Utilizing critical and feminist science and technology studies methods, this thesis offers a new framework, called critical breaking, to allow for reflective and critical examination and analysis of instances of error, breakdown, and failure in digital systems.
The Allure of Choice: Agency and Worldbuilding in Branching-Path Transmedia Universes
Agency is often taken as a given in branching-path stories because they, almost by definition, allow for enhanced user involvement. But this truism hasn’t changed as the structure of the worlds that these branching texts exist within have.
From Trump Tower to the White House, in 140 Characters: The Hyper-Mediated Election of a Paranoid Populist President
Trump’s political communications reached a wider audience, on a sturdier basis, than earlier figures who had similarly adopted a “paranoid populist” philosophy.
Technology Against Technocracy: Toward Design Strategies for Critical Community Technology
This thesis develops an intersectional, critical analysis of the field of practice known as Civic Tech and highlights other relevant community-organizing and activist practices that utilize technology as a central component.
Everything is Awful: Snark as Ritualized Social Practice in Online Discourse
Snark can adopt a pro-social role in online environments whose architecture tends to reward vapid or deceptive content.
Frontlines of Crisis, Forefront of Change: Climate Justice as an Intervention into (Neo)colonial Climate Action Narratives and Practices
Radical media strategies, on the streets and on the airwaves, are central to the articulation of climate justice and the contestation of hegemonic meanings of climate action that legitimise colonial violence.
Narrative as an Aid for the Doctor-Patient Relationship in China
In China, when doctor-patient tension intensifies, some news media tend to blame the doctors, using misleading narratives to create sensationalism, thereby aggravating the antagonism between the society and medical professionals.
