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The Man in the High Castle or the History that Never Happened: The Conflation of Alternative History, Memory, and Ideology

Description
I center my analysis on Amazon’s recent foray into alternative history The Man in the High Castle premised on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. Amazon Studio’s production The Man in the High Castle builds upon the premise of an alternative history where World War II ends…

I center my analysis on Amazon’s recent foray into alternative history The Man in the High Castle premised on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. Amazon Studio’s production The Man in the High Castle builds upon the premise of an alternative history where World War II ends differently. Here, the diegetic narrative depicts a United States split into three distinct regions: the east coast, now part of the German Reich; the Neutral Zone, or most of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains; and the west coast, controlled by Japanese Empire. The film version debuted in 2015 as a series extending to four seasons of 10 episodes a piece by 2019. I argue that the show takes cues from modern political tensions, the rise of the alt-right and “post-truth” media manipulations, to intentionally destabilize viewers’ memories of the historical past. By blurring the boundaries between the diegetic reality of the show and our accepted version of history, The Man in the High Castle disrupts the facility in which the viewer assumes alignment with memory and past, opting instead for a complicated refiguring of the political present. Here I articulate how film as a medium tampers with the viewer’s ontological understanding of image by collapsing history and fiction together. Additionally, the capacity of film to provoke empathy from viewers complicates the universal condemnation of Nazism we are familiar with and permits viewers to see the banality of evil in this reimagined history. Finally, I discuss how film as a medium capitalizes on the incompleteness of memory and the loopholes of history to fabricate viewer memory.
ContributorsAbele, Kelsey Taylor (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, Adina (Committee member) / Hedberg Olenina, Ana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Human-Machine Relationality and the Illusion of Being Cared For: An In-Depth Exploration of Relationships with Communicative Machines

Description
The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how humans experience relationships with machines such as love and sex dolls and robots. This study places a particular emphasis on in-depth, rich, and holistic understanding of people’s lived experiences in the context of human-machine relationships and draws on human-machine communication scholarshi…

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how humans experience relationships with machines such as love and sex dolls and robots. This study places a particular emphasis on in-depth, rich, and holistic understanding of people’s lived experiences in the context of human-machine relationships and draws on human-machine communication scholarship by examining media evocation perspectives, the role of illusions, and the topic of care. Therefore, this study uses a funneled serial interview design employing three waves of semi-structured interviews (N = 47) with 29 love and sex doll owners and users. Utilizing a phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis approach coupled with metaphor analysis, the findings of this study reveal how participants experience dolls as evocative objects and quasi-others. Moreover, the findings illustrate how participants actively construct and (re)negotiate authenticity in their human-machine relationships, driven by a cyclical process between doll characteristics (agency and presence) and doll owner characteristics (imagination and identity extension) that results in an illusion of being cared for. This study extends previous scholarship by: 1) showcasing a new type of mute machines, namely humanoid mute relational machines; 2) adding empirical evidence to the largely theoretical work on dolls and doll owners; 3) adding empirical evidence to and extending media evocation perspectives by illustrating the suitability of participant metaphors for understanding machines’ evocative nature; and 4) proposing an integrative model of care and illusions that lays the foundation for a new relational interaction illusion model to be examined in future research. This study also discusses practical implications for doll owners, the public, and doll developers.
ContributorsDehnert, Marco (Author) / Sharabi, Liesel L (Thesis advisor) / Tracy, Sarah J (Thesis advisor) / Edwards, Autumn P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
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Glocalization in Education for Community Colleges: Intercultural Competency Skills for Local and International Student Global Workforce Readiness

Description
College graduates are expected to acquire certain skill sets that are necessary andsought after by potential employers, as many industries in the United States continue to grow a global footprint. Employers also value good communication skills, and communication classes are a staple of most general education curricula, including those taught on community college…

College graduates are expected to acquire certain skill sets that are necessary andsought after by potential employers, as many industries in the United States continue to grow a global footprint. Employers also value good communication skills, and communication classes are a staple of most general education curricula, including those taught on community college campuses. The diversity of the student populations on community college campuses in the United States is vast, as is the cultural wealth accompanying this diversity. Diverse and internationalized student populations at community colleges include local students living in communities surrounding community colleges and international students studying abroad in the United States. This action research study infused intercultural intelligence activities into a third culture Communication 100 classroom using the prescribed course objectives to prepare both local and international students to enter a global, or a glocal-local (glocal) workforce. This was done by having local and international students communicate, share, and teach each other and their instructor via their cultural capital in a third culture classroom. Mixed methods were employed by collecting student reflection journals after completing four class activities that introduced them to the principles of cultural intelligence. Students in an experimental class and two control classes completed the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI) as a pre- and post-assessment. The experimental students’ GPI scores indicated they perceived themselves to have grown more on all seven variables in the study and felt more prepared to enter a global workforce. In the experimental class, results from both qualitative and quantitative data indicated that the international and local Latine students had comparable cultural intelligence skills upon entering the class and that they felt they learned more about the world by working with each other. Their perceptions changed in a positive direction regarding their intercultural intelligence growth, and they felt more prepared to enter a global and glocal workforce due to their participation in the Communication 100 third culture classroom.
ContributorsPetit, Annique (Author) / Judson, Eugene (Thesis advisor) / Hesse, Maria (Committee member) / Amavisca Reyes, Nora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024