3:15 PM – 4:30 PM | Merten Hall, Rooms 1202 and 1203
Reading Culture: Text, Power, and Representation
3:15 PM – 4:30 PM | Merten Hall, Room 1202
Discussant: Dr. Anu Aneja
Streaming Female Labour: ‘Mrs’, Spectatorship, and the Public Sphere in India
Aparna Shastri (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
This paper follows the diverse public discourses that emerged organically among Indian spectators after the release of the Hindi language film “Mrs” (an adaptation of the Indian Malayalam language film “The Great Indian Kitchen”) in January 2025. Analyzing “Mrs” for its modes of address, character arc, symbolism, and depiction of female labour within the narrative, this paper shows how the film unveils the patriarchal enslavement of women in marriages by mirroring the oppressed domestic experiences of numerous women in India. Using first hand interviews, widespread media discourses on the film, and textual analysis, I argue that the case of this film and its impact in the Indian public sphere is emblematic of the revelatory potential of content on streaming platforms, showing how filmic address and narrative techniques can help foster new kinds of spectatorial subjectivities and agency. I explore what contributed to the film’s popularity and record-breaking viewership and how the film ushered in feminist realizations and conversations on gender equality in the public sphere while conversely, also sparking protests by men’s rights groups in India. By making visible the stereotypical and oppressive gender roles in patriarchal families, this film resonated with diverse audiences, most of them women from all age groups, raising issues of male entitlement, women’s economic independence, and marriage as a form of entrapment within centuries-old patriarchal setups. This paper contributes to scholarship on streaming media, spectatorship, feminist popular culture, and borrows from thinkers like Silvia Federici, Nivedita Menon, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Uma Chakravarti.
Digital Propaganda: How China Uses Short-Form Videos To Undermine Taiwan’s Democratic Resilience
Yenting Lin (Schar School of Policy and Government)
This paper analyzes how China integrates algorithmic propaganda and soft power in its cognitive warfare strategy against Taiwan. It focuses on TikTok and other short video apps that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to mix political messages with popular culture. Through these videos, Beijing aims to shape how young people in Taiwan see democracy, national identity, and cross-strait relations. These activities are part of a larger effort that combines media control, cultural exchange, and local influence networks to weaken Taiwan’s confidence and unity from within. Using Chinese policy documents, research reports, and media examples, this study explains how the CCP turns technology and emotion into tools of persuasion. It connects these tactics to China’s wider model of control, which promises freedom but maintains dominance, as seen in Hong Kong. The paper also shows how weak regulation, data gaps, and limited media literacy make democratic societies easy targets for this kind of manipulation. Taiwan has begun to respond through fact-checking, civic tech groups, and government programs, but these steps are still scattered and reactive. The study concludes that protecting democracy today needs cooperation among government, schools, and civil society, as well as joint action with other democracies to build public awareness and digital resilience.
Masculinity and Shell-Shocked Soldiers in Mrs. Dalloway and The Return of The Soldier
Meg Paulson (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
This paper explores shell shock as a diagnosis for male soldiers during World War I in the texts Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Return of The Soldier by Rebecca West. Many authors in the early 20th century explored the idea of the shell-shocked soldier in their writing, complicating gender identity because shell shock was affiliated with ‘feminine’ symptoms such as weakness or dependency. This paper asserts that a character from each text, Septimus from Mrs. Dalloway and Chris from The Return of The Soldier, fulfill the role of an ‘ideal man’ as soldiers before ‘losing’ their masculinity with the onset of shell shock. As a result, Septimus and Chris take on ‘feminine’ traits that lead to two endings: a cure or death. The paper employs scholars in the field of disability studies within literature to explore the idea of an ideal man and to assert that shell shock was simultaneously a masculine diagnosis while these men faced ‘feminine’ symptoms. This paper challenges the idea that both Septimus and Chris fail to fulfill a traditionally masculine role, because Septimus and Chris stood as masculine soldiers before developing shell shock. The conclusion of this paper is that while shell shock is a construction of feminine traits, both Septimus and Chris meet the expectation of the ‘ideal man’ as soldiers on the battlefield. Ultimately, this complicates gender identity because it is not as simple to claim that Septimus and Chris were only feminine or that this diagnosis meant they were explicitly masculine.
The Story as Agent: From Metaphor to Mode of Analysis
Donald Harmon (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
This paper proposes a mechanism for analyzing the traditional folk story as an agent in its own telling and transmission. It offers an ontology of the folk story as a subject, having desires and intentions, and enacting those desires upon its environment. Through the German hermeneutician Gadamer’s conception of the “play of art” and the “narrative desires” in the theory of American literary critic Peter Brooks, the paper argues that folk stories told and retold in performance exert pressures and enact constraints which are negotiated by their narrators. The agency of the story drives a dynamic process by which stories enact themselves in a repeatable and transmissible cultural form. The paper concludes that the story as agent, readily understood as metaphorical, invites folklorists to inquire what traditional stories want for themselves, a mode of analysis that makes a promising contribution to the repertoire of narrative studies in folklore.
