Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Music History

This dissertation examines the social contexts for music livestreams, in order to lay the groundwork for future studies of both livestreaming as a whole and individual case studies. No frameworks currently exist for analyzing music livestreams. Although the technologies of livestreaming have been evolving over the past few decades, there have been no organized or successful attempts to standardize the ways we understand and study this fast-growing medium for music performance. Chapter 1 provides basic definitions of livestreaming, and then emphasizes the framework of liveness, arguing that although livestreaming technologies developed relatively recently, the practice of transmitting and receiving live music has been developing since the late-nineteenth century. I examine livestreaming as a continuation of broadcast media wrapped up with conceptions of liveness that have been constantly transforming over the long twentieth century. Chapter 2 connects livestreaming with the social media platforms that have emerged in the past two decades. I also position livestreaming within discussions and anxieties surrounding attention and distraction in the context of digital media. In Chapter 3 the discussion of attention extends into the realm of joint attention, and the ways livestreaming engages our attentive capacities in groups to facilitate specific modalities of participation—observational, reactive, and generative. Finally, the conclusion pulls these frameworks together to demonstrate their use in an analysis of music livestreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the patterns of behavior and audience engagement, conceptions of liveness during the pandemic, and the effects of these factors on the social aspects of live music.

Committee: Daniel Goldmark (Advisor); Francesca Brittan (Committee Member); Georgia Cowart (Committee Member); Vera Tobin (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Mass Media; Multimedia Communications; Music; Performing Arts; Psychology; Recreation; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation explores the role of African media in shaping Africa's image through both the analysis of newspapers over the course of the 2014 Ebola crisis and an exploration of African films. This methodology redeploys aspects of Africa's (in)visibility in global politics and discourse on representation in geopolitics. Placing African film and media organizations at the center of analysis in this study is vital, as they add diversity of voices to the conversation about Africa's image in the media. The dissertation looks at how Africa is framed as perpetually “in crisis.” Specifically, the research engages analysis of African film and media depictions under the premise of crises to advance Africa's visual culture and representation. I am interested in exploring how coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in The Inquirer, a major English newspaper in Liberia, compares with that in the New York Times coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Likewise, I explore how African cinema frames and represents crisis through three films – Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975); Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009); and Les Saignantes (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005). I argue that African films speak to the possibility of positive anticipated outcomes ignored by western scholars, and, therefore, possess the agency to decolonize minds. For instance, Pumzi and Les Saignantes offer an outlook on Africa's challenges and possibilities through newly imagined futures. Precisely, the selected films first address Africa's crisis in relation to the political, economic, and environmental struggle as well as gender discourses and, second, offer a prescription of development and progress. How do African filmmakers and media personnel, through their various creative works, reconstruct Africa's global identity? Finally, I advance that this research gives voice to how Africa frames crisis. This dissertation interrogates an unbalanced global power structure that has been typically Eurocentric. Taking an opposing pos (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrea Frohne (Committee Chair); Erin Schlumpf (Committee Co-Chair); Steve Howard (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Literature; African Studies; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; Communication; Comparative Literature; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, American Culture Studies

In 2020, people across the world began to live nearly all their lives online thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Social media allowed people in quarantine and isolation to safely interact no matter where in the world they were. For some, however, this way of online existence had been happening for years. Fans of all sorts of media texts and media objects had flocked to digital realms for years as a way of finding others who felt the same way they did. Some fans choose to use their social media platform of choice to put forward a digital fan identity that fore fronted their role as a fan rather than any aspect of their offline identity. This work looks at the ways that specific social media platforms can impact the ways that fan communities form and how these communities can have impact on the sociopolitical views that users are exposed to. Using the sociopolitical touchstone of the Black Lives Matter movement in May and June 2020, this project utilizes a mixed-methods analysis of digital conversations across Twitter, TikTok,and Instagram. In comparing the three platforms it becomes clear that the unique affordances of each platform combine with unique dynamics of each fan group to privilege the voices and beliefs of socially acceptable fans. It also becomes clear that the distinctive affordances of each platform have the ability to shape offline interactions and sociopolitical ideals in different ways. We can see here just a glimpse into how the online can shape the offline in ways that have growing implications for our understanding of the social and political world.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Andrew Schocket Ph.D. (Committee Member); Yanqin Lu Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, American Culture Studies

Since its inception in 2007, the microblogging platform Tumblr has grown from its modest roots as a social media website founded on short form, user-generated content into a hub for diverse subcommunities and unique experiences. Scholars have been keen to note the breadth of Tumblr users' worldviews and knowledgebases, and to identify the significance of its practices and emergent cultures. This thesis intends to expand upon such research and create a substantive theory of Tumblr which recognizes the platform's relevance according to users, and in connection with current scholarly understandings. It situates Tumblr as a key online platform in the creation of identity, community, and meaning for its users, one which has proven to be influential in present understandings of how people gather and interact in virtual spaces. Using constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology and the lens of social constructionism, this thesis seeks to analyze the lived experiences of users of Tumblr to theorize how their time on the platform have shaped who they are, how they engage with others, and how they navigate the world around them online and offline. Additionally, this thesis looks to suggest what the practices of Tumblr have contributed to users' understandings of community and identity, as well as to provide suggestions for future scholars.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Advisor); Yanqin Lu Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Communication; Cultural Anthropology; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2017, English

