Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Cultural Memory And The Traumatic Past: Examining The Voids In Contemporary German And Uruguayan Literature, Museums, And Film, Jessica Paola Marino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates how “voids” are used as a poetic lens in German and Uruguayan literature, film, music, museum spaces and memory places to excavate traumatic events of the twentieth-century and represent them in collective memory, further promoting a new understanding of historical experiences. These voids are used to symbolize gaping wounds left in Uruguayan culture after the military dictatorship of 1973-1985, the sense of absence and emptiness left in German-Jewish culture after the Holocaust and the breaks, ruptures and divisions in Germany post-WWII. Case studies include the architectural “Voids” in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin, “empty tombs” and installations …

Sunday, Bloody Sunday: Martyrial Theology In The Eucharistic Liturgies Of The Anglican Church Of Canada, Andrew M. Rampton

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Martyrs were foundational to early Christian life. Their experiences, their commemoration, and their ongoing inclusion in Christian life shaped significant portions of the theology, liturgy, and cultural life of early Christians. This foundation is part of the inheritance of all churches today, including the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). The ACC states that its own beliefs are best articulated in its liturgies. Much of the belief, understanding, and practice of the ACC’s members is shaped by participation in those liturgies.

In order to understand how the ACC’s theology of martyrs and its liturgical formation of members around this topic, this …

Animated Art History: A Look Into Disney’S Representation Of Artwork In Film, Brianna Lagacé

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis discusses the representation of artworks in Disney films. It is an innovative study of Disney’s films through an art historical lens. The first chapter considers how representations of art convey Disney’s messages, specifically through medieval art, architecture, and literature. The second chapter examines the art’s role in character development with respect to gender and sexuality. The last chapter criticizes the process by which Disney characters shift from childhood to adulthood. The entire thesis observes the relationship between the art and the characters, plot, and setting of the film. All in all, this thesis considers the implications of representing …

Agnotologies Of Modernism: Knowing The Unknown In Lewis, Woolf, Pound, And Joyce, Jeremy Colangelo

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Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive traits …

An Ecology Not Taking-Place: Analysing Ecocriticism's Move From Place And Space To Spacing And Displacement Through Derrida, Morton, And Haraway, Andrew Case

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Deconstructive readings of place-space dichotomies in ecological thinking reveal not only a repetition of the subject-object divide examined by Derrida and others, but also a spacing in between these categories. Morton and DiCaglio establish the importance of the in-between to ecological thinking and writing, and they demonstrate how literary and physical irony can reveal this spacing to the reader through an experience of displacement. By choosing to reject norms and instead linger in the spacing, individuals can enact a non-lieu-tenance that radically undermines sovereign systems, defers place, and opens up the possibility of new kinds of intimacy and community. By …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

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Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

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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 …

Species Panic: Interspecies Erotics In Post-1900 American Literature, David Huebert

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This project elaborates a concept of “species panic,” a severe and often violently-charged reaction to the notion that one’s privileged species status as a human being is under threat. In this project’s post-1900 American literary archive, species panic is often provoked by nonhuman eros, which provokes and threatens the fantasy of human exceptionalism. Theoretically, this project yokes animal studies and posthumanism (Donna Haraway, Dominic Pettman, Kathy Rudy) with queer theory and critical race studies (Mel Y. Chen, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Alexander Weheliye) as its central driving forces. This theoretical backdrop informs my reading of American authors Jack London, Ernest …

Social Networks, Political Discourse And Polarization During The 2017 Catalan Elections, Rafael Monroig

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates the political process in Spain and Catalonia during the Catalan election in December 2017. This regional election was unusual because of the independence process in Catalonia and its repression. Two parties, Ciudadanos (anti-independence) and Podemos (ambiguous position) and their leaders’ activity in Twitter was analyzed. It was explored from three perspectives: social networks, lexical and emotional discourse and ideological polarization. Firstly, social networks were used to see the properties of the support communities of both parties. Interestingly unlike Ps, Ciudadanos’ (Cs) metrics of cohesion showed that political communities of this party in Spain and Catalonia were remarkably …

Skim, Joy Wong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier provides the theoretical structure to my art production, and is presented alongside my thesis exhibition skim at McIntosh Gallery. This document is comprised of three parts: a comprehensive artist statement outlining the methodology and theory to my work, a case study of painter Cecily Brown, and photographic documentation of my studio practice. These components illustrate the research and material engagement about skin, corporeality, the abject, the grotesque, the formless, and purity.

