Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Polisci 3210f: Feasibility Of A National Disability Insurance Plan (Ndip) In Canada, Twana Hassan, Aditi Priya, Dylan Poole, Samantha Rubin, Ethan Chen

Community Engaged Learning Final Projects

This research report presents an overview of the feasibility and reliability of a National Disability Insurance Plan (NDIP) in Canada. Several Global North countries are leading the way in disability legislation and disability funding in comparison to Canada's inaction on the matter. A National Disability Insurance Plan in Canada will have social and economic benefits for everyone in Canada. The report concluded that Canada is capable of implementing a NDIP and doing so is the right choice.

Changing Minds And Changing Practice: Barriers And Facilitators To The Use Of Methods Associated With Popular Musicianship, And Strategies Music Teachers Use To Navigate Them, Rhiannon Simpson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study was to identify factors which impede or facilitate teacher initiated changes to practice, and the ways in which these factors were strategically navigated by secondary school music educators employing methods associated with popular music education [PME] and/or informal music pedagogy [IMP]. The research was framed using a theoretical framework informed by Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of ‘hysteresis’ and Schmidt’s (2020) concept of ‘policy knowhow’. This served to highlight the dialectic relationship between the beliefs, values, agency and dispositions of individuals, and the presence of complex policy networks across macro, meso, and micro levels.

The research utilised …

The Embodied Rhetoric Of Cognitive Labour, Shubhayan Chakrabarti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation traces the roots of neoliberal selfhood to the rationalist ontology of modernity in the 1600s. The historical tension between materialism and immaterialism is expressed in the historicisation of work into Fordism and post-Fordism where embodied factory toil is apparently replaced by immaterial work, recalling Descartes’ mind-body split. If post-Fordist work addresses the Marxist critique of alienation in its emphasis on entrepreneurial inner selves, it does not explain the post-Fordist preoccupation to efficiently “Taylorise” the body through obsessive productivity. I argue that the factory prevails in the entrepreneur’s adoption of factory efficiency as a learnt behaviour from the Fordist …

The Forgetting Of Fire: An Archaeology Of Technics, Thomas A. Doerksen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation applies the methods of Bachelard and Foucault to key moments in the development of science. By analyzing the attitudes of four figures from four different centuries, it shows how epistemic attitudes have shifted from a participation in non-human, natural realities to a construction of human-centred technologies. The idea of an epistemic attitude is situated in reference to Foucault’s concept of the episteme and his method of archaeology; an attitude is the institutionally-situated and personally-enacted comportment of an epistemic agent toward an object of knowledge. This line of thought is pursued under the theme of elemental fire, which begins …

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Exploring Musical Knowledge Within One Canadian School Of Music: Ideology, Pedagogy, And Identity, Kyle Zavitz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study was to understand how the distribution and transmission of musical knowledges impacted the identities and consciousness of agents within one Canadian school of music which was given the pseudonym Eastern Urban School of Music (EUSM). The project was framed using Basil Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the Pedagogic Device, offering a language of description to examine how forms of regulation differentially distributed various identities and forms of consciousness. Specifically, this study explored how varying modalities of classification and framing revealed competing values about what counts as legitimate and ‘excellent’ music education and who is seen as …

Colombian Women’S Experiences Of The Canadian Refugee And Asylum Adjudication Process, Camila N. Parra Carrillo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present thesis “Colombian women’s experiences of the Canadian refugee and asylum adjudication process” is an ethnographic description and analysis of the experiences of Colombian refugee women as they move through the refugee and asylum adjudication system in Ontario, Canada. Using concepts such as liminality, politics of waiting, hermeneutics of suspicion and arbitrariness, the refugee and asylum adjudication system is shown to be a site of power and domination that creates negative emotions in the people who face it, especially in the oral hearing as a central event in the process. Centering Colombian refugee women’s voices, their experiences and emotions …

“A Content And Thematic Analysis Of #Instagramvsreality Images And Captions On Instagram” (Powerpoint), Meaghan Furlano, Kaitlynn Mendes

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

A couple of years ago, the “Instagram vs. reality” trend sprung from Instagram’s body positivity movement. The trend encourages Instagram users to post side-by-side images of themselves — one side being the highly curated “Instagram” depiction and the other being a more ‘real’ depiction. One study has explored the trend academically, and it found that engaging with “Instagram vs reality” and “reality” images decreased body dissatisfaction amongst its participants relative to viewing idealized “Instagram” images. In an effort to understand who is participating in the trend, what they are contributing to the trend, and why they are engaging with it, …

