Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

On Powerful Qualities, Dean J. Morales

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present work is a critical examination of the Powerful Qualities Ontology. Categoricalism affirms that intrinsic properties are quiddistic or qualitative in nature, and Pure Powers Theory affirms that they are by nature powerful. The Powerful Qualities Ontology, though, affirms that intrinsic properties are both qualitative and powerful, and that by being a more robust ontology than both Categoricalism and Pure Powers Theory, it promises to account for more phenomena and solve more problems than these rival theories. Despite its advantages, however, I challenge the feasibility of the Powerful Qualities Ontology. In chapter 1, I define important terms and provide …

Essays On Privilege And Its Implications For Relational Autonomy And Vaccine Hesitancy, Nicole Fice

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One goal of feminist philosophy is to challenge unjust systems of power like patriarchy, which privilege some social groups while oppressing others. In this three-chapter dissertation, I argue that to achieve this goal, we need a better understanding of privilege and its implications.

In chapter one, I raise objections to some existing philosophical accounts of privilege. These accounts are either too broad in defining privilege as always advantageous or they are vague regarding what privilege comprises. I provide an account of privilege which clarifies that privilege is generally advantageous and that privilege includes tangible resources and options to do certain …

Sound Judgements: Music Education Framework For Guiding Digital Mixing Practice, Artur Kapron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mixing is an intermediary process within audio production wherein the aesthetic and technical qualities of musical compositions are further enhanced and refined. Most music perceived via audio-playback devices is mixed to sound a certain way. By understanding why recordings ‘sound’ how they do, musicians, music educators, and novice mixers can acquire a greater appreciation for mixing while considering how this process might affect their own performance practices (Hodgson 2019; Fisher, 1998). Knowing how and what to listen for when mixing is highly subjective, as people experience and describe sounds differently. Indeed, mixing is illusory as listeners are presented with an …

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 …

The History Of The Enigma Machine, Jenna Siobhan Parkinson

History Publications

The history of the Enigma machine begins with the invention of the rotor-based cipher machine in 1915. Various models for rotor-based cipher machines were developed somewhat simultaneously in different parts of the world. However, the first documented rotor machine was developed by Dutch naval officers in 1915. Nonetheless, the Enigma machine was officially invented following the end of World War I by Arthur Scherbius in 1918 (Faint, 2016).

“Literally, A Game-Changer”: Renegotiating The Aesthetics Of The Real, Moira Mckee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The affirmation of identity as a leitmotif throughout art history has become increasingly concerned with the conflation of the real and constructed, the material and immaterial, as technological developments engineer the fabric of reality with heightened sophistication. In the age of lifelike, digital avatar influencers such as Lil Miquela, Ai-Da, billed as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist,” algorithms developed to create The Next Rembrandt, and the rise of crypto art and non-fungible tokens (NFT’s), the ambiguity or removal of the hand of the artist prompts questions surrounding identity as a visualization of the data that follows us and is …

Malencontres Coloniaux Et Bâtardises Postcoloniales. Pour Une Poétique Du Fait Colonial Et De L'Hybridité Chez Tierno Monénembo, Antoine Marie Zacharie Habumukiza

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette thèse analyse la représentation du fait colonial dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre littéraire de Tierno Monénembo. Son périple scriptural à travers les plis tant du passé colonial que du néo-colonialisme contemporain, ne cesse d’exhumer du tréfonds du bassin historique des ingrédients méticuleux et combien diversifiés mais ayant à la fois comme origine et comme fin le brassage culturel et humain, marqué à tout jamais du sceau indélébile du postcolonial.

S’appuyant, d’une part, sur des théories postcoloniales et, d’autre part, sur des théories multidisciplinaires portant sur le nom, la nomination et l’onomastique littéraire d’abord, et sur les notions de parenté et …

Craft And Virtue In Plato's Early Dialogues, Cecilia Z. Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Ancient philosophers are preoccupied with the idea of craft (technê)—art, expertise, skill, and not infrequently translated as knowledge or science. The idea is often seen by ancient thinkers as the pinnacle of rational agency and offers them a vital paradigm for thinking about the world and our place within it. One longstanding tradition is the view that virtue shares important features with the sort of expertise involved in practicing a craft. In this thesis, I investigate the relationship between craft and virtue in Plato, focusing especially on the early dialogues. The overarching aim of this thesis is to …

Christian Mass Movements In South India And Some Of The Critical Factors That Changed The Face Of Christianity In India, Philip Joseph Mathew

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main reason for Christian growth in India was not individual conversions but rather Christian mass movements (CMMs). Since the late 1700s, a series of independent CMMs among non-Christians and a mass reformation movement within the Suriani community have occurred in the southern end of India. These MMs culminated in a mass emancipation movement against caste-imposed segregation of Dalits in the late 1800s, an event of national significance. In the early 1900s, Pentecostalism evolved from these CMMs and transformed the religious landscape of Christianity in South India and later in India as a whole. The Thoma Christians were the early …

