Department of Communication

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/17

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365 snaps: a digital story
(2015) Wurfel, Marlene
The author combines 365 still images of her baby taken throughout the first year of her life with retrospective voiceover narration and music. This digital story, or, multimedia project, was produced at a Digital Storytelling Workshop for Educators at the Center for Digital Storytelling, now the StoryCenter in Berkeley, California. Some themes explored in the post-secondary classroom using this very personal story include humanizing pedagogy, social justice and feminist identity, and voice. To produce this creative research project, Marlene Wurfel explored camera techniques, digital storytelling techniques and the phenomenology of mother as documentarian. Photos were animated using Adobe Premiere Pro. Soundtrack by Frozen Silence via a Creative Commons license.
Agile digitization for historic architecture using 360° capture, deep learning, and virtual reality
(2025) Baradaran Rahimi, Farzan; Demers, Claude M.H.; Karimi Dastjerdi, Mohammad Reza; Lalonde, Jean-François
The agile digitization of historic buildings is becoming increasingly critical for preservation, conservation, and maintenance in response to climate change, geopolitical conflicts, and other threats of destruction. This paper explores whether deep learning-based novel-view synthesis, combined with commercial 360° cameras and standalone virtual reality headsets, can streamline the digitization process for historic architecture. A case study of a historic interior in Québec, Canada, is used to evaluate the method's capacity to enhance agility, accuracy, and efficiency. The findings demonstrate that this approach significantly reduces complexity, labor, cost, and time while improving precision and workflow. These outcomes offer particular value to heritage experts, building engineers, and creative professionals seeking practical tools for agile digitization of historic architecture. By advancing digitization methods, this study also inspires future research into the broader applications of deep learning and immersive technologies for cultural heritage preservation.
American frontier myth and black humour: a study of Marsha Norman’s The Holdup
(2017) Jose, Soumya; Raj, Sony Jalarajan
American frontier myth, which can aptly be termed as a relic of the past is intricately woven into the plot of Marsha Norman’s play, The Holdup. This paper attempts to unravel how the playwright has employed black humour to stage the metamorphosis of a naïve teenager to an adult with broader world view. Besides, the paper examines the technique of meta-narration used by the playwright to narrate the events that had happened offstage.
Amethyst
(2016) Wurfel, Marlene
Amethyst, a cinnamon-coloured black bear, develops a taste for people food at a Kootenay Mountain campsite.
Amitabh Bachchan’s revived star text in Bollywood cinema
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Monti, Gloria; Shingler, Martin
The Indian popular film industry, known internationally as Bollywood, is home to big superstars who embody active masculine corporealities that define their larger-than-life star identities onscreen. Here, stars live in the realm of imagination, where their star text is constructed, historicized, and reproduced for a long time, thus extending the image of the star to multiple contexts that signify different aspects of stardom. The transformations a star has to undergo are crucial in deciding their fate. A star’s identity that was established in a particular era is often threatened when circumstances change. In order to survive in a new era, stars adopt new vehicles to renegotiate themselves by either abandoning their past glory or carrying a different version of it to the present. Among the many Indian superstars, Amitabh Bachchan can be identified as a classic example of a surviving star. With a career that spans more than five decades and two hundred movies, Amitabh Bachchan is considered one of the greatest actors in Indian cinema and a popular cultural icon. Famously endowed with titles such as “Star of the Millennium,” “Big B,” and “One-Man Industry,” Bachchan’s exceptional celebrity status as an actor, a producer, and a former politician in India is unparalleled, even expanding its impact to global levels and becoming a recognizable cinematic identity from the Asian diaspora. From the 1970s–1980s golden era that established him as the Indian “Angry Young Man” superstar persona to the short and failed political career surrounded by controversies and allegations of corruption, Bachchan’s on- and offscreen performances have been an important subject for both public debates and critical discourses. After a semiretirement from acting, Bachchan revived his career in the 2000s, when he started to appear in films that reflect the identity of an “aging star.”
