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Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Manufacturing Dissent: A Mixed Methodological Analysis of Human Thought, Algorithmic Mediation, and Political Electioneering on Twitter
    (2024-03-16) Ricciardone, Sophia Marie; Pelkey, Jamin; Walsh Matthews, Stéphanie
    The invisible entanglements of deep learning algorithms with political communication on social media platforms like Twitter have complicated political discourse and the formation of public opinion in the digital age. Consequently, as we engage with the content distributed on social media, it is difficult to know whether we are engaging with virtual peers or political bots. At the same time, the invisible interventions of bots also conceal the electioneering processes set in motion within political discourse on social media. Evidence has shown that because our minds cannot discern between tweets posted by human peers and those posted by bots, we intuitively engage with all tweets as though they were produced by social peers. Thus, the nature of our cognitive engagement with all tweets posted on social media conforms to the same social psychological principles that we engage when interacting with other social beings. Across this dissertation, I contend that the convergence of human thought, digital mediation, and digital electioneering creates distortions in logic on Twitter, resulting in a phenomenon I call botaganda. As the decussation of three different modes of reasoning infiltrate discourse within online spaces, the nature of discourse within public debate becomes convoluted, rendering human thought and public opinion vulnerable to the interference and manipulation of political actors. I aim to demonstrate that botaganda compromises the cogency and reliability of political communication in the digital age, but it is also the driving force behind the tenor of bipartisan incivility, politically motivated expression of moral outrage, and polarization of constituencies in the digital age. This dissertation also proposes that the political instrumentalization of deep learning algorithms on social media platforms to shape political discourse violates citizens’ fundamental rights to the freedom of thought, judgement, and conscience according to Section 2 the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Determining the Value of Open-Source Intelligence for Public Safety
    (2024-03-16) Cioffi, Giovanna; Visano, Livy A.
    The intent of this work is to determine the regard to which open-source intelligence (OSINT) is an effective tool for emergency management, especially in relation to public safety. This work seeks to accomplish this through meeting the following objectives: (1) examining OSINT from a public safety perspective, (2) identifying potential challenges and barriers that may limit an analyst’s use of OSINT tools and techniques; (3) exploring the changing nature of threats to national security and identifying how OSINT may provide a direct means of assisting with mitigation, prevention, preparation, response, and recovery; and, (4) by understanding how government analysts are training in OSINT collection and methodologies. The methodological approach to this research is qualitative in nature, focusing on case studies, tool exploration, and Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests. Although the results of this work concluded that OSINT can be regarded as an effective tool in maintaining public safety, it also raised concerns regarding legislation, policy, training, and technical infrastructure that must be addressed if OSINT were to remain effective. All this in consideration, the results of this work were impacted by limitations in access to information. Given the sensitive nature of some collection procedures and the overstrained ATIP request portal, a number of documents were not made available for evaluation and analysis - likely a result of classification level, security requirements, or the overall time it takes for ATIP coordinators to make these documents available for public disclosure. Moreover, in consideration to the results of this work, two main recommendations were provided: (1) Legislation & Policy: clarification of legislation, effective policy development, ongoing communication, and oversight; and (2) Training & Technical Infrastructure: establish clear OSINT tiers, establish mandatory training plans, and establish standardized methods to account for attribution. Together, these two recommendations can further strengthen the OSINT capability as a whole and ensure that it continues to be an effective tool for public safety.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Navigating a Predominantly White Industry: Identity in Canadian Media
    (2024-03-16) Seraphin, Perrye-Delphine; Walsh-Matthews, Stephanie
    This thesis investigates the state of representation for Black and racialized talent (public personalities, hosts, anchors, and contributors) in both French and English Canadian media, specifically in broadcasting and digital media. It is also focused on understanding the experience of Black and racialized people who work in the Canadian media industry and how identity affects the opportunities of these individuals. Therefore, this thesis is guided by two research questions: What is the professional experience of Black and racialized people who work in Canadian media? Moreover, how do they negotiate their racialized identity in the Canadian media industry? Through a literature analysis, I explore how key scholars have critically examined whiteness, colorism and multiculturalism through a critical race theory lens. Through the use of surveys and interviews as methodological frameworks, this research provides insights based on the experiences of Black and racialized people. After analyzing through a critical discourse lens, four main themes are revealed: notions of otherness, barriers of entry, colorism and the experience in the workplace.
