A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Bringing the War Back Home: YouTube and Anti-War Street Theater
by: Chuck Tryon / Fayetteville State University
A YouTube video of a street theater performance by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) raises questions about the representations of the war in Iraq as mediated by both the mainstream media and the more participatory video sharing sites.
Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’?
by: Alex Munt / Macquarie University
Munt explores Hollywood’s reaction to the popularity of YouTube and its emerging “Clip Culture”
Glimpsing Utopia on Lost
by: Tim Gibson / George Mason University
What I felt in my bones when I watched this particular episode of Lost was a yearning for the collective life of the castaways. Whatever else happens, these people are in it together. When times are bad, they are bad for everyone. When times are good—like when Hurley liberates the
hatch’s food—they’re good for one and all alike.
Modern Love?
by: Judith Halberstam / University of Southern California
New York Times column “Modern Love” records the ups
and downs, the byroads and hidden paths of contemporary romance for urban, mostly white, mostly heterosexual men and women.
Mommy, Is That a Boy Text or a Girl Text?
by: Jonathan Gray / Fordham University
How do audiences come to understand a text as having a gender, and/or a gendered audience?
Adieu to The Sopranos; What Next for HBO?
by: Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Exploring whether the series finale of The Sopranos will be the nail in the coffin for the company that defines itself as not TV, but rather HBO.
Hutto’s Children: Maddening Structures of Absence
by: Hector Amaya / Southwestern University
YouTube allows unseen detained children the chance to be witnessed, but is anyone watching?
Everything is Under Control
by: Daniel Chamberlain / USC
Celebrations of viewer control display a marked historical shortsightedness, reveal a familiar deployment of gendered discourse, and raise questions about inequality of access
in a rapidly tiering television environment.
The Edwardian Country House: An Exegesis
by: Alan McKee / Queensland University of Technology
In the 2002 British reality series The Edwardian Country House 21 people live just as they would have done in the first decade of the twentieth century. Six of them take the role of the family who own the house, while fifteen take the role of the servants. And they live those Edwardian lives – strictly – for three months.
Dancing in the Distraction Factory: CGI, Captured Feet, and Box Office Magic
by: Anna Beatrice Scott / University of California, Riverside
Dancing is a central component to today’s CGI blockbusters. What happens in the transformation from the physical to the digital? What effects has dance had on animation and animation on dance? And how does dancing in the digital realm shape our perception of reality?
Indigeneity for Life: Bro’town and Its Stereotypes
by: Ilana Gershon / Indiana University
The writers of Bro’town insist on a distinction between stereotypes used to reinforce historically and economically grounded inequalities and stereotypes used to indicate differences without consequences.
by: John Corner / University of Liverpool
What does the Royal Navy’s recent hostage crisis in Iran say about television’s involvement in the conduct of war and conflict?