Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Canadians Redefining R&B: The Online Marketing Of Drake, Justin Bieber, And Jessie Reyez, Amara Pope Ms.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In a country that long failed to accept, include, and institutionalize R&B music as part of Canadian culture, musical artists Justin Bieber, Drake, and Jessie Reyez have successfully broken-down barriers by having successful careers as racially diverse Canadian R&B artists. This qualitative study surveys the literature on classifications of the R&B genre and of Canadian identities in popular media. The theoretical framework of discourse analysis is used to conduct a brief episodic history of Canadian R&B and to evaluate how the music genre “R&B,” is traditionally associated with people who have "Black" and "American" identities, and how a “Canadian” identity …

Una Visión Holística De La Memoria Digital Sobre El Conflicto Armado En Las Narrativas Digitales Del Centro Nacional De Memoria Histórica De Colombia, Talia Mendez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The connective turn marks the contemporary memory boom. The omnipresence of digital media is a provocation that makes us wonder about the relationships and connections of memory with the past, present and future in the digital world (Hoskins 9).

Using a conceptual analysis based on the idea of the connective turn, this thesis shows how the National Center of Historical Memory of Colombia has been addressing the message of memory of the armed conflict through the case study of the digital narratives of the "Digital Specials", and how the message is transmitted in their Instagram profile.

The study reflects the …

Music Sounds Better With You, M Gillian Carrabre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is a catalyst for creative expression, from the solo dance form known as shuffling, to “Flow Arts” activities (forms of self-expression inducing a flow state) like poi, hula hooping, orbiting, and gloving. Gloving is a subcultural practice and artform that couples LED lights with dexterous finger movements. It is a method of expression for dance music enthusiasts (also known as ravers) and has become an important component of the EDM scene, particularly over the past decade. Glovers engage in “secondary” performances to live music (DJs) using complex techniques such as symbolism, word painting, and what the …

Heavy Metal Fundraisers: Entrepreneurial Recording Artists In Platform Capitalism, Jason Netherton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

How do cultural producers square customary understandings of what it means to be authentic and autonomous creators in new contexts characterized by digital-era entrepreneurial pressures and online platform-mediated financial opportunities? This study examines how heavy metal recording artists experience these pressures; how some of them engage in platform-based crowdfunding, argue over its legitimacy, and rationalize varying degrees of acceptance and dependence. First, my analysis centers on a case study which follows the experiences of a progressive metal band as they navigate a new financial relation in conjunction first with the fundraising platform Pozible and then the patronage-based crowdfunding platform …

"Dance Like Nobody's Paying": Spotify And Surveillance As The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, T. Andrew Braun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines Spotify, the world’s most popular music streaming service, and its usage of music as a data extraction tool. I position Spotify as a surveillance capitalist firm that puts music at the centre of an enclosed environment designed to condition users’ affective responses and behaviors and reorient production of music. I analyze three features of the platform: a campaign in which Spotify invites users and producers to share the data it collects about them, the arrangement of the platform’s architecture into mood-based playlists, and its penchant for music that is “Chill.” I show how each serves the surveillance …

The Myths That Make Us: An Examination Of Canadian National Identity, Shannon Lodoen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses Barthes’ Mythologies as a framework to examine the ways in which the Canadian nation has been mythologized, exploring how this mythologization affects our sense of national identity. Because, as Barthes says, the ultimate goal of myth is to transform history into nature, it is necessary to delve into Canada’s past in order to understand when, why, and how it has become the nation it is today. This will involve tracing some key aspects of Canadian history, society, and pop culture from Canada’s earliest days to current times to uncover the “true origins” of the naturalized, taken-for-granted elements …

A Geology Of The General Intellect, Dillon Douglas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We can no longer be certain whether the central terms and conceptual matrix that the Italian Autonomist Marxist tradition richly develops and draws on--the common, the general intellect, immaterial labour, psychopolitics, cognitariat--are able to survive unscathed the theoretical problems that the epoch of the Anthropocene poses. In an attempt to push this conceptual matrix to its political and ontological limits, I expose a series of “ecological deficits” at the core of Autonomist thought and make the argument that semiocapitalism is a geological operator just as much it is a cognitive, financial or linguistic one. …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Invisible Labour: Support-Service Workers In India’S Information Technology Industry, Indranil Chakraborty

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation investigates the life, working conditions and urban experience of support-service workers in the Information Technology (IT) sector of India: the janitors, security guards, fast food delivery service professionals and car pool drivers who work in and around technology parks that develop software applications for a world-market. The common experiences of these employees are migration from rural contexts to a radically modern employment setting, where they work long hours with minimal benefits in informal conditions that often violate basic labour laws. The thesis draws on quantitative and qualitative research, and in particular on analysis and interpretation of hundred and …

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling And Cultural Production, Jennifer A. Hambleton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are …