Welcoming Strangers: Race, Religion, And Ethnicity In German Lutheran Ontario And Missouri, 1939-1970, Elliot Worsfold

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how German-American and German-Canadian Lutherans in St. Louis, Missouri, and Waterloo County, Ontario, constructed their ethnic identities from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to 1970. Did German Lutherans understand their ethnicity as an identity to overcome, or as an identity worth preserving? What role did religion and race play in how they constructed their ethnic identities? It argues that German Lutherans in the Missouri and Canada Synods constructed a hybrid identity that sought to balance their competing ethnic, religious, racial, and national identities. It charts their experiences negotiating discrimination during the Second World …

Computing, Modelling, And Scientific Practice: Foundational Analyses And Limitations, Filippos A. Papagiannopoulos

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This dissertation examines aspects of the interplay between computing and scientific practice. The appropriate foundational framework for such an endeavour is rather real computability than the classical computability theory. This is so because physical sciences, engineering, and applied mathematics mostly employ functions defined in continuous domains. But, contrary to the case of computation over natural numbers, there is no universally accepted framework for real computation; rather, there are two incompatible approaches --computable analysis and BSS model--, both claiming to formalise algorithmic computation and to offer foundations for scientific computing.

The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, we …

A Practical And Practice-Sensitive Account Of Science As Problem-Solving, Frédéric-Ismaël Banville

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Philosophers of science have recently begun to pay more attention to scientific practice, moving away from the discipline’s focus on theories. The creation of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice in 2006, as well as the emergence of scholarship on experimental practice (e.g. Sullivan 2009; 2010; 2016) as well as on the tools scientists use to construct explanations and theories (e.g. Feest 2011) all point to a disciplinary shift towards a more practice-conscious philosophy of science. In addition, scholars are realizing the potential social relevance of philosophy of science and identifying the obstacles that stand in the way …

Next To A River: Mobility, Mapping, And Hand Embroidery, Sharmistha Kar

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This MFA project explores identity, mapping, and embroidery as broadly considered regarding ideas of place and landscape. Concepts such as travel, the familiar, the temporary, the known, and the unknown are motivating notions that I examine through academic study alongside techniques of hand embroidery. Throughout my MFA project, a series of material and technical choices were crucial to my reflecting on ideas of resemblance, mapping, migration, and archiving in order to further understand my identity.

A series of texts on resemblance, archiving, and mapping by Michel Foucault, Arjun Appadurai, and Tom Vanderbilt, along with references to the art practices and …

Toward A Pedagogical Guide To Argentine Art Song, Matthew B. Pauls

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Argentine art song is a branch of the art song genre that is virtually unknown to Canadian academics and performers. Although there are numerous composers who have contributed songs to this genre, these composers and their contributions to the body of art song repertoire remain virtually unknown. The illusion of their non-existence is perpetuated by a cycle of factors. Publishers, not interested in publishing a product for which there is limited interest, print very little Argentine music. The lack of musical scores makes it difficult for performers to program and record this music. Thus, very few people are exposed to …

A Duty To Adopt? On The Ethics And Politics Of Adoption, Veromi Arsiradam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Around the world, millions of children are in need of parental care. In response to this global crisis, some philosophers defend a moral duty for prospective parents to adopt children rather than procreate. Challenges to the duty focus almost exclusively on parents’ desires to have biological children. However, reasons deriving primarily from one’s membership in a social group that favour procreation over adoption or oppose transracial adoptions are largely overlooked. In this dissertation, I examine whether group-based reasons could justifiably override a duty to adopt for prospective parents who are members of racially oppressed groups. I ultimately argue that group-based …

