Across Cultures
Synesthetic Expressions in English Food Commercials
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shelley Ching-yu Depner
Synesthetic is a phenomenon where one sensory experience is described using terms from another sensory modality. A synesthetic expression is a linguistic device that blends different sensory modalities, e.g., sweet voice is a combination of taste (sweet) and sound (voice). This study collects synesthetic expressions used in English food commercials and advertisements for the purpose of examining the conceptual metaphors used in promoting food products. Conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) is a framework that explains how abstract concepts are understood through more concrete, sensory-based experiences. The result shows that blending sensory descriptions helps advertisers create multisensory experiences to evoke a stronger appeal of the product’s qualities. For example, Rich, velvety chocolate Combines touch (velvety) with taste (rich), Commonly used in chocolate brand advertisements, like Lindt or Godiva. Furthermore, the conceptual metaphors such as FOOD IS A TEXTURE and FOOD IS VISUAL VIBRANCY are frequently adopted. Take FOOD IS A TEXTURE as an example. It conceptualizes food as something tactile, appealing to the sense of touch. While we don’t physically touch food with our hands during consumption, words like velvety and soft transfer the tactile sensation to the taste experience. This conceptual metaphor creates an intimate and indulgent sensory appeal, suggesting that the texture of food directly impacts its quality or enjoyment. By blending touch with taste, it elevates the perception of luxury and comfort. Consumers associate smooth or soft textures with premium or high-quality food, which evokes a sense of satisfaction and comfort.
Getting on Our Feet to Teach Writing: A Pedagogy for Teaching Undergraduates Playwriting View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suzanne Delle
In the U.S., writing is often taught using methods that the professor learned in their own undergraduate studies focusing on writing, revision, and rewriting. This author has made adjustments to her courses focusing having students embody their work in a collaborative environment. This participation in communicating using the Tectonic Theatre Company’s Moment Work technique of play creation and theater games have led to improved student outcomes and experiences. This study provides the opportunity to experience these participation practices. We outline how to make these fundamental changes to writing pedagogy and encourage others to stop relying on the 'how it has always been done' of how to teach a subject and interrogate how best to revise their communication courses for today's undergraduate students.
Creative Identities: Integrating Creativity into Sense of Self and Life Satisfaction
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aileen O'Driscoll
This paper discusses themes of creative identity construction, feelings of joy and fulfilment in creative work, and the aspect of self-identifying as an ‘artist’ or ‘creative’. It is found that the creativity for the women who comprise the study cohort is front and centre of their lives and comprises a fundamental aspect of their personal and professional identity. The argument is made that the strength of their creative identities helps to facilitate a creative productiveness and sustains them in their creative work. There is a recognition on the part of the women interviewed for the study that without being in a position to give expression to their creativity, their level of satisfaction with their lives would be diminished. Another finding is in the reluctance that many of the women feel in self-describing themselves as ‘creative’ or as an ‘artist’ given its connotations of pretension or its associations with a certain type of, mostly male, person that the label typifies; an archetype they do not see themselves reflected in.
Opinion and Advocacy at “The Paper of Record”: A Historical Study of New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Heather Hendershot
Media historians generally trace the rise of politically slanted news to the collapse of FCC regulations in the 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable (Fox, MSNBC) in the 1990s, and, more recently, the decline of mass-targeted print newspapers. Taking the New York Times’s Tom Wicker as a historical case study, this paper suggests—inspired by Matthew Pressman foundational research in On Press: The Liberal Values that Shaped the News (Harvard UP, 2018)—that we look earlier, to the pivotal moment when American newspapers faced the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately realizing the viability of carefully framed, non-neutral reporting. The Times has historically strived for centrism, and they resisted “biased” advocacy reporting on controversial topics such as Vietnam, feminism, and the counterculture that were the purview of New Journalists such as Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. One exception, though, was their columnist Tom Wicker, whose work was specifically intended to express a point of view. Drawing on Wicker’s published work and his papers held at the New York Public Library, and taking his engagement with the 1971 Attica Prison uprising as a tipping point moment, I argue that Wicker was the closest the Times would come to embracing (or perhaps merely tolerating) the politically engaged and openly opinionated New Journalism. The Wicker case, I contend, is not only of tremendous historical interest but also offers valuable political and historical context for understanding today’s opinion reporting and punditry.
