Author

Eastin Kandt

Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Primary Advisor

Dorothy Andreas

Secondary Advisor

Lynette Sharp Penya

Committee Reader

Lauren Lemley

Abstract

Story has a strong power to influence, and in America’s current polarized climate, it is important to understand how it can influence politics. In Arrow S5E13, there are characters representing every side of the gun control debate in the wake of a mass shooting at city hall. This study uses interpretive communities theory to analyze two focus groups’ responses to this episode. The focus groups were composed solely of nine college students, six female and three male in total. The results determine that (1) political moderates appreciate the fair fictional representation of multiple political perspectives in fiction, (2) members of this interpretive community use humor to lessen tension and make points succinctly, (3) the feminist members of this interpretive community want a diversity of female perspectives in fiction, (4) this community pays close attention to the political arguments that narratives make, and (5) this generation has been desensitized to violence.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.