Digital Commons Network^™

Evidence Based Care For Iraqi, Kurdish, And Syrian Asylum Seekers And Refugees Of The Syrian Civil War: A Systematic Review, Cisse Nakeyar, Paul A. Frewen

2016 Undergraduate Awards

A systematic review of literature reporting on the prevalence of assessment measures, treatments, and biomarkers used in the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian refugees was undertaken. A search of medical, psychological, and sociological databases was conducted on all relevant literature published between January 2011 and March 2016. Seventeen manuscripts met the study inclusion criteria. Seven assessment measures were used in more than one study, four of which were clinically administered (Vivo checklist of war, detention, and torture; Clinically Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS); Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview; and Hamilton Depression Scale) and three of which were …

The Permanence Of The Sustainable Development Complex, Christopher Ginou

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Conventional wisdom tells us that sustainable development is the most effective solution to ecological protection, so what has this wisdom led to? Supporters of environmental sustainability have created a permanent sustainable development complex that is embedded within our business culture and the economy. This paper will reveal reasons why this permanence of sustainability has continued and why liberal environmentalism is used indefinitely. Some of these reasons being that sustainable development provides economic growth along with more efficient practices that can be utilized longer than before, and that sustainable development has been argued to produce substantial results that liberal environmentalist theorists …

Closing The Representational Gap: An Embodied-Enactive View Of Narcissistic Representational Systems, Victor Parchment

2016 Undergraduate Awards

According to tracking theories of mental content, the world we conceive is determined by the world we perceive, and the world we perceive is determined by the mind-independent world as it is. This view is challenged by Kathleen Akins on the grounds that our sensory systems are narcissistic, i.e., they have narrow operational interests and are largely unconcerned with representing objective reality. Yet, if what we conceive is not a veridical representation of the world, how is object-guided action in the world possible? This disconnect is the “representational gap”. This paper will close this gap by arguing that Akins’ concept …

Reclaiming The Female Melancholic Artist In Charlotte Smith’S Elegiac Sonnets, Emily Denommé

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Charlotte Smith is often considered a proto-Romantic poet, and her Elegiac Sonnets a precursor to the Romantic poetry of the next century. However, Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets is also heavily influenced by late-eighteenth century currents of thought, most especially the cult of sentiment that had extreme literary significance in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Additionally, changing perceptions of the melancholic artistic genius as a specifically male figure meant that Smith, as a poet for whom melancholy in Elegiac Sonnets was a central element of her artistry, had to demonstrate her claim, as a woman, to the space of the …

Skepticism As Epistemic Naturalization, Dylan Vallance

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Responses to radical philosophical skepticism often interpret skeptical arguments as conceptual challenges that must be overcome if common epistemic practices are to remain justifiably practicable. Such responses treat skeptical arguments as attacks on our ability to justifiably make knowledge claims, wherein the skeptic attempts to isolate conceptual problems embedded in common epistemic processes that debar those processes from the potential to produce knowledge. In this framework, the successful skeptic reveals our constitutional epistemic blindness while the successful response defangs the skeptic’s attack on our capacity for knowledge.

This paper argues that this interpretation is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of …

Transwomen And The Prison Industrial Complex, Naciza Masikini

2016 Undergraduate Awards

As one of the fastest growing populations in the prison system, transwomen have a unique relationship with the prison system and the Prison Industrial Complex. These systems work to further the marginalization of transwomen by subjecting them to psychological and sexual violence. Transwomen’s bodies are criminalized in ways that naturalizes the violence they experience both in the prisons and in the court systems. This paper aims to provide an overview of the ways in which transwomen are dehumanized in their encounters with the criminal justice system (i.e. mis-gendering, the physical and sexual abuse they experience) by contextualizing their experiences. Through …

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Asians and Asian Americans are considered the most well-to-do racialized groups in twenty-first century U.S. Their identity and ontology are incontrovertibly influenced by the model minority myth, a stereotype that envelops them as successful and as overcoming racial discrimination. This paper argues that the model minority myth exemplifies how putatively benevolent racial tropes are nonetheless racist against all communities of colour. Thus, Asian Americans are positioned as the ‘model minority’, as opposed to certain ‘problem minorities’, in order to further subjugate Black and Brown bodies. The myth is also problematic for Asian Americans themselves, demonstrating that to exist as an …

Faustus’ England: Marlowe’S Representation Of Individualism And Spiritual Authority In Elizabethan England In The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus, Andrea Holstein

2016 Undergraduate Awards

This paper explores Christopher Marlowe’s representation of individualism and his criticism of spiritual authority in Elizabethan England as presented in Doctor Faustus. Current Marlovian scholarship focuses on the question of how Marlowe’s consideration of the pressing doctrinal questions of his day were used to advance the narrative of Doctor Faustus. The goal of this paper, however, is to demonstrate that Doctor Faustus is first and foremost a subversive commentary on the religious climate of Marlowe’s day. This analysis of Marlowe’s attitude regarding the religious authorities—both doctrinal and institutional—of this period was accomplished by examining the representation of religious beliefs …

