Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University
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Item Open Access A Genealogy of Consumer Surveillance: From the First Public Market to Eatons Department Store to Amazon(2022-03-03) Nasirzadeh, Bahar; Elmer, GregConsumer surveillance has intensified over time and across differing forms of consumption space and spatial arrangement, which in turn raises the question of what explains the historical changes in the modalities of consumer surveillance. Contemporary surveillance literatures focus primarily on the current phenomenon with little consideration of the historical processes upon which the changes in the scope and intensity of the modalities of consumer surveillance were made possible. My study employs Foucauldian genealogical methodology as a system of inquiry to map the historical transformation in the modalities of consumer surveillance, by utilizing archival records, across three different consumption spaces in key stages of retail development: the first regulatory public market in the Town of York during the pre-industrial period, Eatons department store in the industrial economy, and Amazon that coincided with the rise of information economy. Conversely, contemporary theories of surveillance generally approach the intensification question by focusing on the surveillance-space axis or surveillance-consumption axis, and the spatiality of consumer surveillance is reduced to Foucauldian disciplinary panopticon. Utilizing Foucaults theories of power and governmentality and his intriguing account of the role of space in the exercise of power, my genealogical project examines the intersection of surveillance-space-consumption to understand the intensification of consumer surveillance over time across the three spaces under study. In my genealogical project, I identify five key moments pertaining to differing modalities of consumer surveillance: marketization of space, standardization of consuming bodies, statistification of consumers, virtualization of consumption, and AI inhabitation in consumer spaces. My genealogical project demonstrates that spatiality and spatialization are a recurring issue in differing modalities of consumer surveillance over time. Yet, the spatial techniques have changed and become more complex to augment the scope and intensity of monitoring and gaining of new knowledge about consumers and consumption, as part of long-standing efforts to manage the unpredictable dynamics of consumer behaviour by attaining control over all aspects of consumers life.Item Open Access Abandonware, Commercial Expatriation and Post-Commodity Fan Practice: A Study of the Sega Dreamcraft(2014-07-09) Deeming, Scott; Lessard, Bruno;This thesis explores the nature of digital gaming platforms once they have been expatriated from the consumer marketplace and have been relegated to obsolescence. In this state, abandonware becomes a site for creative interventions by active audiences, who exploit, hack and modify these consoles in order to accommodate a range of creative practices. As part of the digital toolkit for fan production, the Sega Dreamcast has become a focal point for fan based video game remix practices, whereby fan creators appropriate imagery and iconography from popular media to create new works derivative of these franchises. These fan practices subvert the proprietary protocols of digital platforms, re-contextualizing them as devices for creative intervention by practitioners, who distribute their works and the knowledge necessary to produce them, through online communities.Item Open Access Affective and Intimate Ties Between BTS and ARMY: K-pop, Fandom, and the Feminine Gaze(2023-12-08) Schestak, Erika Shauna; Mecija, CaseyK-pop as a part of global popular culture, has had its texts viewed through the lens of local norms and imaginaries in many national contexts, sometimes to the detriment of idol groups and their fans. This thesis examines how race and gender have shaped the reception of K-pop in North America using BTS and their fans, ARMY, as a case study. Through a content analysis of BTS’ music videos and interviews with Canadian ARMYs, this study found that the aesthetics and gendered embodiment in BTS’ music videos align with a feminine gaze and that there is an affective and intimate bond between BTS and ARMY founded on shared (digital) space. Additionally, this thesis concluded that in North American contexts, male K-pop idols are entangled in racial and sexual imaginaries and stereotypes and that young and feminine K-pop fans are infantilized and pathologized by ‘fangirl’ discourses.Item Open Access American Girl: A Critical Inquiry into Dolls, Childhood, and Consumer Culture(2020-08-11) Kirshner, Mirah Jennifer; Podnicks, ElizabethThrough a theorization and analysis of the American Girl doll brand, in this dissertation I illustrate the mutually constructing connection between childhood and consumer culture. There are several elements that contextualize my work including historical research on and a contemporary theorizing of childhood, dolls, motherhood, and consumer culture. As part of my study, I look to historical accounts of dolls, childhood, and consumer culture starting from the