The before and after photographs of Thomas Moore Keesick—known widely by his Anglicized name, Thomas Moore—are some of the most iconic and prolific images signifying Canada’s dark legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Taken in the 1890s and appearing in an 1896 Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, the photos were originally meant to demonstrate Keesick’s successful assimilation through the Regina Indian Industrial School. Assuming an archaeological approach to photography, this article argues that the images of Keesick were not just brute expressions of a powerful colonizing influence (as they are now understood), but desperate attempts by insecure institutions seeking legitimacy as part of a broader colonial apparatus. In many contemporary uses, audiences take these images for granted as a sign of unfettered colonial power. Contemporary critiques that mobilize the photos to illustrate the power of colonization with little historical situating are reductive in their treatment of colonial institutions as homogenous. We attempt to nuance contemporary and historical uses of Keesick’s images to ask how photographic and interpretive practices forward strikingly similar understandings of the images across time, without considering the conventions under which they were originally constructed. Finally, we explore instances of radical resituating to illustrate how recontextualizations of the Keesick images can encourage new ways of seeing and interrogating them.

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This essay examines Suzanne Collins’s monstrous “mutts” in her phenomenally popular series The Hunger Games. Hiltz is especially interested in Collins’s characterization of human-animal hybrids, investigating the relationship between the political commentary at work in the novels and these “monsters,” from the half-wolf, half-humans that nearly overtake Katniss at the Cornucopia in the first novel to the lizard-humans whispering her name throughout the viaducts beneath the city in the last. Hiltz focuses on the mutts as abject creatures, demonstrating the ways in which these uncanny monsters, quite literally making the familiar strange, are at once metaphors for the political control exerted by the Capitol, the rebels’ resistance to the Capitol’s power, and the disruption of natural order. She also concentrates on Katniss and Peeta muttations, each of them reformed by warring entities in service of “the greater good.” Most importantly, Hiltz emphasizes that Collins’s mutts are designed to demonstrate the fine and wavering line between good and evil, calling into question the nature of monstrosity, especially as it relates to human behavior. Her location of monstrosity in the protagonists themselves especially offers a new way of thinking about teen dystopic novels that engage horror as a means of conveying identities assaulted by external forces.

This dissertation examines the visual and discursive production of female notoriety through the multi-mediated circulation of five images of Amanda Knox and Jodi Arias, who were both convicted of murder; Knox was eventually acquitted. This project employs visual discourse analysis to trace the movement and cultural use of widely shared and debated photographic images by consulting a broad visual corpus of mainstream American media content produced from 2007 to 2016. I argue notoriety is produced out of a necessary general relation of speculation that is (re)produced in processes of mass mediation. I illustrate the visual formation of notoriety by following the cultural use and spread of the selected digital images. Here I claim contemporary notoriety is fueled by repeated calls to speculate and judge images that seemingly resist full understanding while they are also used as evidence of perceived legal and sexual transgressions. This continual play to investigate, interpret, and define ambiguous imagery are key cultural practices that generate notoriety, for these relations compel further judgment and scrutiny. The dissertation draws critical attention to the cultural and visual practices tied to the creation of notoriety in contexts of digital mass media circulation, and questions the types of knowledge and spectatorship that are encouraged as images circulate over time and medium.Through the visual discourse analysis, I conclude these five images are continually used to define and assess Knox and Arias relative to shifting norms of acceptable white femininity.Treating the images as performative sites, I outline their compositional and thematic patterns within the visual corpus (e.g. within news broadcasts, newsmagazine episodes, made-for-TV true crime dramas and documentaries, and literary exposés) that constitute discourses of sexual deviancy, inappropriateness, obsession, vanity, and image management. Through these discursive lenses, Knox and Arias are positioned as sexually transgressive, desirable, and excessive -yet remain debatable and highly scrutinized women because they seemingly iii transgress middle-class white heteronormativity. Taking an intersectional approach, I explore how this constellation of visual discourses works to uphold sexist, classist, and racist logics while also encouraging viewers to see, judge, and consult the familiarly ambiguous images for meaning.iv Acknowledgements I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a part of the Carleton Communication community, and there are a number of people I wish to thank for their support, guidance, and encouragement. Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Miranda Brady, for your assistance, patience, and reassurance every step of the way through this project. No question was ever too big or too small, and words cannot express how thankful I am for your mentorship throughout this process. I am grateful to my committee members, Dr. Sheryl Hamilton and Dr.Ummni Khan for their continued guidance. You offered new and exciting perspectives o...