Recent Theses and Dissertations

Full documents of recent theses and dissertations are available electronically through ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst or ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database.

 

Dissertations

2007

• Good women becoming 'queens': Young mothers on welfare as cultural readers, Kennaria Charlott Brown

• The Lacanian spectator: Lacanian psychoanalysis and the cinema, Ke-Ming Lin

• Accounting for taste: Film criticism, canons, and cultural authority 1996--2006, Jonathan D Lupo

• Social protest, freedom, and play as rebellion, Carmen L McClish

• Trait aggression and style of video game play: The effects of violent video game play on aggressive thoughts, Angela Paradise

• Finnish cultural discourses about the mobile phone communication, Saila Poutiainen

• Mass media appropriations: Communication, culture, and everyday social life, Michelle Scollo

2006

• Psychoanalyzing communication: Language, subjectivity, symbolization, Garnet C Butchart

• All of us Americanos: Cultural exhibition and the rise of Latina/os within a national imaginary, Esteban del Rio

• 'Real women' and the struggle against spiritual forces of darkness: A transnational feminist analysis of Concerned Women for America, Kirsten Lynn Isgro

• Active voice and community engagement: Transforming United States public service media through strategic communication, Alicia M Kemmitt

• Becoming visible: Queer in postsocialist Slovakia, Viera Lorencova

• Emotion at work: Stories of teamwork, stress, and professionalism, Mark A Mierswa

2005

• The visibility professionals: The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the cultural politics of mainstreaming, Vincent A Doyle

• 'Framing an execution': Death, lies, and videotape. ABC '20/20' and the rhetoric of law and order in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Thomas N Gardner

• Applied theatre in corrections: Community, identity, learning and transformation in the facilitated, collaborative processes of performative, artistic praxis, Janna L Goodwin

• Money makes a family: A genealogy of female-headed families, welfare and media representations, Janice L Haynes

• The green car: Television automobile advertising and the environmental attitudes of television viewers, Will Hughes

• Policy and culture in the digital age: A cultural policy analysis of the United States commercial radio industry, Nina B Huntemann

• Communication and the grammars of child protection: An analysis of interactions between social workers and their clients, Francois Huot

• 'When words fail, music speaks': How communication transforms identity through performance at the Berkshire Hills Music Academy (Massachusetts), Lauren Benotti Mackenzie

• Action movie Arabs and the American call to endless war: The role of American Orientalism in organizing the United States 'response' to the 9/11 attacks, Nessim John Watson

2004

• Selling sexual liberation: Women-owned sex toy stores and the business of social change, Lynn Comella

• Exploring the complexities of personal ideologies, media literacy pedagogy and media literacy practice, Amy M Damico

• Strategies of the self: Negotiating cultural identities in anglophone and allophone Montreal (Quebec), Alissa Gail Sklar

• Deliberation and democracy: Ethnography of rhetoric in a New England town meeting, Rebecca M Townsend

• The prisons outside and the prisons in our heads: Television and the representation of incarceration, William Yousman

2003

• Fast friends and queer couples: Relationships between gay men and straight women in North American popular culture, 1959--2000, James L Allan

• Recovering trauma: An ethnographic study of women's storytelling within contemporary support group environments, Alpha Selene Anderson Delap

• Cultural production and Zionist ideology: The case study of Gesher Theatre in Israel, Olga Gershenson

• Reading Lacan: Structure, ideology, and identity (Jacques Lacan), Guan-Hua Huang

• The desire to see: Western iconoclasm and the return of the empty image, Dora E Martinez-Ramos

2002

• A Kenneth Burke lexicon: A reader's guide to selected terms in the major works of Kenneth Burke, 1931--1972, Charles Francis Carroll

• The communication of trauma in media culture: A poststructural analysis of women's experience of gender-based violence and healing, Heather Marie Karjane

• Whose nation is it anyway? Nationalism and the metaphorics of secular subjectivity (India, Partha Chatterjee, Jacques Derrida), Satish Kumar Kolluri

• Oral, literate, and television viewers' ways with health issues, Carol Melhem Moufarrej

• Communicating environment: Cultural discourses of place in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, Eric L Morgan

• Graphic design/graphic dissent: Towards a cultural economy of an insular profession, Matthew Alan Soar

