Department of Media, Film and Communication
Collections in Department of Media, Film and Communication
Recent Deposits
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Baudrillard in a ‘Post-Truth’World: Groundwork for a Critique of the Rise of Trump
This paper takes the view that Baudrillard’s work on the West’s fascination with reality is as insightful as ever. The paper traces the rise of this fascination across four areas of his work: the critique of the commodity ... -
The Strategic Narratives of the BRICS: A Coherent Story?
Strategic narratives play a fundamental role in generating public support for political objectives. The formation of strategic narratives has intensified in the twenty-first century due to the pluralization of state and ... -
Terror Apparatuses: Power, Prosumership, and Propaganda in Islamic State Media
This thesis examines the media produced and circulated by the Islamic State (IS) through Michel Foucault’s notions of power, episteme, and apparatus. I expose the biopolitical function of IS videos End of Sykes-Picot (2014) ... -
Becoming-common: Affective Technologies and Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Italy
This thesis employs ethnographic methods to study grassroots activism in contemporary Italy. Through non-representational analysis, which involves participant observation and interviews in activist communities, I observe ... -
The algorithmic subject: the neo-liberal apparatus and the social media technology of power.
This thesis is a Foucauldian inspired apparatus investigation that contributes to our understanding of neo-liberalism. The thesis will show that neo-liberalism has varied and, at times, contradictory relationships with ... -
The Age of the Superhero: The Cycle of Appropriation & Revitalisation in the Hollywood Blockbuster
Over the course of the 2000s, the Hollywood blockbuster welcomed the superhero genre into its ranks, after these films saw an explosion in popularity. Now, the ability to produce superhero films through an extended transmedia ... -
Creative Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Forging a New Path for Ethnographic Film in Aotearoa New Zealand
This thesis envisions a new path for ethnographic cinema. While revisionist works challenge a colonial study that has invaded, marginalized, and catalogued the researched Other, my research recognizes film as a collaborative ... -
Bear Images: Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man
In Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog edits and presents footage shot by Timothy Dexter while in the company of grizzly bears. As the film states, Grizzly Man centres on the human story that unfolds in Treadwell’s videos, ... -
Fan-made Time: Power and Play in the Production Paratext of The Hobbit
Following the critical acclaim of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) the forums of dedicated fan website, TheOneRing.net, buzzed with rumours of a new film, an adaptation of Tolkien’s original novel, ... -
Children of the Revolution: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque
David Bowie and Marc Bolan were two glam rock stars who, in the 1970s, presented audiences with carnivalesque ‘alternatives’ to everyday reality. As a time of crisis and transformation, the 1970s in Britain has been ... -
Exploring nature as representation and young adults’ conceptualisations of nature in the user-generated online world: Nature 2.0
Urban living is now the norm around the world, nature spaces and species are declining and, it is argued, many now have little or no direct contact with nature. At the same time, people everywhere are increasingly dependent ... -
China on Video: Smaller Screen Realities
China On Video is the first in-depth study that examines smaller-screen realities and the important role they play not only in the fast-changing Chinese mediascape, but also more broadly in the practice of experimental and ... -
Willful women in contemporary cinema: Affect, space and affirmative aesthetics
Under the current patriarchal status quo, women’s bodies do not have the same ‘freedom’ (and thus capability) of spatial movement and social exis- tence as bodies ‘gendered as masculine, or racialised as “white”’ (Sheller ... -
Programming Parents: Care of Supernanny
In 2004 the problem of bad parenting came to the British public’s attention in a string of reality TV programmes about unruly children, exemplified most prominently by Supernanny. Unlike first and second wave makeover ... -
Multiplicities and the Subject: Rethinking a Mix-of-Attributes Approach in the Digital World
It has been 30 years since Clark made his call to focus on fundamental structures of media rather than media formats (such as radio or television) and more than 10 years since Eveland proposed a mix-of-attributes approach ... -
Re-examining Rural Representations in Contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand Documentary
Documentary film enacts a particular viewing position, which enlists spectators in what Elizabeth Cowie describes as the desire to see and know the world through its recorded sights and sounds of reality. This thesis ... -
Technology Translated: The Communicational Facilitation of Medium
Drawing upon and synthesizing findings established in select areas of social and medium ecological approaches to the study of human communication, this project advances and tests the utility of a reformed, processual model ... -
Solid to liquid culture: The institutional, political and economic transformation of New Zealand state broadcasting
This thesis examines the cultural development of New Zealand state broadcasting and proposes a new institutional paradigm based around the discursive potential of digital and social media. In framing the political, cultural ... -
Learning for Survival, Resilience, Well-being and Continuance: An Epistemology and Pedagogy for Environmental Education/Education for Sustainability informed by Māori Culture
The literature suggests that philosophies, worldviews and approaches of indigenous cultures may be key to an urgent shift in paradigm towards holistic ethics, attitudes, values and behaviours essential for an ecologically ...