Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University
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Browsing Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University by Author "Bell, Shannon M."
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Item Open Access Contemporary Hollywood and the Spirit of Hope: America, Celluloid, and the Desire (mis)called (dis)Utopia(2018-03-01) Ganjavie, Amir; Bell, Shannon M.As a recent article on The Raw Story suggests, contemporary filmmakers are becoming more interested in utopian genres than ever before. The Summit Entertainment films Divergent and Enders Game as well as Sony PicturesThe Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, 20 Century Foxs Maze Runner, TriStar Pictures Elysium were all released in 2013 or 2014 and could be described as utopian movies. In fact, the popularity of The Hunger Games is one of the main reasons why movie studios have become interested in movies that explore utopian themes. Thus, if the past several years saw cinema interested in wizards, werewolves, and vampires popularized byHarry Potter and Twilight, this fantasy has now given way to the time of utopian movies and especially dystopias with dark images, a situation which is not limited to American cinema. Snowpiercer (2013) and Les Combattants (2013) are just two examples of recent utopian movies developed outside of Hollywood. Granted, the relationship between cinema and utopia has a long history and is not limited to the contemporary period but this is the first time that cinema has given such serious attention to a political genre like utopia, so why is this happening? What can this interest tell us about the socioeconomic structure of our time? How do these movies respond to the shortcomings of modern society? What types of alternative societies do they represent? In order to answer these questions, I analyzed six contemporary American movies. My argument throughout this work has been that cinema has been associated with entertainment, escapism, and wish fulfillment (Dyer, 1981) ever since its very earliest origins. For audiences, engagement with cinema provides an opportunity to experience a different world which shows them the possibility of something better than the world in which they live, a reality which might otherwise seem to be unassailable. Thus, cinema creates a space for envisioning alternatives and harboring hopes and desires. As I argued here, dystopia has definitely become a dominant concept in recent decades, where dystopian visions clearly dominate the scene with utopian themes neglected.Item Open Access Plastic Publics(2024-03-16) Biddle, Erika Lauren; Bell, Shannon M.My dissertation offers an intellectual history of the various technological, aesthetic, affective, and overtly political encounters that modulate people—not so much as individuals but as connected and controllable social groups, as well as processes of locating and then reconfiguring ourselves within networks. This is what I have come to refer to as plastic publics, keeping in mind the double-meaning of plasticity—that it is at once about altering and holding form. I propose ‘rethinking’ cultural shifts in behavioral determinism (the shaping of people) over the last 150 years, tying them to relations with technology and developments in neuroscience, to understand the governance of plastic publics. What emerges is an understanding of control that extends beyond coercion and instead relies on the brain’s mechanisms for learning, understanding, building habits, and making decisions to program and compose publics. New technologies have allowed an intimacy of control that has been absent since humans self-organized in small social groups. This, I will argue, is the “dark side” of McLuhan’s global village. Developments that have taken place as part of industrial capitalism’s shift into consumer capitalism, a framework driven by mass consumption that peaked in the twentieth century, signaled a trend of denoetization, or the loss of the ability to think critically that foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic techniques at work/play in administering publics under the conditions of neurocapitalism. Digital networked technologies have altered the way information flows and how people communicate, but also the shape and composition of publics, in which we deem ourselves and become not subjects, but projects, always modulating. What has been emerging is a new form of social control that is conceptualized here as “incontinence.” We now have a neuroscientific framework that recognizes and seeks to understand the changes that occur when we plug into the rapid feedback mechanisms in networked culture, but we have yet to come to terms with the implications on a scale beyond the individual. If we want to reimagine the story of control, what we really want to do is reimagine the story of feedback.Item Open Access The Potential of Leaks: Mediation, Materiality and Incontinent Domains(2019-11-22) Kushinski, Alysse Verona; Bell, Shannon M.Leaks appear within and in between disciplines. While the vernacular implications of leaking tend to connote either the release of texts or, in a more literal sense, the escape of a fluid, the leak also embodies more poetic tendencies: rupture, release, and disclosure. Through the contours of mediation, materiality, and politics this dissertation traces the notion of the leak as both material and figurative actor. The leak is a difficult subject to account forit eludes a specific discipline, its meaning is fluid, and its significance, always circumstantial, ranges from the entirely banal to matters of life and death. Considering the prevalence of leakiness in late modernity, I assert that the leak is a dynamic agent that allows us to trace the ways that actors are entangled. To these ends, I explore several instantiations of leaking in the realms of media, ecology, and politics to draw connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Despite leaks threatening consequences, they always mark a change, a transformation, a revelation. The leak becomes a means through which we can challenge ourselves to reconsider the (non)functionality of boundariesan opening through which new possibilities occur, and imposed divisions are contested. However, the leak operates simultaneously as opportunity and threatit is always a virtual agent, at once stagnant and free flowing. Belying its figurative possibilities, the materiality of the leak is central to this project. Material in both philosophical and Marxist senses, leaking imbricates matter and actors in constellations of relations that bear potential in helping us comprehend a wide range of concerns. It is to these ends that I argue leaks provide both effective and affective means for performing interdisciplinarity. This project insists that whether they take form as data, images, crude oil, bodily fluids, or slips of the tongue, leaks share the same origin in logics of containment. In interrogating these logics of containment, I assert the potential in letting leak, a mode through which difference is not collapsed, but rather no longer policed.Item Open Access Visualizing Struggle: The Use of Imagery in the Continuing Story of the Black Lives Matter Movement(2023-08-04) Khayambashi, Shahbaz; Bell, Shannon M.Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag in 2013 to protest the death of Trayvon Martin and the lack of accountability by his murderer, George Zimmerman. However, it was with the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both murdered by police officers who were, in turn, not held accountable for their actions, that the movement truly took off, becoming the international movement it has become today. While the movement’s rise was depended on several variables, one of the most important aspects was its use of imagery. Whether images of the deceased who led to the birth of the movement, the images of protest that fueled it or the reactionary images that combated it, this protest movement was viewed by its audience through the pictorial turn. This dissertation follows the Black Lives Matter movement from its birth to the modern day, looking at its use of imagery to grow into what it is today, using visual and semiotic analyses to discuss the many different image-based aspects of the movement. Through this analysis, what becomes evident is that images are a powerful weapon in 21st century struggles. It does not matter if they are being used by protestors or by their opponents; images, whether photographs, videos or even low-effort internet memes, have a real ability to convince people of facts and change opinions. While this can be a positive—the topic of police brutality against Black people became a central topic of discussion because of the release of several videos of such incidents in a short span of time—many reactionary forces have learned of this power and have begun to use it to their own advantage. This is ultimately the more concerning matter here. While this dissertation is specifically about the use of imagery in the Black Lives Matter movement, the points made herein are just as applicable to not just many other contemporary protest movements, but also to the reactionary political strategies that control the western right-wing.