Effects Of Delayed Transitions To Adulthood On Youth Voting Participation, Delia Chen

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Many democracies in developed countries are experiencing declining voting rates largely driven by the non-participation of youth. Focusing on federal elections within Canada, this study examines the socio-demographic differences between old and new voting generations as an explanation for the decline in youth voting participation. The propensity to vote for a Canadian under the age of 35 is modelled as a function of a series of adulthood indicators such as owning a household, marriage and having a child. Using Canadian Elections Studies data conducted between 1984 and 2011, the findings show that adult lifecycle events are largely positive determinants of …

Does Developmental Social Pragmatic Intervention For Children With Autism Influence Parent Language Use?, Mary K. M. Wang

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Parents and primary caregivers provide a key source of linguistic input for children early in the developmental process. The Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative Treatment (MEHRIT) is a developmental social pragmatic intervention that trains parents on supporting their child’s communication development. This study investigated whether MEHRIT training was associated with changes in parent language use following treatment. Preschool-aged children with ASD and their parents participated in a randomized controlled trial. Twenty-five minute parent-child interactions were videotaped pre-treatment and post-treatment, twelve months apart, and each parent utterance was assigned a code indicating its main communicative function. Parents in the MEHRIT …

Moving To The Beat: Examining Excitability Of The Motor System During Beat Perception With Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Celina Everling

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Moving along to the beat of music is a universal human trait. It is a behaviour that displays the interaction between auditory and motor systems during beat perception. While several studies demonstrate that motor structures are involved in beat perception, the time course of motor system excitability during beat perception is not well understood. To examine the time course of motor system excitability in beat perception, we stimulated the motor cortex with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and measured the amplitude of the corresponding motor evoked potentials from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle while participants listened to rhythms that induced …

The Uber Effect, Richard William Kelly

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Taxi industries across the world have been affected by a new trend in transportation; ridesharing services. It is suggested that this effect has been demonstrated through falling taxi medallion prices. This recent decline in taxi medallion prices has been coined the term “The Uber Effect”. This paper analyzes the effect that Uber has had on the taxi industry’s medallion prices since UberX has entered three different markets: New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia. The price of a taxi medallion is modeled against a variable of interest: number of Uber drivers in a city, and control variables: unemployment rate, long term …

Applying Hierarchical Clustering To Broad Absorption Line Profiles For Quasar Classification, Nathalie Chantal Marie Thibert

2016 Undergraduate Awards

The region immediately surrounding an actively accreting supermassive black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy, the accretion disk, produces an enormous amount of radiation resulting in a luminous, short-lived phenomenon called a quasar. About 20% of quasars show broad, blue-shifted absorption features in their UV spectra, indicative of an outflowing wind from the accretion disk. These winds can remove angular momentum from the accretion disk, thereby contributing to the growth of the central black hole. Understanding these winds will help us to better constrain the details of how black holes grow during the quasar phase. The structures of …

Literary Amplification: Jon Krakauer's Use Of Intertextual References In Into The Wild And Their Role In The Mccandless Phenomenon, Wyatt Merkley

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In the summer of 2013 alone, twelve hikers had to be air-rescued off the remote Stampede Trail in the Northern Alaskan wilderness. The route is not particularly accessible or particularly beautiful, and it covers twenty-two miles of soggy, bug-infested, beaver-ponds and muskeg. Throughout the year, powerful rivers of glacial snow-melt cross the path; only in the winter and early spring is it even remotely safe or easy to follow the trail. In her 2013 essay “Chasing Alexander Supertramp,” Eva Holland quotes one Alaskan woman who, shaking her head, pronounced “of all the places you could hike in Alaska…” Yet each …

Conflict Processing Across Development: The Progression Of Response Inhibition Networks, Mallory Jackman

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Cognitive control processes allow individuals to guide their behaviour in the face of distracting or irrelevant stimuli, and typically continue developing into early adulthood. These processes are often tested using response inhibition paradigms such as the size congruency task, which require participants to select between conflicting responses. Previous studies have shown that activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) parallels the protracted development of cognitive control. Recent evidence suggests that children and adolescents may rely on more subcortical regions such as the cerebellum to process conflict. The present study aimed to comprehensively investigate activity …

Beyond Borders: Nature, Revelation, And Identity In Atwood’S Surfacing, Emily Denommé

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing studies the effects of the delineation of identity at a time in Canadian history where the question of Canadian national identity was evolving, becoming a marker that was more clearly defined and more consciously sought out by Canadian artists and citizens. Atwood’s novel can be considered in light of these historical developments, but Surfacing’s interest in the establishment of borders of exclusion and inclusion is not an affirmation of the positive effects such identifiers can bring. Instead of the perhaps typical celebration of the collective identity that such group identifiers as nationality can bring, this novel reveals …