late nineteenth century. Locating children and consumer culture only within the contemporary moment functions to deny the integral relationship between the two and thus reinforces the modern myth that childhood, in some idealized past, was innocent of market forces. As such, I contextualize the very category of the modern child in consumer culture rather than document how a pre-existing, un-marred state of childhood was infiltrated by the market. I argue that childhood and motherhood are connected and central to grappling with the nature and influence of consumer culture. Thus, I also address the role of mothers as consumers, and explore motherhood and childhood as shaped in part through consumer culture. Furthermore, I seek to explore representations of girlhood through an examination of both print and digital resources. In a broad sense, therefore, this study offers insight not only into cultural understandings of childhood, but also into the social production and reproduction of consumer culture through identity. That is, I examine how understandings of childhood function to (re)produce consumer culture and how consumer culture in turn, functions to (re)produce childhood.Item Open Access Are You Really There? The Mediatized Experience of the 21st Century Concert-Goer(2018-08-27) Melamed, Erica Felice; MacLennan, AnneThis thesis focuses on the ways cellphone use has further mediatized the concert experience. The cellphones mediatization of the concert experience involves modifications to memory practices, understandings of the concert experience, and interpersonal interaction within the venue. The combination of a content analysis, participant observation, and interview analysis, examined qualitatively and quantitatively, found that the cellphone has become a standard accessory to concert attendance. Not only has the cellphone become standard, it has forever changed the way we remember and experience concerts. The first set of data included the news coverage of cellphone use during concerts between the years of 2002-2016. The second set of data came from the notes taken during the participant observation of five concerts. The third set of data, the interview analysis, includes 30 concert-goers, five of which were local artists.Item Open Access Assessing Teacher Candidates’ Attitudes on Critical Media Literacy Education(2023-12-08) Kowlessar, Julianna Lily; Bergstrom, KellyThis thesis will explore Ontario teacher candidates’ perspectives on critical media literacy to gain an understanding of the skills and tools they need to constructively approach and teach future students about the subject. In addition, the prospect of introducing remixed, student-created board games into classrooms will be examined. This thesis is guided by the following primary research question (RQ1): What are pre-service teachers’ current perspectives and understandings of critical media literacy? Several sub-research questions will also be addressed: what have teacher candidates learned about critical media literacy (RQ2)? What skills and tools do they need to effectively teach their future students about critical media literacy (RQ2a)? What professional development opportunities have teacher candidates engaged in related to critical media literacy (RQ2b)? This thesis uses one-on-one, semi structured interviews as the primary methodology to better understand the unique perspectives of the teacher candidates who partook in this study.Item Open Access Augmented Reality as a new Medium: Remediation and Novel Form(2015-08-28) Papagiannis, Helen; Fisher, CaitlinThis dissertation is a pioneering exploration and mapping of the vast terrain of Augmented Reality (AR) as a new medium experienced from the unique perspective of being both a practitioner and academic researcher working with AR for the past nine years. AR has been typically defined as a layering of digital images, including text, audio, video, and 3D models, in real-time atop the physical environment and is experienced through an AR equipped device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a computer with a webcam, or a pair of see- through digital glasses. There is a current gap in knowledge in AR, particularly in the fields of communications, media, and humanities, with the critical need to revisit how we come to understand and define AR, especially at a time when AR is emerging as a medium, no longer just a technology found in Computer Science labs. This dissertation provides a first-hand look and foresight into the new world of AR, its promise and expanded capabilities building from a Communications and Culture foundation as a practitioner and researcher deeply immersed in the field. Setting a course of research-creation enabled a major technological innovation, resulting in ground-breaking work: the world's first AR book designed for the iPad using image tracking. The path of research-creation further led to a proposed visionary framework for the present state and coming future of AR entitled, The 40 Ideas That Will Change Augmented Reality, which documents and prescribes possibilities, proposing an articulation of a new language of AR.Item Open Access Authenticity and hybridity in alienation: national identity in the Palestinian