Browsing by Author "Mathers, Catherine"
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Item Open Access Beyond the Towers: September 11, 2001 Watching the Past & Present to Understand the Surveilled Future(2023-12-22) Shubrick, JordynSeptember 11, 2023, marked twenty-two years since the tragedy of 9/11. In this project, I examine the stories that are told and remembered to date about the September 11 attacks on the United States of America and the subsequent events that followed. After the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were tragically attacked on September 11, 2001, many media outlets began highlighting the significance of the attack, capturing the magnitude of the events. This project will look at what is memorialized, remembered, and cemented across the 22 years in our social memory of 9/11. I will further explore what is rooted in politics and memorials, shaped through the media. Through the historical narrative of celebrations of 9/11, looking at memory, memorialization, fear, and what lies ahead for the surveilled future ultimately assesses the forever remembrance of 9/11 in media and memorials and how memory operates to influence Americans' view of safety.Item Open Access Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over Knowledge(2019-04-15) Flamini, DanielaIn news environments all around the world, journalists are frazzled about what they consider to be a deplorable state of the media. With large demographics of consumers having access to digital technologies and new methods of story-telling via social media platforms and the Internet, newspaper reporters of the past are finding themselves constantly having to catch up to a rapidly changing realm of knowledge-production. This thesis uses fact-checking as a lens through which to study the modern relationship between power, information, and the creation of narrative, and it is rooted in observations from my various engagements with fact-checkers in Buenos Aires and at an international conference in Rome. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘the intellectual,’ I examine how Argentina’s polarized political environment and clashing of class interests inspired the organic rise of Chequeado, a fact-checking organization committed to holding elite groups accountable to the rest of society by establishing a new kind of journalistic authority over knowledge-producing processes. Using my experience traveling with the Duke Reporters’ Lab to Global Fact V in Rome, I broaden this discussion to fit a globalized framework. In spaces where ideological battles wage and the very definition of reality is at stake, fact-checkers are vying for a narrower kind of authoritative power over the information that gets exchanged between classes, one that mobilizes the public to use their access to knowledge and counter hegemonic narrative.Item Open Access Volunteering in the Neoliberal Subjectivity: Repackaging Problematic Narratives of the Past(2016-05-12) Gunnarsdottir, ElsaThis thesis seeks to analyze how Western volunteers today justify their experiences in Africa despite being aware of criticism. Outlining key moments in the history of English and American Philanthropy, this thesis seeks to investigate how volunteerism has become conceived of as such an important part of Western communities and identities. The research focuses on fieldwork in Taroudant, Morocco that investigates the ways volunteers describe their experiences in order to further understand this rationale. By identifying key characteristics of the millennial generation, this research has shown that the ways of rationalizing are constructs of a specific neoliberal subjectivity. This includes the coupling of pragmatic approaches to humanitarian issues with an argument that compassion is an imperative part of this activity. With specific focus on individual skill, and belief that compassion constitutes a type of skill, the neoliberal subject justifies that their presence is helpful to the communities in which they volunteer and that the experience can help strengthen personal skills. This neoliberal subjectivity has largely taken shape guided by influential narratives of the past that, for the purpose of this research, focuses specifically on NGO advertisements. This thesis argues that the stories volunteers share today, often on social media, recycle problematic narratives of the past. These reproduced narratives, and the consequent repackaging of the volunteering industry, allow for the maintenance of a hierarchal relationship between Africa and the West.