elon}
This research project will analyze media systems in the Central American countries of Cuba and Nicaragua, and in the Southeast Asian countries of Cambodia and Burma/Myanmar, where the struggles for freedom of speech and press are at crucial junctures. This follows up on some of Kass’s documentary film work to address questions about the role of media in countries during political transition. Special focus will be on dissident media.
This project will examine how five politicians in the 2012 presidential election – Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and President Barack Obama –communicate in a new media environment. The study will also examine how citizens receive information in the Twitter network. Do they receive messages directly from the politicians or through opinion leaders? Do they subscribe to one politician, multiple politicians, even across party lines? Do they passively receive information from political elites or actively participate in a forum for political deliberation?
This research project will examine the stories people tell about public assistance, with the primary goal of understanding the varied opinions, views and lived experiences of people both intimately involved in the welfare system such as aid recipients and providers, and those involved less directly, from politicians to consumers of U.S. media. Further, this research will explore how these narratives contribute to political discourse nationally and locally. Specific goals of this research project include:
This research project will investigate the political, symbolic, and strategic uses of images of political violence in contemporary narratives of American foreign policy. Through a number of case studies – such as the images of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, the dead bodies (or lack of) of key “foreign enemies” such as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Gaddafi, and images of the corpses and coffins of dead American soldiers – the project will seek to answer a number of questions, including: How has the changing media and technology landscape of image dissemination (e.g. social media, mobile devices) affected the political use of images of political violence?