  • ItemOpen Access
    More than a Monolith: Podcasting Authentic Self-Concepts and Cultural Expressions in Canada
    (2024-03-16) Donison, Jeffrey Maxwell; MacLennan, Anne
    This dissertation explores how podcasters from different racial and ethnic groups in Canada use podcasting to articulate their own identities and represent themselves and their communities through sound and language. Ten non-public podcasts were compared to ten publicly produced podcasts from the CBC between 2015 and 2020. In total, three episodes from each of the 20 podcasts were listened to for a total of 60 episodes. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to evaluate how podcasters linguistically self-express. Sound analysis helped examine how podcasters use voice, music, added FX, and archival audio to articulate their cultural identities. Interviews contextualized how podcasters conceived of their production, their motivations, and their podcast goals to represent community and revisit cultural histories in Canada. The findings indicate that “history” and “true crime” podcasters in public and non-public models tend to critique institutionally produced myths about Canadian identity that have shaped colonial understandings of Canada today and the people who are products of its systems. On the other hand, “society and culture” podcasters from public and non-public models tend to support cross-national communication where members of non-hegemonic groups address various communities as heterogeneous collectives rather than monoliths. Findings also indicate that public (CBC) and non-public podcasts both encourage open self-expression and national criticism. Podcasts can promote voices that are difficult to access elsewhere and deepen what people can learn about infrequently taught or underrepresented historical experiences and modern cultural practices. Podcasters in this study often authored their sense of selves using local, multinational, and diasporic labels beyond a “Canadian” label and its cultural connotations. Podcasters explicitly talking about their race or ethnicity often contextualized how it influences, and is influenced by, their professional, political, and social experiences. Sonically, podcasters audibly self-represented using their regular speaking voices that reject standardized broadcasting voices. Overall, this dissertation forwards that podcasts help critique Canadian history while celebrating non-settler histories and experiences that shape what podcasters believe to be their authentic selves exhibited in their vocalized values, attitudes, and beliefs. Thus, podcasts invite us to hear a diversity of peoples, perspectives, and cultures in public and non-public production spaces.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemUnknown
    Locating the Farang Teacher Within and Across West-Thai Encounter(s): From the King and I to Contemporary TEFL
    (2024-03-16) Durdle, Leanna Cheryl; Pelkey, Jamin
    Taking the contemporary idealization of NESTs as a starting point, this research draws on critical Thai studies (i.e., Harrison & Jackson, 2010; Jackson, 2008; Kitiarsa, 2010; Winichakul, 1994; 2000) to conceptualize the farang teacher and attempt to "locate" this figure across 150 years of Thailand's relationship with the 'West'. Guided by the assertion that "… contemporary modes of proximity reopen prior histories of encounter.” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 13), I use Systemic-Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) to analyze both the 1956 film The King and I and the popular travel website gooverseas.com, asking how the farang teacher emerges both historically and today. I then consider my findings through the lens of my own experience, asking how the cultural meanings surrounding the farang teacher manifest within the face-to-face encounters facilitated by contemporary English language teaching. I conclude my work with a reflection on the possibility of a "pedagogy of encounter".