diaspora(2016-06-23) Al-Dajani, Ghina; Drache, DanielThis study investigates the space in which Palestinian identity in the diaspora is formed and where moments of plurality emerge. By focusing on the Palestinian community in Canada, this study interrogates the processes of national identity formation and the achievement of belonging. The study utilizes empirical research in the form of interviews as well as the existing literature on the study of nationalism and identity to conduct a qualitative analysis of Palestinian national identity in the diaspora today. It thus demonstrates that the Palestinian identity is one that is intrinsically dual, with both essential and plural identities that are constructed and negotiated within a social matrix, and that incorporate national ideologies, collective memories, and cultural identities in the creation of a Palestinian nationality. In doing so, the study addresses a lack of scholarship on the identity formation in third generation Palestinian exiles, and illustrates the parameters of the ongoing Palestinian condition of statelessness.Item Open Access Black Diasporic Disasters and the Africanization of Poverty in Western Print Media: a Case Study of Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian Earthquake in the New York Times(2014-07-09) Saisi, Boke; Robinson, DanielleThousands of poor, mainly black Americans were plastered across the news in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Correspondingly, after the devastating Haitian earthquake in January 2010, images and readings of black impoverishment were rife. I argue during both disasters, news media depicted both populations as Africanized, discursively linking blackness and black African-ness with impoverishment. I conducted a critical discourse analysis of eighty New York Times articles, comparing both cases and found that black subjects were homogenously depicted as both threatening and helpless, as “others from within” in coverage of Hurricane Katrina and “others from without” in coverage of the Haitian earthquake; the former being black others who pose an immediate threat by proximity to white majority populations, and the latter as black others whose implied inferiority helps bolster a sense of superiority amongst whites. I conclude that depictions of these essentialized and denigrated black others are problematic as they may inform the mistreatment and management of black populations worldwide.Item Open Access Blinded by Transparency: AI Disclosure Practices in the Canadian Financial Industry(2023-08-04) Hanley, Maura Kathleen; Elmer, GregThis thesis investigates transparency practices related to the governance and communication of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Canadian banking industry through a case study of Canada's five largest banks. By asking how AI and data practices are framed and communicated, what beliefs and values are expressed, and what are the implications for public trust and future policy, this thesis challenges our reliance on transparency as a form of governance. The study employs a multi modal approach, evaluating the content and discourse of key documents and a series of interviews taken with bank executives. The research finds that the banks’ approach to framing and communicating their data governance practices circumscribes their view of potential harms and limits our visibility into how AI is employed. The findings provide insight into potential directions for AI policy and offer a benchmark for future research and regulatory efforts.Item Open Access Braided Archives: Black hair as a site of diasporic transindividuation(2022-03-03) Nyela, Océane Ingrid; Langlois, Ganaele M.This thesis investigates how hair braiding is used by continental African women to negotiate belonging in the diaspora and Canadian society. Scholarship on the cultural significance of Black hair is usually focused on the cultural significance of "Black hairstyles" rather than the practice of hair braiding itself. Therefore, this thesis is guided by three research questions: 1) how is it that hair braiding, cornrows specifically, emerged as a cultural practice throughout the African diaspora when colonization was predicated on the complete erasure and devaluation of the African identities and their cultural/spiritual practices, 2) how can we understand hair braiding as an instance of Black technological innovation and 3) how does thinking about hair braiding as a form of transindividuation redefine what is considered technological? This thesis uses autoethnography and sensory ethnography as methodological frameworks to underline the role that sensory practices play in identity formation.Item Open Access Brotherly Love: Remaking Homosociality and Masculinity in Fan Fiction(2017-07-27) Edwards, Elizabeth Rose; MacLennan, AnneStudies on fan fiction have traditionally employed ethnographic or literary methods to study the activities of fans. Since the 1980s scholars have focused particularly on slash fiction as unique and subversive, but this has been at the cost of devaluing other genres of fan fiction as less critical of the status-quo. By studying a sample of fan fiction which encompasses a variety of genres, and analyzing the sample using mixed