Communication

Jimmy Carter and his administration varied the ways in which they addressed human rights concerns internationally. There was a strong, often emotional evocation of human rights in reference to countries that were less economically, strategically, or politically important to the United States and the foreign policy goals of the Carter administration. This was not present in Carter's approach to addressing human rights concerns in important allies, such as South Korea, or with countries where relations were fragile and important, such as China and the USSR. This ambivalence in addressing human rights in strategically important nations was compounded by Carter's disavowal of linkage policies. It was this ambivalence that made the moral foreign policy a failure. While there were international situations out of his control, his continued leniency and unbalanced application of linkage and focus on adherence to human right practices internationally, lessened the administration's ability to respond to international tragedy.

Author Keywords: American Foreign Policy, Government Indexing, Human Rights, Jimmy Carter, Presidential Press Relations

Game texts present unique and dynamic opportunities for lability: how readers can make choices while reading that alter the narrative's nature or outcome. Labile decisions are neither simply correct nor incorrect--the reader renders judgement to produce a desired outcome. When encountering labile challenges, players employ an interpretive strategy to resolve them. Many game texts tell stories. Games anticipate readers' interpretive strategies to orchestrate a desired result in labile narratives and manipulate players into inhabiting an identity in a variety of different ways. This thesis examines how Fallout 3 does so with periodically opposable intentions, mainly applying an inconsistent moral orthodoxy via the player character's father, but occasionally exhibiting the series' nihilistic philosophy that disdains American exceptionalism, undermining the orthodoxy. This isolates and breaks down the interpretive communities the player inhabits to play the game.

Author Keywords: Exceptionalism, Identity, Lability, Morality, Narrative, Video Games

Forensic scientific practice is conventionally understood as a solution to absence. With every technological advance the power and span of the archive grows and with it revives hopes of uncovering facts and locate bodies that might put genocide denial and/or negationism to rest. Destruction, however, continues to define the reality and conditions

for testimony in the aftermath of mass atrocity. This means that even as forensic scientific practice grows in its capacity to presence that which was previously unpresentable, destruction and the concomitant destruction of archive require that we consider what it means to remember with and without the archive alike. This dissertation explores the impact of forensic science on cultural memory through a choice of two case studies (set in Kosovo and Srebrenica respectively) where forensic scientific methods

were involved in the investigation of atrocities that were openly denied.

This dissertation makes an agnostic argument that the biblical example of the empty tomb can serve as a paradigm to understand the terms of witnessing and testifying to absence in the era of forensic scientific investigations. Specifically, it posits the following theses with regards to the empty tomb: it is a structure and an event that emerges at the intersection of forensic science's dual property as an indexical technique and as a witness

function, it cannot be validated through historiographic or forensic scientific methods (it is un-decidable) and as such serves as a corrective the fantasy of the total archive, is represented in the contemporary genre of forensic landscape; and because it breaks with the forensic imperative, it compels alternative uses for testimony and memorial practices that need not be defined by melancholia as it can accommodate forms of testimony that

are joyous and life affirming.

Author Keywords: Absence, Archive, Forensic, Memory, Testimony, Witness

The goal of the present study was to explore the overall discourse within media articles regarding Aboriginal health issues. The present research aimed to answer the following questions: What Aboriginal health issues are being discussed in the media? How are Aboriginal health issues being discussed in the media? And, does the media propagate power imbalances between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians? A thematic analysis was conducted, coopting aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to assess media content. Four CDA devices were used: overlexicalisation, structural oppositions, nominalizations and functional nominations, and concessions and hedging. Results suggest that while there are disparities in health outcomes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, it is not widely reported in the media. The thematic analysis of 208 articles revealed patterns of stereotypical ideologies and negative framing appearing in media articles, the creation of an us versus them narrative, and themes of out of sight, out of mind, criminalizing Aboriginal Canadians, politicizing health, and access to health services.

Author Keywords: Aboriginal Health, Communication, Health, Media, Psychology, Thematic Analysis

On Tilt: The Inheritance and Inheritors of Digital Games accepts and extends Eric Zimmerman's contention that literacies currently being developed during video-game play will be more broadly applicable (outside games) in the next hundred years as Western work, education, entertainment, and citizenship spaces become ever more shaped like video games.

To the end of better understanding both video games and the players and literacies contiguous with them, this dissertation interrogates comparisons between video games and... non-digital games, film and other fictional texts and worlds, blogs, casinos' games of chance, and the strategies employed by face-to-face criminals, always asking about the roles and responsibilities the human participants in these systems take; that is, this dissertation investigates what video games inherit from other forms of art, including non-digital games, and what the gamers and audience of today and tomorrow inherit through their contact with video games.

The dissertation examines in detail works by Jodi Dean, Bernard Suits, Bruce Sterling, T. L. Taylor, Walter Benjamin, Gavin de Becker, N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler, and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, considering their work, the video game, and gamers, in terms of power gaming, genre, fiction and suspension of disbelief, audience, motivations, fungibility, the zombie vs. the robot, value vs. meaning, agency, slipstream, capitalism, and ontology.

Ultimately, the dissertation suggests that there are two disparate strains of gamification building Zimmerman's future, arguing first that the penetration of video games into culture is changing the way we behave and exist as audience and more generally, and, second, that what is at stake, in terms of the attitudes, labels, and gameplay that we accept in terms of games and gamification is significant to what it means to be human, especially within systems that are only partly human, in the next hundred years.

Author Keywords: digital, gamification, genre, literacy, new media, videogame