Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Manufacturing Legitimacy: A Critical Theory Of Election News Coverage, Gabriel N. Elias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To what degree does instrumental reason influence election news coverage? Using Habermas's understanding of system/life-world as a heuristic, I map the rationalization process of political communication. This illuminates the institutional logics at play in the field of politics and the field of journalism, and the way the social dynamics between them enable the framing of political life as a strategic game. This understanding is then contextualized within an analysis of the media frames that informed the Canadian federal election of 2011. I find that news coverage does tend to focus on political strategy; but this is not wholly at the …

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people …

Brave New Wireless World: Mapping The Rise Of Ubiquitous Connectivity From Myth To Market, Vincent R. Manzerolle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a critical and historical analysis of the myth of ubiquitous connectivity—a myth widely associated with the technological capabilities offered by “always on” Internet-enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This myth proclaims that work and social life are optimized, made more flexible, manageable, and productive, through the use of these devices and their related services. The prevalence of this myth—whether articulated as commercial strategy, organizational goal, or mode of social mediation—offers repeated claims that the experience and organization of daily life has passed a technological threshold. Its proponents champion the virtues of the invisible “last mile” tethering …

"Duchamping In Game Making": An Analysis Of Pippin Barr's Parodic Computer Games, Devin A. Wilson

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

Devin Wilson analyzes some of Pippin Barr's subversive videogames, examining the methods by which they parody game design conventions.

The Academic Grind: A Critique Of Creative And Collaborative Discourses Between Digital Games Industries And Post-Secondary Education In Canada, Owen R. Livermore

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Digital game development, seeking opportunities to extend its reach and augment its capabilities in a competitive global market, requires the institutions around it to respond and reconfigure to its needs. In Canada, collaborations between digital game industries and educational institutions coalesce around the need to identify and draw students into a tailored educational stream where narrowly defined forms of creativity and knowledge maintain a fluidity amenable to the needs of capital. Provincial and federal government endorsement, supplemented with targeted policy measures, presides over a repurposing of the relationship between post-secondary education, business, and society as a whole, translating monopolies …