The angry young man strikes: an exploration into Lindsay Anderson’s political satires
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Kitchen, Will
Provides new scholarly interpretations of films by British director Lindsay Anderson New interdisciplinary research on Lindsay Anderson Fresh interpretations of neglected texts using contemporary critical themes Contains international contributions from both established and emerging academics Following the centenary of Lindsay Anderson’s birth (1923-94), this edited collection of original essays re-examines the work of one of British cinema’s most iconoclastic and challenging directors. Building upon existing scholarship and authorial frameworks, the chapters included engage with a range of highly contemporary interpretive themes and approaches, including regionalism, reception, trauma, queer theory, genre, collaboration and gender representation. Addressing a number of methods and key themes which have arisen in the years following Anderson’s death, ReFocus: The Films of Lindsay Anderson offers a diverse exploration of his screen work from a contemporary critical perspective. The chapters provide fresh insights into some of the most significant texts in the history of British cinema, including films, concepts and creative relationships that have shaped modern screen culture.
Arachne gets revenge
(2017) Wurfel, Marlene
This Tales From the Lilypad original by Marlene Wurfel is a mash-up of new story and ancient Greek myth. There are bits from Theseus and the Minotaur, bits from Arachne and Athena's story, bits from Charlotte's Web, and entirely new bits, all woven together for contemporary heros and princessess. Warning: contains lots and lots of spiders.
An Arctic fairy tale
(2017) Wurfel, Marlene
Three little arctic fairies learn from the crow who raised them that they aren't crows and need to make their own way in the world as fairies. Will these siblings work together to make magic?
Aversion and othering: the discourse of food disgust and subalternity in Indian cinema
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Roy, Pinaki
Food plays a significant role in the cultural integration and rejection of identities. It is because the notion of food and its associated signifiers contribute to the very structural framing of public discourses in relation to the power dynamics that define social status. Food choices and eating are related to socio-cultural contexts, environment, economy, and political power (McMichael). The symbolism of food in arts and literature has been so profound in many forms and they are often used to contextualise the violence, discrimination, inequality, racial prejudices, and excommunication of certain categories of people and their histories of resistance, cultural communications, and social inclusion (Ojwang 68). Food can be viewed as a unique and powerful "semiotic device" that provides meaning to those who consume them (Appadurai 494). The cultural and political character of food shapes the public identity of a class in a hierarchical social order. Food studies are often integrated with cultural studies to examine how food as a metanarrative gives information about individual subjects and their positions in the world around us (Ashley, Hollows, Jones, and Taylor).
Better than the real you? VR, identity, privacy, and the metaverse
(2023) Macpherson, Iain; Puplampu, Adiki
If tech-sector CEOs from firms like Meta and Microsoft, plus industry hypers and investors, get their way, then days and nights like Kentarō’s will become commonplace. This future is heralded under a banner-word the metaverse, envisioned as a blending of virtual and physical realities that will profoundly alter how people experience everyday life, from entertainment to work to relationships. Think ‘augmented reality’ (AR): So, these are computer visuals overlaid by screen or lens onto the actual world – but re-imagine this as a more seamlessly immersive experience, in which we intensify or reduce, at will, our envelopment in virtuality. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently described the metaverse as an “embodied Internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it” (as cited in Newton, 2021, para.11). This metaverse will depend on advances and convergences across a vast technological array: 5/6G telecommunications, computer processing/graphics, VR, AR, artificial intelligence, social media, the mobile Internet, ‘smart’ glasses/lenses, body tracking and face recognition, holograms and deepfakes, blockchain and cryptocurrency, and ‘the Internet of Things.’ If this massively, multi-user, multimedia metaverse comes to pass, there will be ramifications for everything from the economy and politics to psychology and relationships. This chapter explores implications for human identity, in three senses: psychological well-being, a deeper ‘sense of self,’ and digital privacy. In each case, we highlight negative and positive discoveries and potentials regarding existing and emergent technologies. Our conclusions are tentative, since findings on ‘virtual identity’ remain debated, and the metaverse isn’t here yet, but this chapter will equip you to decide whether you approach its subject with worry, wonder, or doubt that virtual reality (VR) will transcend niche interests any time soon.