A Revised Feminist Analysis Of Disordered Eating And Weight Preoccupation, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Eating disorders (EDs) are often emblematized by the upper-class young white woman anorexic or bulimic, an archetype that constructs disordered eating as pathological and depicts it in a singular and comprehensible manner. Personal narratives of body dissatisfaction (rooted in both literature and qualitative research), as well as my own subjectivity as a poor East Asian-Canadian woman, will equip me with the theoretical frameworks and insights by which I problematize the homogenization of problematic eating. Subscribing to the tradition of interjecting first-person perspectives into research that is so characteristic to feminist theory, I demonstrate how a subject as visceral and commanding …

A Western Concept Of Honour: Understanding Cultural Differences, Realizing Patriarchal Similarities, Rebecca Meharchand

2016 Undergraduate Awards

The term ‘honour’ is surrounded by ample amounts of cultural anxiety. First appearing in mainstream news media in the early 2000’s, ‘honour’ is a term that has come to be associated with the ‘other’, the ‘third world’, the ‘backwards’ and ‘barbaric’ societies. Perhaps the most important thing about the term ‘honour’ is that it automatically places any honour-related incident in the context of culture. In this paper, I will draw attention to the way in which the West hypocritically cries ‘honour’, pointing a finger at the ‘Third World’, while claiming to have absolved itself of any conceptual form of honour. …

Expression Of The Non-Structural Proteins Ns3/4a Of The Hepatitis C Virus Using A Genetically Modified Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Vector System, Angela Ye Seul Kim

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is one of the leading causes of chronic liver diseases. Despite advancements in the development of antivirals and efforts to combat HCV infections, there is currently no vaccine for HCV. Adopting traditional approaches to HCV vaccine development has been impractical due to the lack of reproducible cell culture systems that can support HCV replication. In this study, the New Jersey serotype of recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSVNJ) was used as the vector to express non-structural proteins NS3/4A of genotype 1a HCV for potential vaccine purposes. The rVSVNJ-GMM vector was genetically modified by changing glycine to …

1/1, Michelle Bunton

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Creating installations through athletic or “gym” aesthetics, my work embodies a high-intensity atmosphere in which technological, human, and material bodies compete and grate against one another. Collectively the components of my installations strive towards an extension of the self or psyche, reaching beyond a deterioration of materiality to achieve pseudo-stasis through recording technologies. However, video and sound technologies ultimately fail to either fully reanimate or fully neutralize a recorded subject, instead what is produced is an intermediary image simply relocated into a new physical body that is equally subject to deterioration. Yet, in its mechanical form, the recording contains the …

Food Figures At The Forks: The Intersection Of Feminist And (Post)Colonial Politics Of Food Imagery In Kiran Desai’S The Inheritance Of Loss, Maryam Golafshani

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Anita Mannur argues that food offers ‘an alternative register through which to theorize gender, sexuality, class, and race’ in literature by and about the South Asian diaspora. The use of food in these texts is not merely a figurative flourish, but rather an ‘important vector of critical analysis in negotiating the gendered, racialized, and classed bases of collective and individual identity’ of South Asian bodies. Food is always already political; it must not merely be tasted, but must be read in terms of how it (re)presents and (re)produces intersecting power differentials. …

An Analysis Of Les Yeux Clos Ii By Toru Takemitsu, Jason Mile

2016 Undergraduate Awards

This paper presents an analysis for Les Yeux Clos II (1989), a solo piano piece written by Toru Takemitsu, based on a lithograph by Odilon Redon. The piece falls within Takemitsu’s “Third Period” which Timothy Koozin describes as a combination of “Western syntax” and “Japanese tradition.” By identifying the influences of Western composers, such as John Cage and Olivier Messiaen, and Japanese tradition, this paper analyzes the extent to which both Western and Eastern traditions can be identified in this piece. Based on comments by Takemitsu and John Cage, the form of the piece is defined by means of motivic …

Effect Of Maternal Age On Offspring Social Behaviour In Drosophila Melanogaster, Shirley Long

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Aging can be defined as the natural and progressive decline in physiological functioning leading to increased risk for disease and death. Although the effects of age are well characterised, much less work has been done to study whether these detrimental changes can be transmitted to offspring. Advanced parental age has been correlated with higher incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism in children. As average maternal age increases in North America, it is becoming increasingly relevant to study the effects of maternal and paternal age on offspring social behaviour. We hypothesize that advanced maternal age in Drosophila melanogaster will affect …

Towards Romantic Syncretism: Liminal And Transitory Women In The Work Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michelle Bunton

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti struggled with a poetic and visual synthesis of the ideal with the sensual, exploring and attempting to resolve the complex paradox of Victorian sexuality, a feat not easily achieved during an era of such fervent morality. Developing his own Romantic Syncretism, Rossetti presents a synthesis of multifaceted symbolism and allegory in his work, combining pagan and Christian themes to create a liminal space in which the divided natures of his female subjects, their object versus subject-hood, are unified. His approach to Christian symbology, via a fleshy and aesthetic representation of the female form, retains …