New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces, are playing a highly visible role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum studies scholars see the participatory experiences mediated by such technologies as potentially redefining relationships between the institution and the public by allowing museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural elite. In these pages, I employ rhetorician Gregory Clark's (2010) theory of rhetorical experience to investigate the claim by museum studies scholars that a “paradigm shift” is being enacted by digital technologies within museums. I show that digitally mediated experiences, particularly those facilitated by touch, can induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their engagement in the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and interpretation, to the documented, public roles of educator, curator, researcher, and critic. I also show that the rhetorical nature the experiences that invite visitors to participate in such activities can effect changes in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer. This qualitative study takes place in two public institutions with recent installations of groundbreaking exhibition technologies, the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. I use ethnographic methods, including participant observations and interviews, to identify what I term the “habits of interaction” afforded by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of physical and digital activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one's ability to take up new interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated experiences and one's previously existing digital literacies, I closely examine the rhetorical experiences visitors engage in through interaction with touchscreen interfaces. Museum visitors interac (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: T. Kenny Fountain (Advisor) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation investigates how functional music, utilitarian commercial music composed to create moods, shapes environmental imaginaries in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century America. In particular, the study considers how functional music operates in specific media contexts to facilitate sonic identifications with the natural world that imbricate nature with modalities of contemporary capitalism. As humandriven changes to the planet have ushered in the Anthropocene, an investigation of the relationships between musical sound, moods, and environments will draw out the feelings and imaginaries of the era. In doing so, this study amplifies these attenuated sounds, aiming to open the conversation to new ways of listening in an age of increasing environmental fragility.

Committee: Marina Peterson (Advisor); Michael Gillespie (Committee Member); Harold Perkins (Committee Member); Garrett Field (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

PHD, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation examines senior citizens' literacy practices as they manage the body in an effort to characterize seniors' “lived experiences.” The study is a grounded theory analysis of interviews with seniors ages 60 to 80. The seniors within this study show that they use literacy practices to leverage control over their bodies in uneven relationships with medical professionals; they view the body rhetorically; and they adopt new literacies mentalities (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007). The study allows the researcher to develop a model that characterizes seniors' uses of literacy practices. The researcher proposes the concepts embodying texts and embodied literacies to conceptualize the ways seniors use literacy.

Committee: Pamela Takayoshi Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Patricia Dunmire Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sara Newman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kelly Cichy Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Gunstad Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Gerontology; Literacy; Rhetoric

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art

Questioning the disjunction which occurs between the real and virtual structure of the moving image, this selection of works and concepts explores the dissection of time and exploitation of structural artifacts. Expanding upon the disjunction which occurs, the subsequent writing investigates the conflation of image making and image fixation which is ever-present within my studio practice. Looking at the history of film and television as a visual and narrative structure, this work will survey the methods and techniques in which a conversational gap can be actualized and given a physical form.

Committee: Kenneth Rinaldo (Committee Chair); Amy Youngs (Committee Member); Laura Lisbon (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Design; Epistemology; Film Studies; Fine Arts; Motion Pictures; Museums; Performing Arts; Robotics; Robots; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2011, American Culture Studies/Communication

This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers. I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia's actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia's content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles.

Committee: Victoria Ekstrand PhD (Committee Chair); Nancy Patterson PhD (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala PhD (Committee Member); Donald McQuarie PhD (Committee Member); David Parry PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Epistemology; Information Technology

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, American Culture Studies/Communication

"IRL (In Real Life): Breaking Down The Binary Of Online Versus Offline Social Interaction" examines the framework of "real versus virtual" that is often applied to studies of online social activity. This framework is often employed as a default in new media research, influencing a number of areas including the ongoing debate among scholars about whether or not the word "community" can be justly applied to a virtual group. The difficulty lies in the fact that few researchers have examined the framework in a critical context, in particular in the context of our larger narrative of the history of mass media technologies. This research begins with a detailed discussion of the real/virtual binary as a theoretical construct, in order to see if the idea of a sharp separation between online and offline activity is supportable. Having broken down the binary construct, this work turns to a case study of an online community known as "the Bronze," which existed from 1997 to 2001. By utilizing interviews and archival information, the case study examines the ways in which Internet users combine online and offline social activity seamlessly, the ways Internet forums can become integrated into daily activity rather than exist as exotic oases away from normal routines, and concludes with examples of the community organizing to deal with unwanted behavior, and also with a discussion of what the risk of deception in an online space means for the legitimacy of online social interaction.

Committee: Radhika Gajalla (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Popular Culture

Thinspiration images, meant to inspire weight-loss, proliferate online through platforms that encourage the circulation of user-generated content. Despite numerous alarmist critiques in mass media about thinspiration and various academic studies investigating 'pro-anorexia' sites, surprisingly little attention has been given to the processes of creation and the symbolic potential of thinspiration. This thesis analyzes the formal hybridity of thinspiration, and its use as an expressive medium. The particularities of thinspiration (including its visual characteristics, creative processes, and exhibition) may be considered carefully constructed instances of self-representation, hinging on the expression of beliefs regarding the mind and body. While these beliefs are deeply entrenched in popular body management discourse, they also tend to rely on traditional dualist ideologies. Rather than simply emphasizing slenderness or reiterating standard assumptions about beauty, thinspiration often evokes pain and sadness, and employs truisms about the transcendence of flesh and rebellion against social constraints. By harnessing individualist discourse and the values of mind/body dualism, thinspiration becomes a space in which people struggling with disordered eating and body image issues may cast themselves as active agents—contrary to images of eating disorders proffered by popular and medical discourse.

Committee: Marilyn Motz (Advisor); Rebecca Kinney (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Art Criticism; Communication; Folklore; Gender Studies; Health; Multimedia Communications; Social Research; Web Studies; Womens Studies