  • ItemUnknown
    Virtual Influencers and the New Wave of Digital Labour Exploitation
    (2023-12-08) Hughes, Calvin; Bergstrom, Kelly
    Virtual influencers (VIs) are animated replacements for human social media influencers, with popular VIs like Lil Miquela garnering millions of followers. This thesis explores the unaddressed ways VIs enable the exploitation of the human labourers creating them. As human influencers have become more powerful and expensive to work with brands and marketers have sought to regain control over them. The behind-the-scenes workers creating VIs have limited ownership of the characters they create, and a system of NDAs, job insecurity, and exploitation of worker passion discourages workers from discussing labour conditions. These conditions complicate primary research on VI creators, pushing me towards influencer studies and digital labour literature as the unit of analysis for my exploration of labour conditions in the VI industry. Political economy, emotional capitalism, and affect theory frameworks guide this analysis. I argue that the labour ecosystem surrounding VIs represents concerning future trends in labour exploitation.
  • ItemUnknown
    Storytelling, Myth, and the Dreams Therein: A Critical Analysis of the Intertextuality of Christianity, Capitalism, and Americanism
    (2023-12-08) Buesink, Jeremy John; MacLennan, Anne
    This dissertation, while dealing with many aspects of Americanism, argues that the hegemonic history of Christianity in America and the centrality of capitalism in national ethos have contributed to an impulse in the national psyche towards illusion. I argue that due to this impulse and privileging of illusion, and/or various ‘realities’, over actuality, much American violence takes place both within and without the nation’s borders. I demonstrate the harmful but seldom examined paradoxes produced and sustained by treating American values as sacrosanct in American life and in individual American lives, despite the varying definitions of those values along the spectrum of political and religious belief, the ways they are interpreted, and the manners in which they are executed. Underpinning my examination of the intertextualization of Christianity and Americanism, are queer theory, postmodern theory, and critical race theory, thereby employing theoretical perspectives that are not strictly associated with benefitting examinations of Christianity or Americanism, which is to say that these perspectives can broaden our appreciation of the outcomes of intertextuality.
  • ItemOpen Access
    UnBarbie: Queering the Image of the 11-inch Doll
    (2023-12-08) Beck, Paula Elizabeth; MacLennan, Anne
    With a reported 98% global recognition rate, Barbie is perhaps the world’s most well-known icon. She is not without her share of controversy, but there is no doubt that her existence represents “girlhood” to a large group of the world’s population. However, Barbie’s heteronormative and cisnormative ideals have been challenged recently by another Mattel brand toy line: Creatable World dolls. Where Barbie consistently represents femininity, Creatable World is supposed to represent inclusion, designed to “Keep labels out,” to quote Mattel’s promotional materials for the line. This photographic research project points a critical lens at the popular image of the 11-inch fashion doll and subverts it through the use of Creatable World dolls and 1/6 scale dioramas. Reminiscent of the photography of David Levinthal and the miniature crime scene models of Frances Glessner Lee, UnBarbie seeks to represent the queer gaze and objectification using gender-neutral dolls and the nearly unlimited character creation options that such toys allow.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen Access
    From Lifeworld to City Life: Rethinking how the Culture of Everyday Life in Cities Engages Urban Administration
    (2022-09) Martin, George Richard; Bailey, Steven C.
    Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in the winter of 2020, city governments around the world have faced extraordinary demands from citizens for services, expertise, and leadership. Urban administration has rarely been so involved in everyday life. Yet, during this time, reflexive fear, justifiable criticism, and malicious disdain of public initiatives and civic authorities seem to have undermined the status of urban administration as a representation of the public interest. The links that connect everyday experiences to urban administration have become strained to the extent that there is a waning certainty as to how "the city" as a collective project is constituted and realized. City governments and those who study urban society and culture, now face the task of re-examining fundamental questions about how urban administration engages urban life. Accordingly, in the most general sense, in this dissertation, I ask how urban administration comes to make sense to the people it serves. I aim, specifically, to foster an interest in the definition of the situations for administrating cities using a cross-disciplinary approach that engages traditions of urban theory, reflective analysis, hermeneutics and cultural sociology. I do this by looking at how these traditions elucidate the relationship between urban lifeworld and administration as it is found in various contemporary practices of city governance and urban life. Through this analysis, I suggest that the relationship between lifeworld and urban administration is established in practical conditions, but these conditions are ultimately grounded in participants engaging in self-reflective modes of theorizing the city as a situation for taking action, a process I will refer to as order-making. This notion of order-making is not merely an attempt to formulate a method of analysing urban administration. Nor does it simply provide an account of an individual’s encounter with institutions of urban administration. Instead, the analysis proposes a way to re-consider those who are involved in the administration of the city, both in formal and incidental ways, as active agents in the urban community engaged in the ongoing and collective project of theorizing the city as an order-making situation. This study highlights order-making as it is entrenched in the messiness and details of everyday urban culture, yet it also shows that order-making extends beyond the limits of the commonplace so as to produce an enduring order, or form, of the city itself. In this sense, what might be called the movement toward order-making underpins a multiplicity of engagements with administration while attending to the permanence—or, the formal goodness—of the city as a type of community. This enquiry thus supports a radically pluralistic grounding for urban administration by exploring what fundamentally connects the diversity of urban experience with the singularity of administration. Instead of assessing specific administrative policies and practices, this dissertation steps back to consider a broad view of administering the city to see what underpins the relationship of the urban lifeworld to the administration of city life. To do this, I consider questions such as: How do people conceptualize the city as a project? What part do everyday routine, memory, and meaning-making play in administration? How does the administration of cities engage forms of urban lifestyle and even the notion of the good life? How is the urban community made and remade? This analysis, in sum, aims to elucidate how order-making occurs in the confluence of legalistic and customary experiences of city life to clarify the realization of the city as a form of community. I consider order-making in four contexts of urban administration: city planning, gentrification, technology, and theory. I first consider details of order-making as people discuss city planning at a local administrative tribunal. Next, I expand the focus by considering order-making within the context of neighbourhood gentrification and how gentrification epitomizes order-making as the desire to reconcile personal experience and identity with the city at large. I then turn to the technology of smart cities to address ways order-making connects technology to the problematics of the urban lifeworld. This sets up a discussion about the notion of making within order-making, which is subsequently treated in terms of social theory. It is in this last main discussion that I consider the engagement of the lifeworld with urban administration as a way of engaging the city as an externalized ‘thing’. In a closing discussion, I briefly outline a program for future research, suggesting ways urban order-making might contribute to an effective response to current challenges facing city governance. Throughout this dissertation, I aim to expand the discussion about what connects everyday urban culture to urban administration in establishing a sense of order. The analysis hopefully helps turns attention to new ways in which institutions of urban administration might become better attuned to the plurality of cultural and historic experiences that now constitute much of the social life of contemporary cities. It offers an analysis of administration in terms of being self-reflexively aware of mundane actions, incidental memories, and the taken-for-granted patterns of everyday life, so that an array of experiences might not just reshape administrative practices to make outcomes just and fair but also substantially redefine the epistemological grounds on which such practices are grounded, that is, the ethos of doing urban administration. This involves imagining new ways of thinking about entrenched notions of administrative authority so that institutions of community order-making accord far more with the global, diasporic, and post-colonial dynamics of urban communities. In that sense, this work hopefully contributes to new ways of ensuring cities remain accountable, meaningful, and worthy of trust amid a period of disorientating change.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Worshipping at the Shrine of Wagner: Fandom, Media and Richard Wagner
    (2023-03-28) Hurst, Emilie; Bailey, Steven C.
