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The Walt Disney Company has been a worldwide phenomenon for over half a century. Disney's animated films in particular impact a large number of individuals around the world. The fact that they rerelease popular films every few years lends to the lasting influence these movies will hold in the lives of children to come. It is important to examine the messages Disney animated films can teach children in regards to women's roles, United States history, and racial difference. This essay examines these topics as they appear in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, and The Lion King. Lastly, it examines the potential impact these films can leave on children and suggests ways in which adults can help children analyze what they see in the media.
ContributorsMonnig, Elizabeth Ann (Author) / Baker, Aaron (Thesis director) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
This paper offers a radical critique of consumer capitalism and consumer activism through advertisements from Industrial Food Systems. I examine advertisements from Monsanto, Industrial Beef Farmers, and Waste Management in order to critique the rhetoric that these companies use and reveal the environmental destruction they are attempting to obscure through the strategic use of language and symbols. I argue that a deeper anti-capitalist analysis of Industrial Food Systems is necessary to subvert consumer activism and greenwashing tactics and to curb environmental destruction.
ContributorsSnarr, Madeline M. (Author) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This thesis examines media rhetoric promoting neoliberal education reform, including the advancement of school-choice systems and movements towards privatization. Films like Waiting for Superman and Won't Back Down have ushered in new, markedly "progressive" narratives that show neoliberal reform as both a model for a consumer-led culture in education and as a path towards educational equity, a goal typically associated with public schools promoted as a public interest.
ContributorsMorrow, Victoria Rose (Author) / Brass, Jory (Thesis director) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
This paper analyzes the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine within the context of the other Trek series, especially the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a particular focus on multiculturalism. Previous Trek series present an image of the United Federation of Planets that has evolved into a peaceful, cooperative, post-scarcity, multicultural utopia, but gloss over the difficulties the Federation governments must have faced in creating this utopia and must still face in maintaining it. I argue that DS9’s shift in focus away from exploration and towards a postcolonial, multicultural, stationary setting allows the show to interrogate the nature of the Federation’s multicultural utopia and showcase the difficulties in living in and managing a space with a plurality of cultures. The series, much more than those that precede and follow it, both directly and indirectly criticizes the Federation and its policies, suggesting that its utopian identity is based more in assimilation than multiculturalism. Nonetheless, this criticism, which is frequently abandoned and even undermined, is inconsistent. By focusing on three of the show’s contested spaces/settings—the space station itself, the wormhole, and the demilitarized zone—I analyze the ways in which DS9’s ambivalent criticism of the success of multiculturalism challenges the confidence of the Trek tradition.
ContributorsPoterack, Vivien Eulalie (Author) / Free, Melissa (Thesis director) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This essay outlines public art in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa and how public art can manifest itself to reconstruct cultural memory, provide a space for healing and processing collective trauma, and produce critical public pedagogy. Public art also has the power to provide symbolic reparations, an approach proposed by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee but one that I believe was not properly or effectively handled by the South African government. In this paper I will cover two specific public art projects and one established museum, all three framed within the context of both institutionalized and individual approaches to public art. Such projects extend to the District Six Museum, the Public Arts Festival of 1997, and the Black Arts Collective visual-media project, ‘Returning the Gaze.’ This paper proposes that the concept of public art should be reconsidered; I argue that its purpose is not to solely beautify urban landscapes, but rather to provide platforms for survivors of abuse to relay their experiences, influence popular discourse, and challenge hegemonic notions of race, identity, and culture.
ContributorsHeppner, Gena Rose (Author) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Popova, Laura (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05