A Qualitative Look Into Repair Practices, Jumana Labib

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research poster is based on a working research paper which moves beyond the traditional scope of repair and examines the Right to Repair movement from a smaller, more personal lens by detailing the 6 categorical impediments as dubbed by Dr. Alissa Centivany (design, law, economic/business strategy, material asymmetry, informational asymmetry, and social impediments) have continuously inhibited repair and affected repair practices, which has consequently had larger implications (environmental, economic, social, etc.) on ourselves, our objects, and our world. The poster builds upon my research from last year (see "The Right to Repair: (Re)building a better future"), this time pulling …

Acting Out Gender: Embodied Criticality And Performance-Based Pedagogies, Danielle K. Carr

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Using an adapted Theatre of the Oppressed workshop titled Acting Out Gender, this study explored the use of embodied, performance-based pedagogies to examine gender identity and performance with undergraduate and teacher education students. Attending to feminist and queer epistemological questions of embodiment and gender, this qualitative, arts-based study used observation and interviews to explore participants’ understanding and experience of gender and to experiment with performance-based pedagogies for exploring embodiment and embodied rituals. This study highlighted the usefulness of Acting Out Gender in supporting students’ interrogation of embodied gender subjectivity in their own lives and illuminated how performance-based pedagogies function in …

Women And Western Mission: A Case Study On The Christian Khasi And Garo Tribal Women, Rosemary Philip

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Western mission justified a mission to the Global South that was ingrained with the dominance of its culture and values. Women’s mission, as a tool of this mission, patronized themselves as the ‘care-taker’ of the ‘subjugated’ women of the Global South. This mission promulgated new ways of thinking and prescribed new gender roles and values to the Global South. In doing so, it framed the traditional roles and cultural values of the non-Western world as oppressive and replaceable. Subsequently, Women’s mission along with Western feminism and Feminist theology as a broad idea has been challenged by feminists from the Global …

Making Meaning About Reproductive Work: A Narrative Inquiry Into The Experiences Of Migrant Caregivers In Canada, Crystal Gaudet

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how migrant caregivers ascribe meaning to the (re)productive labour that they provide within Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). Introduced in 1992, the LCP was a temporary foreign worker program that recruited women, primarily from the Philippines, to care for children, elderly people, and people with disabilities in the homes of their employers. Numerous studies have shown how the stipulations of the LCP produce precarious working conditions that render caregivers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and that result in their deskilling and de-professionalization. The conditions engendered by the LCP reflect and reinforce the devalued status of care and …

Policing Perspectives Of Human Trafficking, Joanne V. Silva

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This study incorporates a criminological and feminist analysis of policing perspectives surrounding the power dynamics within human trafficking.

The Athletic Body: Eating Disorders In Canadian Sport History, Kimberly Callander

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Eating disorders in Canadian sport are and have been an ongoing issue for some time. In recent years, more research and education programs directed at athletes and their peers have been implemented. However, the topic has never been subjected to thorough historical analysis, specifically in Canadian history. The purpose of this research was to gain a complete understanding of sport-related eating disorder development in Canada.

To construct a social history analysis of eating disorders in Canadian sport, the exploration of Canadian policy statements, archived media sources, general history of eating disorders, and autobiographical accounts by Canadian athletes was conducted. 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 …

Yoga As Embodied Peacebuilding: Moving Through Personal, Interpersonal And Collective Trauma(S) In Post-Conflict Colombia, Mayme Lefurgey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine creative methods of peacebuilding that are both community-driven and embodied in their approach. I evaluate how these methods can simultaneously challenge the confines of conventional peacebuilding mechanisms in transitional and post-conflict contexts, while also offering a unique complement to existing programs and structures. I look at the multifaceted socio-cultural expressions of yoga globally, inquiring as to how this mind-body practice can offer opportunities in peacebuilding on both individual and collective levels.

My project is rooted in the principles of community-engaged research and feminist research ethics. More specifically, this dissertation closely engages with the work of …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Education, Migration And Development Panel, Henri Boyi

Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020

8 graduate students/recent graduate presentations on education, migration and development. Moderated by Dr. Henri Boyi. Reporting of panel done by current GHS students of the 2021 class. Abstracts can be found under "Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020 Abstracts". Presenters as follows:

Jemima Nomunume Baada, "Experiences of Social Reproduction among Migrant Women in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana"

Elmond Bandauko, "This is a Good Place to Live! Narratives and Counternarratives on Territorial Stigmatization in Harare's Informal Settlements"

Chinelo Ezenwa, "A History of 19th Century European Missionaries in Colonial Africa with Specific References to the Impact of Missionary Schools"

Rebecca Jackson, Jade Rozal, …

Music Education In A Liquid Social World: The Nuances Of Teaching With Students Of Immigrant And Refugee Backgrounds, Gabriela Ocádiz Velázquez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This integrated-article dissertation explores the multiple ways in which music teachers, community facilitators, and students engage in music teaching and learning in social contexts prone to change due to human mobility. Drawing upon Bauman’s sociological understanding of modern societies as liquid and the larger implications of processes of human mobility in schools and communities, this research focuses on exploring music education as it happens within an increasingly diversifying Canadian society.