methods of content analysis and textual analysis, similarities between genres emerge, as well as a breadth of both critical and uncritical treatments of the construction of masculinity.Item Open Access Canadian Audiovisual Archives: The Politics of Preservation and Access(2018-03-01) Mitchell, Aimee Marie; Zryd, MichaelIn 2005, in the spirit of Canadas total archives philosophy, the Western University Archives in London, Ontario acquired over ninety regional films on 8mm. Archival staff digitized the films in a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fashion: they were simply repaired, projected, and captured off the wall with a digital camera. The raw files were then processed and given basic titling before being exported onto DVDs for public and institutional sale. While digitization was quite rudimentary, the public has access to a forgotten regional history. This dissertation analyzes the tensions and politics of audiovisual acquisition, preservation, and dissemination by recounting steps taken by DIY archivists to bring films from a personal archive to an institutional archive. I trace this collection of amateur itinerant films as they move from the filmmakers home in Dundee, New York, to the Western Archives. Reverend Leroy (Roy) Massecar (1918-2003) was a Baptist Minister and itinerant filmmaker who between 1947-1949 visited over ninety towns throughout Central and Southwestern Ontario, documenting daily life, screening films in these towns as Stars of the Town See Yourself and Your Friends on the Screen! and capturing the fleeting energy of small town rural Ontario. The dissertation mobilizes what Canadian archivist Terry Cook calls, archival contextual knowledge, a history from the bottom-up, and uses this case study to highlight larger issues facing Canadian audiovisual collections in the early 21st century: the shifting value in antiquated audiovisual formats and marginal film collections; the tension between professional preservation and public access; the hidden labour of audiovisual archivists; and the politics of DIY audiovisual discourse. I make the labour and bureaucracy of traditional archives visible by examining the discourses of the Archive not only within a theoretical space, but also in actual archive spaces whether physical or digital. I argue that bringing transparency to the roles and actions of donors, artists, archivists, scholars, and the public will allow for the larger ecology of Canadian audiovisual preservation to be activated, allowing actors in each point of the cycle to collectively move towards a holistic and networked audiovisual preservation strategy.Item Open Access Capoeira as a Resource: Multiple Uses of Culture Under Conditions of Transnational Neoliberalism(2015-08-28) Robitaille, Laurence; Coombe, RosemaryThis dissertation explores the shifting meanings and values attached to capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ‘martial game’, as it circulates as a ‘cultural resource’ in the context of neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, immigrating Brazilians brought their practice to new lands and commercialized their embodied knowledge and cultural difference. While they initially sought to create economic capital, a whole range of indirect repercussions followed: they generated affective communities, disseminated a Brazilian imaginary soon transformed into symbolic capital, and arguably transmitted an embodied memory that can be traced back to the practice’s African ancestry. This multi-sited ethnographic study uses a mixed methodology to explore how capoeira’s circulation in North American markets enables its multiple uses. A central commitment to theoretical analysis is conveyed by each chapter’s distinctive theoretical framing. Chapter One demonstrates processes of creation of political and ideological value as it examines capoeira’s role in the twentieth century formation of Brazilian nationalism. Chapter Two describes a new paradigm for considering ‘culture’ in a neoliberal political economy in which cultural goods and services assume new valuations. Chapter Three describes capoeira’s commercialization through theories on transnationalism and concepts of economic anthropology. Chapter Four analyses the construction of a field of discourse that renews capoeira’s semantic values, specifically as it relates to the field of Brazilian culture. Chapter Five turns to theories on affect to account for capoeira’s experiential, embodied, and phenomenological power to generate relations of intimacy uniting practitioners. This affective exchange, I argue, drives the whole cross-cultural economy of transnational capoeira. Chapter Six studies capoeira as performance to understand how its traditional system of values is perpetuated. This study demonstrates that capoeira’s transnational circulation has generated a coherent system of interacting values fueled by individual entrepreneurship but also socially experienced and collectively perpetuated. It shows how cultural objects, representations, and practices can be intentionally wielded to generate a broad range of benefits including, but not reduced to, economic ones. Understanding culture in such pragmatic terms highlights cultural actions’ potential to