Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University

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Open Access
A Genealogy of Consumer Surveillance: From the First Public Market to Eatons Department Store to Amazon
(2022-03-03) Nasirzadeh, Bahar; Elmer, Greg
Consumer 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.
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.
Open Access
Affective and Intimate Ties Between BTS and ARMY: K-pop, Fandom, and the Feminine Gaze
(2023-12-08) Schestak, Erika Shauna; Mecija, Casey
K-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.
Open Access
American Girl: A Critical Inquiry into Dolls, Childhood, and Consumer Culture
(2020-08-11) Kirshner, Mirah Jennifer; Podnicks, Elizabeth
Through 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.
Open Access
Anatomy of Higher Education Fundraising in Canada
(2024-07-18) Leibel, Cynthia; MacLennan, Anne
Fundraising campaigns have made a significant difference in the communities they work within, for the causes and initiatives that matter to donors. Within Canada, we have one of the largest and most vibrant not-for-profit sectors, including charities supporting the arts, environmental protection, professional associations, health and education (Hall, et al., 2005). To support these campaigns, Canadians donated approximately $10.6 billion in 2020 to charitable organizations across the country, a number decreasing every year (Government of Canada, 2022). The potential then for a systematic approach in profiling is critical to success, allowing for a more targeted approach for increased fundraising success and measurement (Smith & Lipsky, 1993). With over $22 billion dollars being donated online in 2010, an increase from around $7 billion dollars in 2006, online giving represents a significant portion of fundraising and continues to grow every year (Castillo, et al., 2014). Although there are large-scale philanthropic donations, there are many smaller donations that contribute to many organizations. Fundraising online creates a field where “equally important as the club of billionaires is to the future of philanthropy, so too are the contributions Americans of modest means channel through mass appeals that have so often worked in sync with large donations” (Zunz, 2012, p. 298-299). The focus of this research is that identification, relationship and social capital influence supportive behaviours for any not-for-profit. Social media data was scrapped from Instagram and X accounts from a select group of Universities in Canada, and a data analysis was then applied used Python and VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning) to understand sentiment, opinion and popularity of each accounts content. This work suggests that (1) marketing and communications practices are as important to not-for-profit organizations as they are for profit organizations, and this remains an area that it is a field of fundraising and communications practice that remains underserved, (2) that the factors that influence relationship in the alumni and student stakeholder groups are not utilized in communications strategy, specifically in social media groups and online communication, and (3) identify five potential strategies for communications success in fundraising and long-term post-secondary success.
Open Access
Are You Really There? The Mediatized Experience of the 21st Century Concert-Goer
(2018-08-27) Melamed, Erica Felice; MacLennan, Anne
This 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.
Open Access
Assessing Teacher Candidates’ Attitudes on Critical Media Literacy Education
(2023-12-08) Kowlessar, Julianna Lily; Bergstrom, Kelly
This 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.
Open Access
Augmented Reality as a new Medium: Remediation and Novel Form
(2015-08-28) Papagiannis, Helen; Fisher, Caitlin
This 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.
Open Access
Authenticity and hybridity in alienation: national identity in the Palestinian diaspora
(2016-06-23) Al-Dajani, Ghina; Drache, Daniel
This 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.
Open Access
Best of Both Worlds: A Phenomenological Exploration of East Asian Diasporic Identity Through Virtual Reality
(2024-11-07) Ashizawa, Kaede Claire; de Jesuús, Desirée
While East Asian diaspora studies have addressed inequities imposed by hegemonic epistemologies on diasporic communities and identities, expressing the equally important politics of diasporic agency and joy is also essential. My research-creation intervenes in this knowledge space through a phenomenological framework informed by cyborg theory and assemblage theory in a Virtual Reality experience. Reiterating metaphors of prostheses for diasporic transcendence, I consider if instrumental and ecological cultural affinities of East Asian-Canadian identity can be perceived as such. Mediated by the VR experience, I visualized this by inquiring about diasporic upbringing, everyday life, personal and institutional relationships, and cultural interactions. Informed by autoethnography and semi-constructed interviews with 14 East Asian-Canadian participants, I investigated what hybridity and empowerment look, feel, and mean when extensions of diasporic selfhood are metaphorized as prostheses in an assemblage network. I also explored the affordances of VR as a pedagogical medium to visualize this analysis.