Art, Work: Subsumption, Posthumanism And Artistic Responses To Surveillance Capitalism, Anna Mirzayan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation brings together multiple discourses, including surveillance studies, autonomist Marxism and posthumanism, as the groundwork for a novel discussion of contemporary visual art— in particular surveillance art, that is, art that addresses and problematizes the omnipresent digital monitoring now part of everyday life. Because in this dissertation contemporary art is defined as necessarily political, aesthetic (in the Kantian sense) and responsive to conditions of current history and society, I use Marxist theory to identify the particular features of contemporary capitalism that this art is responding to. I first characterize post-Fordist capitalism, focusing on the increasing reliance on extracting network …

Buried Feelings, Standing Stones: Secularity, Animism, And Late-Victorian Pagan Revivalism, Jeff Swim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this project, I argue that during the late-Victorian period a revived form of paganism developed in response to an emerging kind of secularity. My first chapter engages post-secularism as a framework for understanding how paganism responds to this new sense of secularity, which I demonstrate formed alongside developments in geology, archaeology, and anthropology. In chapter two, I show how ideas of “primitivity” and “animism” put forth by John Lubbock and E. B. Tylor influence what Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater debate as “the pagan sentiment.” The rest of the project concerns forms of what I call “pagan affectations,” authorial …

Creative Common Worlding With Research Creation In Early Childhood Education, Sarah M. Hennessy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Creative Common worlding with research-creation in early childhood education engages with provocations that disrupt dominant understandings of children and their relations with more-than-human and human others. Reconceptualizing alternatives through art, this dissertation contemplates the potent possibilities beyond human stewardship, underscores the influence of an uncommoning lens, and emphasizes the difficulties with humancentric notions of research. If, by disrupting how we understand ourselves and our role in place, we modify our actions and change our habits, then perhaps we can live differently and contribute differently to the planet. Through a common worlds framework together with research-creation, this dissertation considers climate education …

Gesture In Steve Reich's Music And Its Signification: A Referential Approach To His Process, Stylistic, And Postminimalist Works, Martin Ross

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

When listening to minimalist music, one will more than likely notice the scarcity of materials. Small motifs and repetition pervade the surface, and one might be inclined to interpret such scarcity as mere redundancy of materials with seemingly few meaningful layers underneath the surface. When analyzing minimalist music, one will notice a similar pattern of scarcity. Music-theoretical scholarship on minimalist music, especially formalist analyses, primarily investigates the rhythmic and melodic connections spanning the entire work. The analytical uncovering of such scarcity through formal means has resulted in few novel analytical approaches and, consequently, an attitude that minimalist music itself is …

Investigating The Perspectives Of Early Years Professionals’ Anti-Racist Practices, Amy Williams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This qualitative case study explored the perspectives and experiences of early years professionals engaging in anti-racist practices in Ontario licensed child care settings. Critical race theory and whiteness studies were the guiding theoretical frameworks for the study. The qualitative case study draws from semi-structured interviews with four early years professionals working in licensed child care settings. Based on the experiences of the early years professionals, there seemed to be an overall lack of in-depth continuous anti-racist practices among the participants. The findings highlight that the participants engage in anti-racist work using play materials, videos, and discussion-based learning with children. Some …

The Time Helix: Nonlinear Narrative Structures And The Paradox Of Delayed Simultaneity, Jaclyn A. Reed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My study of contemporary (post-2000) Anglophone novels combines themes of time and temporality with narratological analysis. I argue that nonlinear narrative structures (which originate in science fiction novels) challenge the supposed impossibility of simultaneity in the novel, undermine the literary construct of realism, and model new, more optimistic ways of imagining the future(s) beyond our present. I build upon Mathias Nilges’ argument that in the wake of the crisis of the “long now”—a societal belief that the future has been exhausted and we are trapped in an unchanging present—the contemporary time novel critiques historical forms of time and models new …

White Histories Of Antiblack Violence: An Investigation Between Black Studies And Critical Theory, Anna E. Stoutenburg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main goal of this thesis is to evaluate both how antiblack violence functions and the way in which white people have, historically, perpetuated this violence. Although this thesis consults various areas within Black Studies, its main theoretical foundation is Afropessimism. The first chapter is mainly concerned with white ignorance; with an analysis of how various prominent white critical theorists have often been antiblack while attempting to theorize antiblackness. These theorists include Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Lee Edelman. The second chapter investigates the violent history of the concept of Black animality and how this idea is a …

