School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemDirty mirror or focal lens: The role of literary journalism in the public understanding of psychological science.( 2016)The overarching question posed by my research and explored from both an academic and creative perspective is to what extent can literary journalism transform its ‘dirty mirror’ reputation in communicating and commenting on the psychological sciences for a general reading public. Theories of the popularization and communication of science have largely focused on the ‘hard’ sciences and frequently conceptualize journalism as a subordinate discipline and an often unreliable ‘dirty mirror’ in the dissemination of knowledge to the public. In the scholarly component of my thesis I will argue for a new ‘focal lens’ model that recognises the relationship between the psychological sciences and journalism as a symbiotic one between two equal spheres of influence. The model I propose will conceptualise a conversation in which literary journalism can make a range of important contributions. These include celebrating psychological science and its achievements to offering alternative truths, new interpretations, raising new ethical issues, stimulating new knowledge and new ways of understanding psychological research. Just as the psychological sciences can focus a lens upon questions of human behavior and our mental life, journalism can focus its lens back upon the psychological sciences as a human phenomenon requiring the insights that journalism is designed to bring forward. I will apply this model to three case studies of literary journalistic accounts of psychological research to test the effectiveness of the model. The creative component of my thesis will apply the model and techniques identified in the scholarly component to the retelling of a classic psychological study - Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment.
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ItemIdeal and real: illusion and reality in Stanley Milgram's accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments( 2010)Through a close reading of Stanley Milgram's published and unpublished accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments I will demonstrate that Milgram shaped the story of his research, excluding material that might subvert the positivist ideal. In the creative component, using unpublished qualitative material that Milgram gathered from his subjects during the course of his research, I will reclaim the stories of the silent, de-identified subjects and explore the experience of the experiment from their point of view. The two components of the thesis will work side by side to demonstrate the gap between official accounts of the experiments and what actually occurred and how Milgram constructed a credible narrative of his experiments that silenced competing narratives.