Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

Infotainment: the pressure of ratings and their dangers for democracy in cable news

Publication Date
2016-January-01
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In this thesis I argue that through the necessity to generate a profit, cable news organizations focus on attracting the most viewers so that they can then charge more for advertising and in turn make more money. This symbiotic relationship...

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Miss Samoa: Navigating Gender, Politics, and Culture in the National Pageant

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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As a national pageant, Miss Samoa operates as a performative space where notions of gender, politics, and culture are negotiated and transformed. In this thesis, I examine how these concepts operate on an individual, local, and transnational level. Plus, the...

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Speed as Signifier: McDonald's as a Contested Space

Publication Date
2015-January-01
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Those who control spaces are able to regulate what moves through them and the speed at which they do so; as such, space has a tendency of being reorganized in favor of those who move more quickly at greater expenditures...

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Theater and Social Change: How Small-town U.S. Theaters Reproduce and Resist Inequality

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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This thesis interrogates the social function of small-town theater in the United States. Through a series of interviews with theater artists working at regional and local theaters in the northeast United States, I demonstrate theater's capacity to both reproduce and...

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