contribute to broader fields of value, where value is understood as simultaneously economic, politic, cultural, and affective, and both socially and individually generated. AbstractItem Open Access Confess the Gay Away? Media, Religion, and the Political Economy of Ex-Gay Therapy(2015-08-28) Thorn, Michael Edward; Moore, Paul S.The “ex-gay” movement does not encourage people to pray the gay away but confess it away. As a loose organization of mostly Christian ministries and psychotherapy practices offering “freedom from homosexuality,” the movement utilizes religious and psychological confessions of sin and disease and testimonies of truth and belief as technologies of both self-sacrifice and identity formation. The aim is to control unwanted same-sex desire through life-long labour and struggle and to sacrifice one’s gay or lesbian identity for an ex-gay identity. However, in the debate surrounding the movement, those opposed use confessions of trauma and harm, and testimonies of their own truth and belief, to try and sacrifice the movement in favour of gay and lesbian identities. Confession and testimony, then, underlie the discourses and practices of all involved in ex-gay truth games as two sides of the same coin. Although the movement formed in the 1970s, this dissertation analyzes it from the 1990s, when, in alliance with the Christian Right, it “came out of the closet” through a cross-platform advertising campaign that generated fifteen years’ worth of “earned media” in news and popular culture entertainment. By deploying an economic discourse of consumer choice, the movement hoped to justify itself as a legitimate form of intervention while the Christian Right hoped to use it to encourage the repeal of gay rights legislation. Those tactics backfired, resulting in a consumer fraud lawsuit, legislation banning conversion therapy for minors, and scathing critiques and satires in mainstream popular culture. However, the movement has legitimized itself within its own conservative Christian communities. In this dissertation I show that limiting the ex-gay debate to commercialized and politicized concepts and strategies neglects the real problem at the heart of the controversy: the paradoxical use of confessions of self-renunciation and true-belief as technologies of self-emergence sacrifices the self to unstable and “fundamentalist” truth games; on both sides of the debate. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I treat the movement as a mediated cultural phenomenon currently constituted by cost-benefit calculations and marketing protocols but historically constituted by the psychological and religious governmentalities that pervade its thought and practices.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 Cooptation, Collusion and Contestations: Development, Regulation and Globalization of the Internet in China(2021-03-08) Jia, Lianrui; Middleton, CatherineThis dissertation investigates the antithetical sets of developments between a nationally-controlled Chinese internet and its increasing commercial success. It asks the central question of how does the Chinese government reconcile its political goal of maintaining a sovereign internet with the goal of sustaining and fostering commercial success? To answer this question, this dissertation uses primary methods of textual and document analysis and examines a corpus of first-hand and secondary documents including laws, regulations, directives, company financial documents, and news reports. This dissertation develops a tripartite model, outlining the role and interplay between three actors in sustaining Chinas tightly controlled yet commercially vibrant internet: the Chinese state, internet companies, and capital. It is argued that the Chinese state remains as a key institutional force in shaping domestic internet regulation, gatekeeping entry and conditions of participation of capital in the domestic market, and supervising and supporting domestic internet companies. The internet companies, on the other hand, are agentic and creative in working around restrictions on foreign investment while retaining managerial control and collaborating with various state-led projects. Foreign capital enters the picture, transforming Chinese internet companies into financiers, owners and stakeholders in emerging markets. This dissertation therefore challenges the top-down view of the Chinese state in directing and controlling the internet. It shows that the Chinese state is highly adaptive in political control and economic policy-making. Censorship and control have always constituted part of the institutional conditions interwoven into the political economy of the Chinese internet. It also systematically analyzes the often-overlooked role of capital in the industrial development of the Chinese internet. Overall, this dissertation unpacks the collusion and contestations between state, internet companies and capital, caught in between aspirations of building an explicitly nationalistic internet and the increasing need for global connections, flows of technologies, financial and human capital.Item Open Access "Crazy B****": Discriminatory Language, Radio Censorship, Regulation, and Enforcement Policies in Canada(2016-09-20) Foley, Rebecca