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, Danielle
Thousands 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.
Open Access
Blinded by Transparency: AI Disclosure Practices in the Canadian Financial Industry
(2023-08-04) Hanley, Maura Kathleen; Elmer, Greg
This 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.
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.
Open Access
Brotherly Love: Remaking Homosociality and Masculinity in Fan Fiction
(2017-07-27) Edwards, Elizabeth Rose; MacLennan, Anne
Studies 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.
Open Access
Canadian Audiovisual Archives: The Politics of Preservation and Access
(2018-03-01) Mitchell, Aimee Marie; Zryd, Michael
In 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.
Open Access
Capoeira as a Resource: Multiple Uses of Culture Under Conditions of Transnational Neoliberalism
(2015-08-28) Robitaille, Laurence; Coombe, Rosemary
This 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. Abstract
Open Access
Climate Crisis, Youth and Media: a story analysis of Geo-Doc videos as agents for social transformations
(2024-11-07) Alsop, Dylan Wallace; Tschofen, Monique
The last three decades have witnessed paradigmatic transformations in how youth engage in climate crisis advocacy practices. My thesis offers analysis of a United Nations-endorsed policy advocacy project, The Youth Climate Report (YCR). The project comprises short youth documentaries geo-positioned on a virtual map combined with an annual report submitted to United Nations Council of parties (COP) negotiations. Inspired by the project as an initiative of “Speaking Youth to Power” (Terry, 2024), my thesis seeks to better understand, celebrate, and contribute to this initiative and more broadly to youth climate crisis documentary multimedia. Recognizing that climate crisis is in part a storytelling crisis and drawing on selected scholarship in media studies (McLuhan, Williams), youth studies (Hall, Castañeda, Foucault), and climate studies (Callison, Hulme, Solnit), I reflect on ways in which climate crisis and youth are framed and formed in stories bound up with social power relations. I analyzed a sample of YCR Geo-Doc media documentaries—20% of those available, n=130—asking two questions: How do Geo-Doc videos story climate crisis? How do Geo-Doc videos story youth? My comparative analysis reveals four influential climate stories (Impacts, Humans, Resources, and Solutions) entangled with four stories of youth (as Witnesses, as Heroes, Inheritors and as Vulnerable). My conclusion follows a political stance in which I interrogate these eight stories and alternatives and the extent to which they reproduce pre-existing stories with associated power relations thereby supporting the status quo and/or offer new ways that resist and challenge these. These discussions are more normative, seeking to identify youth climate crisis stories that are underrepresented and now urgently needed.
Open Access
Clocked by the App: Discovering Queer Identity on TikTok
(2024-07-18) Argyle, Sophie; Driver, Susan
Since 2020, anecdotes of ‘TikTok knew I was queer before I did’ have been prevalent. To examine this phenomenon, this thesis uses semi-structured interviews with five TikTok users in Canada who discovered one facet of their queer identity on the platform. This study seeks to understand these users’ experiences with identity discovery on TikTok and how TikTok’s affordances and limitations contributed to their experiences. This study finds that queer assemblages operate on the platform, users have paradoxical experiences with TikTok, and as a corporate platform, TikTok is limited in what it can offer queer users. These findings uncover fertile areas for future research and offer valuable insights for queer people to imagine a platform that better serves our needs.
Open Access
Community, Housing, and Crime: Framing the News Coverage of Lawrence Heights and Rexdale
(2024-11-07) Boateng, Mary Ann Asantewah; MacLennan, Anne F.
Why is there less media coverage or public outcry when Black or racialized people lose their lives in Lawrence Heights and Rexdale? My dissertation started with this simple question. By studying the intersection of media, housing, community and crime, my dissertation sheds light on how mainstream and independent new sources contribute to stereotypes and metaphors that influence the public perception of Lawrence Heights and Rexdale. Starting in 1960, ending in 2020, I collected news from the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and Share in the three categories of housing, crime, community. I used 9 variables to determine what type of news appeared in a higher frequency to show how independent, Black news media has told a more nuanced story. My research found there is work to do in countering the high frequency of crime stories in the mainstream news, and the presence of independent publications like Share are vital in presenting counternarratives that give a voice to the community. As well as representing how residents, community groups and activists have come and are coming together to reclaim their right to the city.
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.