Between the borders of life and art: Roman Polanski’s transgressive negotiations
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
Beyond the boundaries of jump scare: OTT platforms and the discourse of elevated horror
(2025) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.; Petridis, Sotiris
The way horror films attract audiences from all over the world reflects a universality tethered to the genre’s structural identity that depends on transgressive acts that produce fear. Horror fans are audiences whose existence is defined by this affinity to explore the realm of fear and the thrilling experience derived from it. But what really satisfies a horror fan? Is it the occasional viewing of narratives that offer repetitive “out of the blue” jump scares or the experiments that try to portray new formats of horror? In the present time, it is not only the structural changes but the medium of distribution that affects the viewing experience of horror. In the 21st century, one can find horror films that do not follow the typical jump-scare methodology to evoke fear getting more attention than those that adhere to it. (Changes in the media environment and global entertainment industry have led to such productions receiving more recognition and appreciation on an international level. An emerging context where perspectives and stories from non-Western worlds gain visibility has both challenged and redefined the attitude of horror in general. The most observable aspect of this is arguably the deconstruction of the emotion of fear. Questions related to what constitutes fear and what contributes to its construction are essential to a more critical definition of horror, and more crucially they add insights into the renegotiations that surround its redefinitions. Subgenres like techno-horror, ecohorror, and body horror have found new relevance in the changing social, cultural, and political scenarios, and their significance is more pronounced in terms of the psychological effect they produce. Real-life conflicts associated with technological expansion, ecological degradation, global disasters, and violence related to gender, race, and religion are traumatizing enough to nourish fear, and horror based on such tears affects the mental health of characters. Some critics define the 2010s as the decade of “grief horror,”' where the portrayal of psychological degradation through narratives that emphasize loss and grief contextualizes a new mode of elevated horror cinema that focuses on evaluating imminent threats of suffering that do not merely come from the external but, on the contrary, are part of the psyche of the subject who suffers.- Films like The Babadook (2014), It Tollows (2014), The Witch (2013), Mother! (2017), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and The Lighthouse (2019) are noted for their treatment of subjects different from the conventional Western notions of horror. Such films often experiment with the genre of psychological horror and can be cited as examples of the “revival of horror” with a new ideology of horror that goes deep into discussions about topics rather than just scaring the spectator with momentary cheap thrills.
Bodies that need queering: the queer hetero-topias in Malayalam cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.
Bollywood self-fashioning: Indian popular culture and representations of girlhood in 1970s Indian cinema
(2023) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Suresh, Adith K.
This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri in Guddi (1971) and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.
Bollywood, mobility and partition politics: representation of displaced Muslims in films on Indo-Pak partition
(2024) Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Sreekumar, Rohini; Trandafoiu, Ruxandra
The ultimate horror of history is not the persistent fear that it is bound to repeat itself but the very unfathomable nature of the temporal and spatial coordinates that constitute its existence as an incomprehensible form of knowledge. The discontinuous and disrupted notion of history is a self-negation of certainty and any opposite activity to place the reality of events in the historical timeline has farreaching consequences. Such a discourse of history is an extension of the violence perpetuated through the fragmented memories of our collective consciousness. India, entwining the webs of its complex and traumatic past, exemplifies this perception of history, not just the narrativization of the past embellished by the ambience of nostalgia but a vortex of uncertainty through which the present finds its meaning. The historical significance of ‘Indianness’ perplexed in the literary and cinematic forms is a product of the ‘historical violence’ that literally erupted from the day when India as a nation came into existence, and is subliminally rerepresented through the spectacles of artistic imaginations. The event known as the Indo-Pak Partition or the independence of India/Pakistan was a ‘seismic political transformation’ conjoining the regional identities into the larger geographical narrative of cinema which mutated the linguistic and cultural elements along the way of emerging migratory patterns (Vasudevan 2010). The epistemological, artistical, ethical, cultural, and political modes of ‘being’ stuck in between the binary border politics emanating from the Partition are precisely historical and this is the vantage point where one must start scrutinizing the inveterate discourses of India.
