Trapani, William

Social media played a pivotal role during The Never Again MSD Movement. This study examines the communicative tools social media, specifically Twitter, provides its users in order to communicate and distribute information. Authors Evans, Twoney, and Talan describes Twitter as “a valuable tool because it allows for instant communication to a wide audience” (9). Twitter is a valuable tool for communication because it fosters an online space where activists utilize the following communication tools: conversation, community, connection, collaboration, and accessibility. The study describes how activists use those tools in the type of messages being communicated on digital spaces. Through a context analysis on tweets from 3 prominent leaders of the movement: Sarah Chadwick, David Hogg, and Cameron Kasky, common themes were identified. The data was collected from a 6 week period ranging from February 14th, 2018 - March 28th, 2018. The purpose of this study is to ultimately examine how activist communicate on online spaces during social movements. Twitter offers activists a series of communication tools such as community, accessibility, and collaboration. Activists use these tools to first communicate about a variety of different topics relating to the movement as well distribute information and encourage involvement from other users. The results from the analysis determined that there is indeed power in communicating your message in online spaces. The study concludes with these findings: social media, specifically Twitter, is represented as a communication tool. The leaders of the Never Again MSD Movement use those tools in a variety of different ways such as communicating their personal opinion, encouraging involvement as well as promoting collaboration, community, and accessibility.

The unexpected comparison of a Supreme Court Justice with a popular culture
icon demonstrates how politics and popular culture become entwined in the
contemporary context; moreover, network culture provides a conduit for vernacular
discourse about politics, which circulates in the style of popular culture. Through analysis
of images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as created, shared, and circulated in network culture,
this project explores the alternative levels of discourse generated in network culture,
examines the ways the public represents politics, and explains the ability of political
subjects to affect meaning. The aim of this project is to document a conjunctural moment;
as such, analysis of the images in aggregate provides a foundation to raise questions
about how American political culture is manifested, attended to, and maintained through
network culture and the parlance of popular culture.

This thesis builds from press accounts of Bruce Springsteen’s South by Southwest
keynote address, taken by many to be a renewed call to arms of the classic mantras of the
rock ethos in the age of a declining recording industry. In tracing the ways the speech
circulated I argue that its discourse was rearticulated toward quite different (and
concerning) ends. Throughout, I aim to show the apparatuses of power that sustains the
rock liberation fantasy. I read the coverage of Springsteen’s address as a therapeutic
discourse meant to soothe the anxiety over the closure of agency in the age of
neoliberalism. The general problematic for the thesis, then, addresses an anxiety over the
collapse of freedom and as such works to offer broad reflections on the nature of radical
agency in our increasingly neoliberal present.

Community cookbooks operate through a rhetoric of place as ways of thinking
about belonging and influencing communal identities. They reveal much about a
community, including the sharing of memories and tradition, geographical identification,
and representation of socio-cultural hierarchies and habits. For that reason, this paper
advances the claim that the discourse and visuality in community cookbooks, specifically
the cookbooks 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, and Charleston
Receipts Repeats published during the height of a renaissance in Southern literature,
influenced the identity of “Southerness” which, taken in conjunction with place, space,
and time has resulted in a unification of the changing American South. Using Carolyn
Miller’s notions of genre criticism on the basis of genres as social movements,
community cookbooks qualify for the genre label of domestic literature in terms of
content and rhetorical influence. To prove my claim, the use of images, recipes, and
folklore within the pages are analyzed with five a posteriori themes that discuss relations
between a sense of place and its foodways.

This thesis examines the rise of image culture in the 1920’s and its impact on
American national identity. I demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, the central figure in
these debates was not a past or present prominent American but instead an indeterminate
Other which is read in ambivalent ways and for varied purposes. It is the central claim of
this project that in order to trace the modern American subject that emerges from the
1920s national rift, one must attend to the ways in which a felt need to view and position
oneself in relation to “the Other” was essential to defining the nature and future of the
nation. More specifically, I argue that the film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925)
offers a solution to this national divide by providing viewers a popular culture form of
“evidence” of the Westerner’s capacity to exhibit both premodern and modern qualities.