    Nineteenth-century opera composer Richard Wagner has long inspired passionate responses, with contemporary commentators often noting the cult-like reverence with which lovers approached his operas. In the years since, however, interest in Wagner’s art has not disappeared. In this dissertation, I explore the contours of modern Wagnerism using as my primary case study the Toronto Wagner Society, asking how members incorporate opera into their lives and what Wagner means to them. To do this, I employ a multimethodology of ethnography, an examination of Wagner’s art and rhetoric, and a consideration of the materiality of opera. These findings are analyzed through a dual lens of fan studies and cultural techniques, with which this dissertation makes two principal moves: first, to highlight how fandom of high culture is different in nature, not in kind to fandom of popular culture; second, to propose a networked model of fandom, one which conceptualizes fandom as a dynamic assemblage of audience, media and text. Chapter 1 opens by asking what is a fan, which I resolve through the introduction of cultural techniques, and subsequently, my networked model of fandom. I also consider how cultural techniques research might expand to include ethnography. Chapter 2 lays out the main findings of my interview. Particularly, I examine how aging intersects with reception, how fans re-enact the distinction between German and Italian opera, and the joy of opera as an explicitly performance art. Chapter 3 tackles the dual description of Wagner as both “work” and “overwhelming.” By taking seriously Theodor Adorno’s criticism, I illustrate how his music and rhetoric exert their agency onto fans. The final chapter studies the materiality of reception. Employing the metaphor of Michel Serres’ parasite, I analyze how the media which host opera shape reception through an examination of the role of the theatre, and by tracking mentions of Wagner in Toronto’s Globe newspaper in the years 1875–1876.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Ignored and Deleted: Understanding content moderators as racialized media of social network services
    (2022-12-14) Baek, Seung Woo; Elmer, Greg
    This thesis investigates how Facebook moderates its social media platform and mediates content flow by employing subcontracted Filipino workers as a form of racialized media filter. Scholarships on social media networks have often focused on the contents that flow through its networks, rather than the material and historical make-up of the infrastructure that enables said circulation. The thesis seeks to highlight the colonial and racist logic that undergird commercialized content moderation and its practice of global labour outsourcing that seeks to meet the Western social media and tech companies’ demand for cheap, fast, and available labour. The research looks to the history of transcontinental railway and its usage of Chinese migrant labour as a parallel media history and to Armond R. Towns’ “Black mediality” as a conceptual framework that helps illustrate the colonial mode of racialization inherent in contemporary network of social media.
  • ItemOpen Access
    From one Place to an 'Other": Meanings, Ideologies, Identities, and Representations on the Covers of Japanese Self-Help Translations
    (2022-12-14) Sampson, Esther Elizabeth; Pelkey, Jamin
    This study addresses gaps in paratextual, translation, and cultural theory research concerning the covers of Japanese self-help book translations. The study looks at five book covers of The Courage to be Disliked: the original Japanese and four culturally Western English translations from Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. This study uses a novel approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis specific to cross-cultural self-help book covers based on John Bateman’s GeM model. My results indicate that elements on the covers create disparate meanings between the original Japanese version and the English translations. In addition, the difference in meanings on the covers influence which ideologies and identities are represented on the covers. Ultimately, although the Japanese cover focuses on the book’s ability to provide the expertise of Alfred Adler on self-enlightenment, the English translations centre on the foreignness of the book, representing the book’s content, source text, and source culture as ‘Other’.