Buttercup cools down
(2016) Wurfel, Marlene
This mindfulness story was recorded in a pond full of little froggies. It's about the littlest frog in the pond, Buttercup, and how she learns to calm down.
Can data visualization storytelling in energy communication campaigns ingrain farmers’ intentions to use agrivoltaic system? Evidence from global south
(2025) Raza, Syed Hassan; Ogadimma, Emenyeonu C.; Abdullah, Zulhamri; Khan, Shumaila; Raj, Sony Jalarajan; Jamil, Sadia; Malik, Aqdas; Alkhowaiter, Mohammed; Khan, Sajid Ullah
Purpose Innovative technologies pave the way to address alarming global climate issues. Among these technologies is the expansion of renewable and clean energy in farming, which aims to meet the global cheap energy demand and, at the same time, replace fossil fuels. In pursuant to this, agrivoltaic technology is an innovation that provides sustainable and low-cost production solutions to diminish the adversities associated with climate change and global warming. However, farmers from developing nations remain unacquainted or unenthusiastic about adopting such sustainable technologies. Therefore, in response to these key challenges related to climate change, this study aims to provide the utility of communication resources to inspire climate-friendly behaviors among farmers. Design/methodology/approach This study used a cross-sectional field survey method for data collection from 992 farmers. Findings The results verified that using data visualization storytelling in communication campaigns could significantly enhance farmers’ public understanding of adopting renewable technologies. Research limitations/implications Theoretically, results highlighted the importance of communication strategies in a downward spiral of ongoing challenges of optimal climate protection, counteracting rebound effects and reducing carbon emissions. Practical implications The novel contribution of this research by examining the data visualization storytelling in climate and energy communication campaigns paved the way for social marketers to develop a straightforward and user-friendly platform for implementing innovative renewable technologies. Originality/value This research underpinned a novel approach that remains understudied to understand how data visualization storytelling supports renewable technology adoption. Furthermore, it addressed the timely call for research on how data visualization storytelling can assist in achieving UNSD goals 12 and 13 by promoting renewable technologies among the farmers from the neglected area of the Global South.
Canadian post-secondary players in India: obstacles, issues, opportunities
(2008) Scherf, K.; Macpherson, Iain
In November 2007, the Canadian Bureau of International Educationorganized, along with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, a Forum on Canada-India Higher Education Linkages. At that Forum, it became evident that Canadian post-secondary institutions conducting academic business with and in India are facing a number of problems, both operational and policy-related. This paper seeks to identify those common problems, discuss remedies, and suggest the best ideas for moving forward with a view to improving the situation for Canadian institutions that wish to work in and with India. Findings, while drawing on secondarysource readings, are based especially upon 17 interviews, conducted during Spring 2008 with key figures in the field, from professors and postsecondary administrators to promotional agents and political officials. An interesting range of problems emerged, but most striking is the fragmented, scattershot approach to conducting academic business in India, both by the government and academic institutions. This lack of coordination is uncharacteristic of countries whose international education portfolios run sleekly and effectively. The federal government’s recent changes to visa policy related to international education is a very positive move, however. Our recommendations focus on continuing improvements to visa service and, especially, on addressing the lack of co-ordination in and between governments and post-secondary institutions.
Cat and mouse in partnership
(2018) Wurfel, Marlene
A rearrangement and retelling of a Brother's Grimm fairytale: Cat and Mouse in Partnership. Cat and Mouse are in love. Can they make it work?
Cat castle III: Primrose escapes
(2019) Wurfel, Marlene
A Tales from the Lilypad original bedtime story for kids by Marlene Wurfel in which Primrose the Mouse must escape from the Cat Castle to perform a heroic task. Cats! Alicorns! Razzle Dazzle! An Enchanted Clock Tower!

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