In the first article, a philosophical research study, I conceptualize the notion of coping with discomfort as a form of response possibly experienced by music teachers. Here, I draw from …

The General Artificial Intellect, Ramon S. Diab

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In passages of Marx’s Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines, Marx suggested that advanced capitalist development leads to the production of autonomous machines that replace labour-power in the direct production process. Autonomist Marxist interpretations of this text have emphasized that the proliferation of immaterial labour is the historical condition that is leading to a crisis in the measure of value based on labour-time and that will lead to a future communist mode of production. Further, Mario Tronti posited that as capitalist development unfolds, it subsumes both the state and society, a concept known as the ‘social factory thesis’. …

An App A Day Keeps The Doctor Away: A Visual Case Analysis Of The Self-Optimization Ideologies Downloaded Onto Apple Users As They Download Applications, Ismahan Yusuf

MA Research Paper

This visually thematic qualitative case analysis seeks to advance cyber-sociology by analyzing the hyper-under-attended relationship between interfaces and discourses. Here, the interface under investigation is the Apple App Store, examined for the ways in which the platform is discursively encoded with particular ideologies, ideals, desires and narratives downloaded onto users as they download applications. Such is explored via a two-part research question inquiring: Which type of applications enjoy the most promotion on the Apple App Store and what cyber-architectural tools are herein used to optically exalt them? To investigate this, an iOS 11-operating iPhone was used to frequent the store’s …

In Search Of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds And Natural Classification In Psychiatry, Nicholas Slothouber

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I contend that psychopathological phenomena do not cluster together into kinds in the way that paradigmatic natural kinds (e.g., chemical …

Excavating Feminist Phenomenology: Lived-Experiences And Wellbeing Of Indigenous Students At Western University, Eva Lynn Cupchik

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission underscores the need to incorporate narrative accounts of Indigenous students’ experiences as part of wide-scale de-colonizing efforts. This dissertation asks; how do Indigenous students experience their identities at Western University? What is at stake for phenomenology, feminist methods, and Indigenous theory, in the post Truth and Reconciliation era?

There is a gap between theories centering on reflective cognition in philosophy and the embodiment of land, prevalent across Indigenous cultures. However, phenomenology can provide a method to facilitate dialogues with discourses outside Eurocentric domains that empathize with marginalized communities’ struggles, through an understanding of location-based knowledge. …

Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, Kristin Longdo, Anabel Quan-Haase

2019 Cohort

Together, the authors have edited Anabel Quan-Haase’s previously written textbook Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, a textbook used in the first year course Introduction to Sociology, to implement more Indigenous content into each chapter. Our motive with modifying the content in this textbook is to give first-year or new students a chance to learn about Canada’s history. Ideally, implementing such content into this textbook will make future students not only aware of what their fellow brothers and sisters have endured, but how they continue to suffer. We can not change the past, but we can shape the future. Young …

Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, Kristin Longdo, Anabel Quan-Haase

Head and Heart Posters 2019

Together, the authors have edited Anabel Quan-Haase’s previously written textbook Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, a textbook used in the first year course Introduction to Sociology, to implement more Indigenous content into each chapter. Our motive with modifying the content in this textbook is to give first-year or new students a chance to learn about Canada’s history. Ideally, implementing such content into this textbook will make future students not only aware of what their fellow brothers and sisters have endured, but how they continue to suffer. We can not change the past, but we can shape the future. Young …

Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, Kristin Longdo, Anabel Quan-Haase

Learning with your Head & Heart

Together, the authors have edited Anabel Quan-Haase’s previously written textbook Real Life Sociology: A Canadian Approach, a textbook used in the first year course Introduction to Sociology, to implement more Indigenous content into each chapter. Our motive with modifying the content in this textbook is to give first-year or new students a chance to learn about Canada’s history. Ideally, implementing such content into this textbook will make future students not only aware of what their fellow brothers and sisters have endured, but how they continue to suffer. We can not change the past, but we can shape the future. Young …

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 …

Narratives Of Sexuality In The Lives Of Young Women Readers, Davin L. Helkenberg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, research on adolescent sexuality in Young Adult (YA) Literature has included a discussion of its potential role in sex education. Based on the extensive yet problematic presentation of sexuality within these texts, it has gained both support and opposition. However, very few empirical studies have been done on how readers say YA Literature has informed their sexual lives.

This thesis investigates how narratives of sexuality found within YA Literature may inform the sexual lives of young women readers by examining both readers’ experiences and YA texts. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 female participants (aged 18 …

Postcolonial Trauma In The Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, Rosario Pollicino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a …