokot, Tetyana; Oates, Sarah; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research project uses the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine to inform and shape a theory of augmented dissent to help explain the complex ways in which protest participants guided by the political, social, and cultural contexts engage in dissent augmented by ICTs in a reality where both the physical and the digital are used in concert. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize the use and perception of ICTs in protest activity using the communicative affordances framework. Through a mixed-method research approach involving interviews with protest participants, as well as qualitative and thematic analysis of online content from social media pages of several key Euromaidan protest communities, the research project examines the role ICTs played in the information and media landscape during the Euromaidan protest. The findings of the online content analysis were used to inform the questions for the 59 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with Euromaidan protest participants in Ukraine and abroad. The research findings provide in-depth insights about how ICTs were used and perceived by protest participants, and their role as vehicles for information and civic media content. The study employs the theoretical framework of social media affordances to interpret the data gathered during the interviews and content analysis to better understand how digital media augmented citizens’ protest activity through affording them new possibilities for dissent, and how they made meaning of said protest activity as augmented by ICTs. The findings contribute towards shaping a theory of digitally augmented dissent that conceptualizes the complex relationship between citizens and ICTs during protest activity as an affordance-driven one, where online and offline tools and activity merge into a unified dissent space and extend or augment the possibilities for action in interesting, and sometimes unexpected ways. Such a conceptual model could inform broader theories about civic participation and digital activism in the post-Soviet world and beyond, as ICTs become an inseparable part of civic life.Item Digital Alchemy: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Investigation of Digital Storytelling for Peace and Justice(2013) Gibbins, Thor; Hultgren, Francine; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the experiences of undergraduate students enrolled in an education I-Series (University of Maryland undergraduate courses designed to inspire innovation, imagination, and intellect) course, Good Stories: Teaching Stories for Peace and Justice. In this course students are asked to produce digital stories that project themes of peace and justice. The locus of this study focuses on the essential question: In what ways do participants world their experiences producing digital stories for peace and justice? The methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology is employed in order to elucidate interpretive understandings about digital storytelling for peace and justice in the experiences of nine undergraduates over the course of one semester. The metaphor of alchemy is used since the practice of alchemy entailed amalgamating base metals in the hopes of transmuting them into gold. Jung (1968) likens this process to our experience of becoming individuated, whole, and healthy human beings. Digital media amalgamates image sound and written text in order to enhance narrative, making it an apt metaphor since it captures the synergism inherent in both the metaphor of alchemy and the multimodality inherent in digital stories. The methodological practices for this inquiry employ van Manen's (1997) human science research. This inquiry elucidates the participants' experiences on being students of digital media in addition becoming agentive knowers capable of projecting digital stories for the purposes of peace and justice. The conspicuousness of developing the technological know-how of producing digital media also takes particular precedent in this study. Themes of the ways in which students are concerned by being students, producing digital stories the "right" way, and developing particular stances on their understandings of peace and justice are disclosed. Additionally, the pedagogical implications for designing teaching and learning of digital media are discussed. These implications focus on ways educators may develop pedagogical tact in engaging and apprenticing students in digital media. These pedagogical understandings may open possible opportunities for classrooms to be transformed into digital media studios where students develop critical stances through the practice of digitally designing narratives for the purposes of extending care, caring, and caring for others to possible global audiences.Item Representation(s): A Mutable Process for a Transitioning Urban Landscape(2009) LaCharite-Lostritto, Lisa; Ambrose, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To understand the medium is to understand the affects the medium has on the changes and the scale and form of human association and action over time, not only as the medium is being introduced, but also the unconscious and unforeseeable effects the cultural matrix within which the medium operates. Marshall McLuhan Difference is not simply the collapsing [or circulation] of identity, it is also the rendering of space and time as fragmented, transformable, interpenetrated, beyond any fixed formulation, no longer guaranteed by the a priori or by the universalisms of science. Elizabeth Grosz Media can be leveraged as a way to evaluate and inform the built environment. By using media as more than just a communicative necessity, media is capable of directing process. This process seeks to construct a representational framework and narrative through the investigation and translation of cultural, historical, and conceptual contexts. Architecture, as media, functions as a perceptual tool toward the fusion of process and a meta-physical and physical experience. This thesis asks the question: How can these complex contexts create a framework within which the media operates and informs the built environment? The validity of this research in the context of the culture of architectural education is to show that architecture is more than simply applied knowledge and skills translated through conventions of visual communication. Architecture is a way of seeing and thinking that requires understanding of media beyond the idea of tool and production to an idea of performance, process, and methodology.