Buffer, Graham Macaulay

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier is separated into the following distinct sections. The first is an extended artist statement that attempts to locate the uncertain objects of my practice within a relational field, involving writing around becoming, unaccountability and empathy, among other things. The second is a portfolio of photographic documentation of artworks made during my MFA candidacy, primarily attending to documentation of my concurrent thesis exhibition. The third is a case study exploring the work of artist Erin Shirreff, who works between photography, video and sculpture, among other media, drawing attention to bodily presence and duration through mediated structures.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Works And Diasporic Identity 1890-1945: Compositional Revision And Discourse, Renee Mackenzie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This monograph examines the post-exile, multi-version works of Sergei Rachmaninoff with a view to unravelling the sophisticated web of meanings and values attached to them. Compositional revision is an important and complex aspect of creating musical meaning. Considering revision offers an important perspective on the construction and circulation of meanings and discourses attending Rachmaninoff’s music.

While Rachmaninoff achieved international recognition during the 1890s as a distinctively Russian musician, I argue that Rachmaninoff’s return to certain compositions through revision played a crucial role in the creation of a narrative and set of tropes representing “Russian diaspora” following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. …

Tanks And Tinsel: The American Celebration Of Christmas During World War Ii, Samantha Desroches

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“Tanks and Tinsel: The American Celebration of Christmas during World War II” is an examination of the American celebration of Christmas during World War II. As the first comprehensive investigation into the most well-known holiday in Western culture and its role in shaping Americans’ experience and understanding of the war, it contributes to historical scholarship in three ways. First, it continues the trend of blending analyses of society into military-focused narratives of the war, and it expands the scope of this by fusing the literature of War and Society with that of Holiday History. Second, it challenges traditional views of …

A Pluralism Worth Having: Feyerabend's Well-Ordered Science, Jamie Shaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of this dissertation is to reconstruct, critically evaluate, and apply the pluralism of Paul Feyerabend. I conclude by suggesting future points of contact between Feyerabend’s pluralism and topics of interest in contemporary philosophy of science. I begin, in Chapter 1, by reconstructing Feyerabend’s critical philosophy. I show how his published works from 1948 until 1970 show a remarkably consistent argumentative strategy which becomes more refined and general as Feyerabend’s thought matures. Specifically, I argue that Feyerabend develops a persuasive case against rationalism, or the thesis that there exist normative and exclusive rules of scientific rationality. In Chapter …

Separating The Sands: Karl Clark And Early Oil Sands Research In Alberta, Shane Roberts

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Karl Clark’s research on the oil sands had a huge impact on the province of Alberta. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Clark was one of few researchers who remained involved throughout the entire developmental period of the oil sands industry. Clark’s persistence and systematic experimentation led to the development of an effective hot water separation process which resulted in viable commercial development of the oil sands. Without his extensive experience and sustained involvement and passion for the project, the oil sands would not have been developed when they were. The sparse earlier historiography of the developmental period has tended …

“And, Needless To Say, I Was Athletic, Too:” Southern Ontario Black Women And Sport (1920s – 1940s), Ornella Nzindukiyimana

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents a two-part study of sporting practices of Southern Ontario Black women, between the 1920s and the 1940s, aimed at developing a socio-cultural history of sport that includes narratives from marginalized groups. Given sport’s traditional position as a masculine domain, as well as Canada’s status as a patriarchal White supremacy, the accounts presented in this work centre Black women’s sport experiences through an intersectional perspective. It is argued that, by virtue of their simultaneously racialized and gendered identities, Black women had distinct sporting experiences from those of White women and men and Black men.

The first study used …

Cultural Hybridity In The Contemporary Korean Popular Culture Through The Practice Of Genre Transformation, Kyunghee Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The focus of this dissertation is to show how the media of contemporary Korean popular culture, specifically films, are transformed into “hybrid cultural forms” through the practice of genre transformation. Since the early 21st century, South Korean popular culture has been increasingly spreading across the globe. Despite its growing attention and popularity, Korean pop culture has been criticized for its explicit copying of Western culture with no unique cultural identity. Others view the success of Korean media, both its creative mimicry and its critique of the West, as a new hybrid form that offers the opportunity for reassertion of local …

...And The Songs Of Another... For Six Voices & Live Electronics, Matthew David Becker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

…and the songs of another… is a composition of five songs for six voices and live electronics. Voice is the principal tool of sound generation, and the sounds produced by voice are transformed using extended and non-conventional vocal techniques plus electronics. I hence use voice in this manner with electronics to create unique sound development in a new work.