Regarding Aid: The Photographic Situation Of Humanitarianism, Sonya De Laat

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since the invention of photography, the medium has played an increasingly central role in shaping spectators’ imagination of distant suffering and calamitous experiences. The discourse of humanitarianism has evolved alongside photography and has relied on the medium to give it shape. Indeed, humanitarianism is and always has been a photographic situation, which is to say, photography has played and continues to play a significant role in constituting the very terms of humanitarianism, including how it is referenced, conceived, understood, and practiced. This dissertation is concerned with the historical role of photography in shaping the humanitarian imagination, as well as the …

Becoming Sonic: Ambient Poetics And The Ecology Of Listening In Four Militant Sound Investigations, David C. Jackson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation Becoming Sonic: Ambient Poetics and the Ecology of the Ear in Four Militant Sound Investigations offers a critical and historical analysis of acoustic ecology and soundscape recording —the sounds, noises, and silences that make up our ambient sonic environment and are found and recorded “in the field” by artists to create recordings and performances are then experienced by listeners. Field recording captures the diverse and often unwanted or inconsequential sounds of a space, which can then be used to bring attention to the often unheard and unconscious processes that stratify space. By stratification I am referring to the …

"Whatever I Want:" Death Grips, Disobedience And The Music Industries, Grant M. Hawkins

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The experimental hip-hop group Death Grips, formed in 2010, quickly rose to prominence and signed with the major label Epic Records in 2012. Their first Epic album, The Money Store, (2012) did well and the band appeared to be settling in to a profitable and productive relationship with the company. Yet in 2013 Death Grips released their second album, No Love Deep Web, online, for free, and without authorization from the label. Despite this breach of contract, Epic Records did not do the expected and seek to enforce their contract or sue for damages. Instead, Death Grips were …

Happiest People Alive: An Analysis Of Class And Gender In The Trinidad Carnival, Asha L. St. Bernard

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Many of the marketing strategies inherent to the modern version of the Trinidad Carnival include texts that represent Trinidadians as young, fit, bikini-wearing, party enthusiasts. In these advertisements, Trinidadians are often characterized as carefree and welcoming to anyone participating in the much-anticipated annual festival. However, dominant narratives highlight certain groups and cultural aspects of the island while frequently masking several inequalities. They cleverly conceal other narratives and therefore marginalize groups and individuals from the very festival that is understood by many as a national symbol. Through informal participant-observation, and an analysis of some of the main promotional material, in particular …

Navigating The Social Landscape: An Exploration Of Social Networking Site Usage Among Emerging Adults, Kristen Colbeck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explores how emerging adults (Arnett, 2000) in their first- and second-year of undergraduate study make use of social networking sites (SNSs) for their day-to-day sociality. This study compares emerging adults’ use of Facebook, which is the most popular and widely used SNS among this particular demographic, to increasingly popular SNSs Twitter and Instagram. This project seeks to discover how the use of different SNSs supplements, changes, or replaces the use of Facebook, considering social capital exists on each platform, and if and how each sites’ uses and gratifications differ. This study employs face-to-face semi-structured interviews to pursue the …

The Promise And Problematic Of The Virtual Eucharist Mass According To The Roman Catholic Church’S Position In “The Church And The Internet”, Andrew W. Labenek

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study is concerned with articulating a valid community-building role that the virtual Eucharistic Mass could play within the Roman Catholic Church. I undertake this task in view of those unable to attend a real world Mass because of physical and geographical impediments or for fear of violence. According to the Pontifical Council of Social Communications’ document, “The Church and the Internet,” Eucharistic Mass celebrated through the internet is invalid. The first chapter of this study contextualizes and explains the Church’s stance in this document. The remaining two chapters are framed by the Pontifical study’s two main objections to virtual …

Because I Am Not Here, Selected Second Life-Based Art Case Studies. Subjectivity, Autoempathy And Virtual World Aesthetics, Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Second Life is a virtual world accessible through the Internet in which users create objects and spaces, and interact socially through 3D avatars. Certain artists use the platform as a medium for art creation, using the aesthetic, spatial, temporal and technological features of SL as raw material. Code and scripts applied to animate and manipulate objects, avatars and spaces are important in this sense. These artists, their avatars and artwork in SL are at the centre of my research questions: what does virtual existence mean and what is its purpose when stemming from aesthetic exchange in SL?

Through a qualitative …

"Ça Devient Une Question D’Être Maîtres Chez Nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, And The Politics Of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984, Terry Gitersos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes the discourses produced by the selected newspaper coverage of the Montréal Canadiens and Québec Nordiques, two professional hockey clubs based in the province of Québec, from 1979 to 1984. Sport has long provided a medium for national identification, and constitutes one the most effective institutions through which the nation is imagined. This is especially true of Canada, where ice hockey has been celebrated as the country’s national game and a window into the Canadian soul. However, sport is a malleable institution; in Québec, hockey has long served as a symbol, speaking to French Canadian national identity, imbued …