Irene Marie; MacLennan, AnneThis thesis focuses on the censorship, or lack thereof, of discriminatory language on Canadian radio stations. In addition to purely discriminatory based language, this project also investigated the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and ability were employed in popular music. Two data sets were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively to find that private and public radio stations in Canada are more likely to censor discriminatory or explicit content than their community station counterparts. Further, discriminatory language based on gender, is not only more likely to be contained in popular music, but it is also less likely to be censored in comparison to language based on racial or sexual orientation based discrimination. The first data set included 485 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1985 and 2015. The second data set included 2818 songs from a six-month period (May-October 2015) of the top twenty charts from 27 different radio stations in Canada, including private, public, and community stations.Item Open Access Creative Transformation and the Knowledge-Based Economy: Intellectual Property and Access to Knowledge under Informational Capitalism(2016-11-25) Turcotte, Joseph Fernand; Coombe, RosemaryThis dissertation contributes to critiques of informational capitalism by analyzing the role intellectual property (IP) law plays in the appropriation and commodification of knowledge. Using an interdisciplinary framework rooted in the critical political economy of communication and critical legal studies, this dissertation focuses on how IP law is used to appropriate knowledge as a commodity and support accumulation in a so-called knowledge-based economy, better understood as informational capitalism. Informational capitalism is legitimated by neoliberal, libertarian, and technologically-determinist beliefs, which I demonstrate to be fallacies that support political economic concentrations and inequitable processes of commodification, spatialization, and structuration. International organizations and governance regimes, such as the international trade-based IP system, diffuse these beliefs and thereby legitimize practices that remove knowledge and information from their social contexts. This dissertation propounds the use of a knowledge/information dialectic to highlight the mutually constitutive relationship between knowledge-based resources and informational assets. As I demonstrate, digital and peer-based production alternatives challenge IP law by highlighting the socio-cultural aspects of knowledge/information necessary for commodification to occur. Such alternatives represent an emerging informational politics responding to the inequities of informational capitalism. Using Karl Polanyis double movement thesis, I focus on alternative practices of knowledge production and management as counter-movements to IP seeking to support a greater variety of socio-cultural concerns and more equitable political economic structurations. In particular, through a critical analysis of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Movement (an umbrella term covering various civil society and non-Western approaches to IP), I demonstrate how informational politics simultaneously resist and extend the economically reductionist and technologically determinist fallacies they purport to oppose. By tracing the emergence of the concept of A2K and performing a critical discourse analysis of key primary and secondary Movement texts, I show it to be a counter-movement that concurrently opposes and reinforces key neoliberal, libertarian, and technologically-determinist assumptions. I conclude that human rights-based discourses and human capability approaches to development provide alternative normative frameworks that oppositional movements might use to address the political economic inequities posed by IP-based informational capitalism.Item Open Access Cultural Heritage and Representation in Jamaica: Broaching the Digital Age(2015-12-16) Henry, Abigail Ruth-Ann; Coombe, RosemaryThis thesis discusses Jamaica’s cultural heritage management in the 21st century and questions how the country’s cultural heritage is represented in today’s digital age. Tracing the development of Jamaica’s cultural policies since the late-colonial period (beginning in the late 1930s), I consider the ways in which the state has managed cultural heritage historically and connect the evolution of theoretical understandings of heritage to explore evolving ideologies of policy and management. I then examine three digital cultural heritage projects in Jamaica to question their representation of heritage material to the local population and the wider world. I argue that these presentations of Jamaica’s cultural heritage illustrate a 21st century neoliberal interplay of cultural heritage, nationalism, and economic development. The projects put forward a restricted and exclusive form of heritage knowledge which re-inscribes historical inequalities. I conclude that cultural heritage organizations and policymakers must incorporate participatory methods to leverage digital technologies to ameliorate ongoing issues of hegemonic representation.