Race, Ethnicity, and Belonging
3:15 PM – 4:30 PM | Merten Hall, Room 1203
Discussant: Dr. Alyssa Bivins
The (Un)Productive Force of DNA Ancestry Testing in Brazil: Colonialism, Capitalism, and Data
Camila Campos Costa (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Brazilians have welcomed DNA ancestry tests as an alternative response to the widespread sense of uncertainty surrounding heritage, a social issue largely related to colonialism’s legacy. In the light of studies on racial subjetification and Political Economy, this work interrogates the nature of data from companies that offer DNA ancestry tests in Brazil. Specifically, it analyzes the “genetic groups” available on MyHeritage, Genera, and MeuDna. This work identified that, although attention is often directed toward the number of genetic groups available—which, indeed, do not even remotely represent the diverse groups in Brazil—the key issue is that these companies carry biases rooted in colonialism that actively rearrange racial and ethnic identities and participate in the production of racial meanings. Despite DNA functioning as a representational model of genetic information, companies do not invent the genetic groups in the context of ancestry tests; history and social relations do. In this exchange of social and scientific abstractions, they convert socio-historical constructs into data that tend to biologize race and ethnicity in colonial terms, oriented toward profit under global capitalism. Likewise, it informs how people identify themselves in terms of race and ethnicity, erasing some identities while fabricating others according to colonial reasoning, geopolitical outcomes, and profit. Within a national narrative long defined by “mixture,” ancestry is also translated, through these tests, into percentages that produce fragmented identities. Thus, reliance on DNA ancestry tests to address Brazilians’ search for heritage ultimately reinscribes the same colonial reasoning that produced this uncertainty in the first place.
Understanding Cultural Development in Western Europe Through The Impressionist Art Movement: An Application of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to Intercultural Communication.
Grace Furlong (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
This paper explores the connection between intercultural communication and art history by addressing the former field’s limited interdisciplinary engagement with artistic movements. Intercultural communication provides insight into societal structures, identity, and power, yet it often overlooks art as a critical site of cultural sense-making. Using Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory, this study offers a theoretical interpretation of the Impressionist movement as both a reflection and catalyst of cultural change within Western European, primarily French, society. By applying a macro level cultural context, the paper demonstrates how artistic movements communicate and shape cultural values, contributing to a deeper understanding of intercultural communication and cultural transition.
Grandparental support and the margins of fertility intentions: evidence from the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey
Charles Remien (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Fertility rates in developed nations have hit historic lows after decades of decline, prompting renewed attention to the constraints shaping reproductive decision-making. This paper applies a Beckerian framework to assess whether grandparental childcare support is associated with increased fertility intentions, utilizing nationally representative data from the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey. Using gender-stratified nested logit models, the analysis reveals a consistently positive association between grandparental support and short-term fertility intentions among Spanish parents aged 18–45. The inclusion of male fertility intentions, which are often understudied, combined with a theoretically supported distinction between co-residential and non-residential grandparental support, gives this analysis greater explanatory precision and reveals meaningful gendered asymmetries. For men, co-residential support is strongly associated with higher fertility intentions, notably among fathers with multiple children. By contrast, only non-residential support shows a significant positive association for women. These results remain robust across all model specifications. Interaction tests were additionally used to test how the association between grandparental support and fertility intentions interacted with parity and pregnancy status. These findings highlight the role of informal family-based care as a gender-differentiated, non-governmental lever for shaping fertility intentions. This paper contributes to academic discussions on how non-governmental institutions can influence reproductive behavior, while also offering policymakers a potential tool for designing more targeted, gender-sensitive pronatalist strategies.
Tokyo, Class, Identity
Wakaba Hisatomi (College of Humanities and Social Sciences)
This paper analyzes the formation and interrelation of urban and class identities in Tokyo. It examines how contemporary media – ranging from real estate websites, advertisements, city planning, to social media – contribute to the reproduction of these identities through generating and circulating images of wards (ku) in Tokyo, and how it fosters the exclusive elite consciousness in real-life settings. First, drawing from Yoshimi Shunya’s dramaturgy and cultural geopolitics framework, this paper further argues that the effects of class are not merely to produce economic inequalities, but to generate differentiated urban identities tied to specific wards. Dramaturgically, the stage is both the city itself and the media space, and the audience, who simultaneously function as performers, are not limited to actual inhabitants and pedestrians. The audience-performers embrace and reproduce the images of the wards affected by economic inequalities, which extend beyond the media space and shape how districts are perceived and inhabited. Second, the boundaries between the media space and real life have been increasingly blurred. As a result, these mediated images stimulate forms of elite consciousness among inhabitants of affluent wards, as represented by the case in which the inhabitants of Minami-Aoyama protested against the establishment of a child-welfare facility for allegedly “damaging the brand image of Minami-Aoyama”. Through an analysis of a wide range of media content, this paper contributes to urban and media studies by articulating mechanisms through which class is made visible, desirable, and consequential in contemporary Tokyo.