Doctoral dissertation research: The dynamics of visual media and social change

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

How individuals adjust identity to social change is an important question, as such adjustments affect how individuals understand their place within larger social and political structures. Social change offers opportunities to clarify fundamental tensions in modern societies between individualism versus collectivism and between private versus communal property.

This doctoral dissertation research investigates whether and how visual media reflect and/or drive social change in rapidly changing socio-economic landscapes. The work provides a unique lens for investigating these dynamic feedbacks in ways that illustrate whether, how, and at what pace expressions of identity change in relation to larger socio-economic structures.

The research contributes to training a U.S. doctoral student and its findings will be distributed widely to diverse audiences.

Specifically, the project investigates what the economic and aesthetic strategies of contemporary visual media reveal about the socio-economic role of creative work in societies undergoing fundamental social and economic transformations. It considers whether and how concepts of property are exposed and reworked in the self-presentation, material production, and exhibition infrastructures of visual media during periods of rapid social change.

Using an integration of ethnographic and archival methods, the doctoral student examines regional visual media as they respond to recent domestic socio-economic reforms in a context where transitions between collectivist and individualist notions of belonging are shifting. The student integrates direct observation, analysis of printed material, as well as interviews with relevant stakeholders to understand how regional visual media have responded to changes in property legislation following privatizing reforms.

The results of this research provide a more robust account of visual media as both a barometer of and participant in processes of social, political-economic, and cultural change.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.