• Stories matter: Media influence on Asian American identities and interracial relationships, Chyng-Feng Sun

• Women's ways of speaking about menopause and hormone replacement therapy: An American discourse on personhood, Cynthia Anne Suopis

2001

• Exploring the meaning of work: A CMM analysis of the grammar of working among Acadian-Americans, John Chetro Szivos

• Recovery culture: The promotion of depression and consumption of mental health technologies in contemporary social practices, Paula M Gardner

• New technology, old medium: Internet, television, and audience, Oh-Hyeon Lee

• Atalanta's sisters: Sport, gender, and technology in popular press, 1921--1996, Susan C Leggett

• The Black, Jewish, other video dialogue: A case study of the social construction of transformative discourse, Rozanne T Leppington

• Mapping the pre-history of cyberspace and the making of social movement computer networks, 1973--1993, Brian Martin Murphy

• Communicative practices of Yiddish-speaking Jewish elders on South Miami Beach (Florida), Joel Saxe

• Producing the gay market: Sex, sexuality, and the gay professional-managerial class, Katherine Elizabeth Sender

• The modes of social emergences and the transformations of Taiwanese oppositional movements in the process of imperialist and capitalist stratification: A Deleuze-Guattari analysis (Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari), Tsu-Chuen Yang

2000

• Discriminating technologies: Personal information in an age of computer profiling, Greg Elmer

• Media literacy in cyberspace: Learning to critically analyze and evaluate the Internet, Julie Danielle Frechette

• A social constructionist perspective on the Chinese lian/mian (face?) practices, Wenshan Jia

• Popular belief in gender-based communication differences and relationship success, Ann Michelle Johnson

• Owning culture: Authorship, ownership and intellectual property law, Kembrew McLeod

• Media images of Africa and African Americans' attitudes toward Africa, Ekra Miezan

 

Theses

2007

• Trophy Children Don’t Smile: Fashion Advertisements For Designer Children’s Clothing In Cookie Magazine, Chris Boulton

• Immigrant Perceptions of Advertising amid Acculturation Levels, Stress and Motivation, Qiao Lan

• Maximizing Masculinity: A Textual Analysis of Maxim Magazine, Kirsten Wisneski

2005

BERGSTROM, Andrea M. "From Fantasy Dates to Elimination Ceremonies: A Content Analysis of Gender, Sex, and Romance on Reality Television."

CHELARU, Iris S. "Behind the Virtual Wall: Information Society Policy in Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine."

ZENG, Ya. "College Students' Adoption of Instant Messaging, Online Shopping, and Music/Video Downloading."

2004

CHASE, Gordon L. "Discourses of Independence and Interdependence: The Construction of Bermudian National Identity."

PARADISE, Angela. "Just a Word from Your Sponsor?: The Commercialization of Children's Public Television."

2003

SOUSA, Arthur. "A Path Formed of Words: Native North Americans and Their Languages."

2002

GOODWIN, Janna. "Coordinated Management of Meaning in Productive Post Show: Exploring a Method for Audience Research."

MACLEOD, Erna L. "Negotiating Nationhood: History, Cultural Identity, and Representation at Fortress of Louisburg National Historic Site."

2001

CAMPBELL, John E. "Guts and Muscles and Bears, OH MY!: The Body, Embodied Identity, and Queer Erotic Space Online."

IONESCU, Sanda. "Television's Contribution to the Erosion of Social Capital: The Cultivation Perspective."

OBERACKER, J. Scott. "Mediating Masculinity and the Films of John Sayles."

2000

BENOTTI, Lauren F. "Alternative Modes of Cultural Expression: Viewing Performances of Basque Nationalism and Identity from Communication Perspective."

KEMMITT, Alicia M. "Viewing the Troubles: Irish-American Audience Interpretations Political Violence."

CLICK, Melissa A. "Who Dunnit?: The Utility of Theorizing (In)Visible Identities in Feminist Action."

DESILVA, Melanie R. "Knowledge and Power within Natural Childbirth Discourse: Feminist Interrogations, Theoretical Considerations and Practical Concerns."

REYES, Ian. "The Self in Sound."

SCOLLO, Michelle A. "Living Music of 'Museum Piece'?: An Ethnographic Study of the 'Debate over Opera Translation in the U.S.'"