The Missing Riot takes the Cooper Do-Nuts Riot, a largely forgotten queer uprising in 1950s Los Angeles, as a case study for the construction of historical narrative. The riot, which appears in history books and has been commemorated by the City of Los Angeles and immortalized in public art, leaves no archival trace. I ask how history is constructed in public—through archives, memory, art, institutions, politics, and the people who find uses for the past. Ultimately, I argue for a speculative understanding of history: not as a settled account of an objective past, but as something continually constructed in the present through our attempts to represent, remember, and use what is no longer there.

Fundamentally, Hezbollah’s discourse operates through a political economy of promises and phantasmagoric displays of power amplified into spectacularized narratives of militant triumph. The investigation probes how this structure achieves remarkable institutional persistence, analyzing its ascendance in Lebanon's sociopolitical sphere through ideological branding, welfare, historic amnesia and performances of military power for mass effect. Essentially, leading to a hollowed-out model of “resistance”, in which the word functions merely as a credential, stripped of substantive political meaning and reduced to a legitimizing device.

Is it possible to create political images? My research looks at the history of documentary impact, both in theory and in practice, and draws from past and present examples inspiration and warnings for those hoping to make what the theorist Tom Waugh termed "committed documentaries."

The “hobby” is a seemingly simple but expansive concept that exists somewhere between leisure, work, productivity, and occupation. Hobby, as a subject of study, is largely absent from academic literature. This thesis seeks to amend this gap, while also arguing that the hobby, as an invention of the industrial revolution, represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and work. In the changing nature of work and political life, hobby also represents the diminishing of the Vita Activa, or active life of the worker in favor of moral occupations of time. This thesis will also seek to understand how the concepts of hobby, craft, and art, as well as the Studio Craft movement are symptomatic of a culture that idolizes masculine work and marginalizes feminized modes of production.