This thesis will examine possible connection points between the health of a local environmental/climate news ecosystem and that local community’s belief in and vulnerability to the effects of climate change in Central Appalachia and Northern Virginia. The three counties that will be studied in Virginia are Arlington, Buchanan and Wise Counties. This research will be mainly a hypothesis-generating descriptive analysis of data, coupled with both interviews with researchers and local experts, in addition to observations from relevant literature about the possible connections between availability of environmental news with climate change, institutional belief and climate vulnerability data. The local history of resource extraction will also be explored. The point of this thesis is not to prove that a lack of access to strong, locally focused climate and environmental news increases vulnerability to the effects of climate change (although it does raise this as a possibility). Rather, it is to continue a conversation with journalists, media professionals and climate professionals about how to approach understanding and engaging groups left out of the climate conversation and groups who've been traditionally underserved by news media when it comes to climate information and appeals for institutional trust. This conversation is already happening, especially when it comes to the importance of the health of local, community focused news in general in Appalachia, but given the urgency and scale of the climate crisis, merits continuation and some inquiry into environmental news.

This study presents documentary analysis and observational data evaluating the portrayal of female body types in movies produced by the Walt Disney Company and its impact on our most vulnerable population, young children. We examine past scholarly works and present a tool for quantifying the progression of Disney in representing a larger variety of body types in their films in order to make a determination as to whether or not Disney has improved in their presentation of the female body overtime. Overall, our findings indicate that Disney movies have not progressed significantly over time in terms of representing a realistic female body type to its young audience quite yet in a meaningful way.

Robocop, Logan, and War Girls all present dystopian futures where technology, and more specifically cyborg augmentation, unleashes the worst of humanity. Within these texts, the cyborg, when produced for military use, allows humans to indulge their most harmful impulses in armed conflict. The government-produced cyborg facilitates the domination of outgroups by forcing characters to shed empathy and to “other” perceived enemies. The cyborg in this situation works within the militarized masculine framework described by Cristina Masters in Cyborg Soldiers And Militarized Masculinities. This is the cyborg individual’s transformation into a weapon with a singular use. This transformation is facilitated and encouraged by dominant military power structures, and allows these structures with the help of the cyborg to execute brutal violence against any group unlucky enough to find themselves on the wrong side of a conflict. The solution to such exploitation, then, is for the cyborg to assert its humanity and reject this transformation into a weapon. This thesis argues that doing this will involve abandoning the military structure, rejecting the subjectivity of militarized masculinity characterized by empathy loss and “othering”, and refusing to remain a soldier of the dominant corporate or governmental power structures. Even though this cannot bring down the entire system that perpetuates injustice and bloodletting, it does free the cyborg and hinder the military structure’s ability to execute this injustice. In the uncomfortably plausible dystopias my primary texts reasonably predict, the solution to the cyborg’s exploitation and transformation is to firmly oppose the military-industrial war machine characterized by hyper capitalist and imperialist ambitions.