  • ItemOpen Access
    "What makes a great story?: Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives On Digital Stories By Youth Formerly In Foster Care In Canada
    (2022-12-14) Ludlow, Bryn Ashley; Flicker, Sarah
    What makes a great story? This qualitative arts-based dissertation study explores multidisciplinary and international perspectives on digital stories created by youth formerly in foster care. Over Skype, thirty-five participants from the arts, healthcare, education, and social services sectors watched three short digital stories about experiences of youth in foster care. Then, each participated in a 90 minute semi-structured interview to discuss the value, impact, and potential for digital storytelling to influence social change. All participants spoke about how the three digital stories presented honest and personal experiences that contrast dramatically with stories presented in the media about foster care. After viewing these stories, all participants asserted that there is a need for the creation and sharing of authentic and emotional stories that connect with specific audiences to subvert idealistic narratives in the media about youth currently and formerly in foster care. I drew on participant narratives using Constructivist Grounded Theory approaches to develop the 4A model to describe the attributes of “great stories”: Anticipation, Actualization, Affect, and Authenticity. I also created seven multimodal outputs that contributed to the shaping of the findings and enhanced reflexive praxis. The implications of this work varies across disciplines. Digital storytelling facilitators may develop insights into better supporting future participants to think critically about the impact and value of their stories before they write them. Artists may consider how best to employ their aesthetic skills and techniques to create compelling and storied artworks. Social service professionals may consider how to further leverage stories to build empathy and positively impact care delivery.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Producing Play: The Political Economy of "Actual Play" Media
    (2022-08-08) Chalk, Alex; Jenson, Jennifer; Dubois, Louis-Etienne
    "Actual Play" (AP) is a recent genre of online videos and podcasts focusing on unscripted play of tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). Its most popular exemplars, such as Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, account for large revenue streams and are important cultural actors in TRPGs recent surge in popularity. However, despite widespread monetization, only a tiny fraction of AP producers earn enough to make a career of AP. This dissertation approaches AP from a political economic perspective, analysing its composition as a field of cultural production, and exploring its producers' practices in relation to questions of creative labour and what David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker term "good working lives." Building on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and in-depth qualitative interviews with 24 AP producers, it maps out relational networks with key actors that give shape to AP, including the TRPG industry, major brands like Critical Role and Dungeons & Dragons, online distribution platforms, co-production networks, and audiences. This account of the field undergirds an analysis of AP production as labour. The analysis indicates that AP producers are aware of the structural economic limitations of their craft, and underscores the importance of non-economic values, such as cultural participation, enjoyment, and community, in motivating their work. Despite AP's deep imbrication in processes of commodification and neoliberal structuration, this research speaks to its embeddedness in parallel economies of affect and play. The concluding chapter connects AP to broader evolutions in the creative economy, namely ubiquitous commodification and platformization of cultural production, and argues for the necessity of multilayered analyses of labour that are sensitive to questions of pleasure, community, and coping, as significant dimensions in the political economy of cultural production.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Playing and Making History: How Game Design and Gameplay Afford Opportunities for a Critical Engagement with the Past
    (2022-03-03) McCready, Samuel Calvin Paul; Jenson,Jennifer
    For decades there has been a call for educators to explore new possibilities for meeting educational goals defined broadly under a number of 'twenty-first century competencies' curricula (Dede, 2014; Voogt et al., 2013). These stress the need for students to combine critical skills development with an understanding of the processes and reach of technologies in daily life, in order to prepare them for a shifting cultural and economic landscape. In response, an extensive literature has grown up about game-based learning (Brown, 2008; de Castell, 2011; Gee, 2003; Gee and Hayes, 2011; Jenson, Taylor, de Castell, 2011; Jenson et al., 2016; Kafai, 1995; 2012; 2016; Prensky, 2001; Squire, 2004; 2011; Steinkuehler, 2006) that seeks to explore whether/how games can be used productively in education. History as a discipline lends itself particularly well to game-based learning. It is bound up in questions of interpretation, agency, and choice, considerations that gameplay and game design as processes highlight well. My research explores the uses of digital historical games in history education, and most especially in the acquisition of critical historical skills. These skills are defined as the capacity to view and engage with the constitutive parts of historical scholarship and objects: interpretation, argument, evidence, ideology, subject position, class, race, sex, etc. This thesis will present findings from two participant-based research studies that I organized and ran between 2018 and 2019. In the first, participants were tasked with playing a counterfactual historical game, Fallout 4, and talking about their experiences, as well as answering questions about history and historical understandings. The second study took the form of an interactive digital history course. In it, students, working in small groups, were tasked with creating their own historical games. Exploring both gameplay and game production answers the call issued by Kafai and Burke (2016) that researchers should view the potential for games in education holistically, rather than in either/or terms. Taken together, this thesis argues that playing and especially making historical games offers opportunities for learners to engage with epistemological concepts in history in meaningful ways that can advance their critical understanding of history as a subject.