The text in the composition is generated using phonemes through which syllabic sounds are constructed. The electronics are pre-installed modules that come with the software Max/MSP, and each of the five songs applies different processing. These modules are: a spectral harmonizer, …

Variation In The Pronominal Clitic System Of P'Urhépecha-Spanish Bilinguals, Itziri Moreno Villamar

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This dissertation investigates linguistic variation and optionality in the Spanish clitic system of bilingual L1 P’urhépecha speakers from Michoacán, México to determine if interference from L1 features results in non-standard use of accusative and dative pronouns in L2 Spanish. Using the theoretical framework on feature/morphology mapping in bilinguals by Lardiere (2000, 2005, 2009) and Sánchez’s theories of functional interference and convergence (2003), I investigated three phenomena occurring in Spanish and Amerindian contact varieties or amongst bilingual speakers: neutralization of gender (and number) into an invariant accusative clitic lo, omission of anaphoric clitics, and liberal accusative clitic doubling. I also investigated …

Empirical Evidence And The Multiple Realization Of Mental Kinds, Danny Booth

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This thesis explores the use of the concept 'realization' in the philosophy of mind. The primary focus is on the role realization plays in assessing or opposing identity theory. The history of the use of the concept of realization in the philosophy of mind is reviewed, and from that a set of desiderata to be used for assessing accounts of realization is extracted. The desiderata are applied to a sample account of realization proposed by Sydney Shoemaker. (2007) Next the application of 'realization' in contemporary contexts is considered, focusing on the idea that mental kinds are, potentially, multiply realized. Based …

Interfaces Of Nearness: Documentary Photography And The Representation Of Technology, Mark Kasumovic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central aim of this dissertation is to provide insights into the ways in which documentary photography, in theory and practice, can be employed in the representation of evolving and difficult to visualize technologies. Examining technology via its relationship to scientific inquiry offers a framework for considering the production of knowledge through instruments and their inscriptions. This relationship is examined from diverse perspectives, such as the philosophy of technology, social constructivism, the philosophy of science, and media studies. Considering the relationship between the function of instruments within the scientific laboratory and the camera as used within the visual arts can …

Tribute To The Fallen: The Evolution Of Canadian Battlefield Burials During The First World War, Jeremy P. Garrett

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This dissertation focuses on the burial of Canadian soldiers during the First World War. This study explores the ways in which the body was treated upon death during the early, middle, and late years of the conflict to show the drastically different practices and customs that were implemented and modernized throughout the war. While nineteenth century military burial customs were suitable for religious beliefs at the time, a religious shift among the general populace occurred at the end of the century. Subsequent conflicts showcased the inadequacies of established military practices.

While the Boer War demonstrated soldiers’ need to ensure a …

Would You Sell Yourself For A Drink, Boy?: Masculinity And Fraternalism In The Ontario Temperance Movement, 1850-1914, Megan E. Baxter

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In popular culture and in historiography, the temperance movement has often been depicted as a movement by women to control men's drinking. Forgotten have been the thousands of men who identified themselves with the campaign for prohibition, creating for themselves an image of temperate masculinity that exemplified the attributes of responsibility and respectability. In nineteenth-century Ontario, men who had never taken a drink and those who struggled with the habit often joined fraternal lodges centered around the temperance cause, looking for common ground and assistance in avoiding alcohol in a society where alcohol use was normative. The Sons of Temperance, …

The Passing Away Of Nature: Two Essays On Natural History, Domenic Hutchins

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This thesis begins by examining the natural-historical character of Theodor Adorno’s thought and corpus, 1931–1969, by way of engaging the centennial of the October Russian Revolution. In the first three chapters we attempt to read Adorno’s corpus as écriture or writing whereupon unconscious writing of history is transcribed. This literary-driven approach to Adorno’s work highlights the primacy of history for his thought, whence his late-Marxism issues that culminates in what we call a politics of experience. Given the historical experience we seek to make legible heretofore, in chapter four we briefly turn to the hyper-object of ongoing and future anthropogenic …