The Digital Extreme: Cinema's Reality Crisis In A Nostalgic Age, Lucas J. Dvorsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the trajectory and legacy of two streams of filmmaking born in the 1990s: extreme film and the digital film, which eventually fuse into the digital extreme film, a watershed moment of postmodern filmmaking. I analyze the rise of the digital extreme, probing its disturbing aesthetic, its grainy, blurry glitches, dark, mundane reality and connections to fear, surveillance and nostalgia. Looking at filmmakers as disparate as pop-culture mainstays like Martin Scorsese, breakout directors like Jane Schoenbrun, avant-garde artists like Michael Snow, and arthouse auteurs such as Catherine Breillat and Olivier Assayas, I consider what the moment of …

Civil War And Power: A Theoretical Inquiry, Can Guven

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a theoretical project that explores the conceptual nexus between civil war and power. It maps out a lineage of thought which posits civil war as a framework for explicating politics, not as a pre-political stage of savagery or a deteriorated condition of the socio-political order. Starting with Michel Foucault’s radical yet short-lived civil war thesis, which situates civil war as the matrix of relations of power, this investigation traverses the work of several theorists and philosophers who have drawn on, or departed from, this line of thought. It critically evaluates Giorgio Agamben’s use of the concept …

Men Under Microscopes: “Medical Gaze” And Homeostasis In Victorian Realist Literature, Nida Rashid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to explore the following questions implicit in four Victorian novels: is the relationship between science and humanities continuously at odds due to fundamental differences in philosophies? Can an understanding of how medicine transformed from an art to a science help bridge the gap between the arts and sciences? As medicine transformed into a science in the nineteenth century, it adopted three key innovations: first, Claude Bernard’s experimental method; second, what Michel Foucault later came to conceive of as the “medical gaze”; and third, Bernard’s theory of homeostasis. The thesis traces the changes in medicine as inflected across …

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 …

Influencer Engagement Pods And The Struggle Over Measure In Instagram Platform Labour, Victoria J. O'Meara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer engagement pods to explore the dynamics of antagonism, resistance, and struggle unique to the structuring conditions and valorization processes of platform capitalism. I argue that beneath the seemingly frictionless data-driven accumulation strategies of social media platforms like Instagram lies a familiar struggle between the subjects of labour and capital, the “struggle over measure” (de Angelis & Harvie, 2009).

Instagram influencers are native-to-online, professional content producers who have amassed an online following that they monetize in various ways. These digital producers are the unique progeny of platform capitalism; they operate as independent “entrepreneurs-of-the-self,” …

At Dusk, Michelle Paterok

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In supplement to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is composed of an extended artist statement, photographic documentation of artwork, a transcribed interview with artist Ben Reeves, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize the motivation and research that inform my studio work in painting. The extended artist statement describes the personal and theoretical foundation of my Master’s thesis project—a series of paintings collectively titled At Dusk, which documents everyday interior space in order to explore the invocations of colour, light and atmosphere. The interview with Ben Reeves provides insight into his artistic practice in painting, …

Canadian Prisoners Of The First World War: The Struggle For Resilience, Grace Peeters-Rosien

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the First World War, 3,500 Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner. Throughout their captivity, they endured intense humiliation, dehumanization, and abuse. Despite this, the men were able to remain resilient and even found ways to fight back. By using memoirs and letters written by the prisoners, this paper will analyze how these Canadians were determined to keep fighting. This paper will be using an analogy of a bank account to explain how close the prisoners came to breakdown, and how they continuously struggled to endure. Society and war had taught these men that prisoners were weak and cowardly, but they …

Unsung Equine Heroes: An Analysis Of Equine Care And Management During The Great War, Emma E. Kuiack

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the use of equines by the British Expeditionary Forces throughout the First World War, particularly examining various aspects of war equine care and management. It addresses the significance behind the use of these animals in the war before delving into the reality of how equines were cared for in terms of farrier work, skin care and management, feeding and watering, as well as psychological understandings of horses, donkeys, and mules. Through the implementation of various primary and secondary source materials, this thesis considers care mistakes that were made and the corrections that were enforced to alleviate injury …

Low Resolution .Jpgs And Collaborative Networks: Dreaming A Sustainable Digital Archive, Imogen G. Wilson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores various challenges in the archiving of Internet Art, including accelerated obsolescence of technology, the ever-changing nature of the Internet and the environmental impacts of digital archives. Using the Solar Protocol Network, Morris Fox’s Vestiges and Remains, Rhizome’s ArtBase and the Pad.ma video archive, the author builds an argument towards the cultivation of collaborative networks in archiving alongside the use of low resolution images in the creation of reliable digital archives of Internet Art. This paper draws from the conservation approaches of Annet Dekker, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, as well as, the writings of Josephine Bosma and …

Non:Wa: Navigating Indigenous Modernity Through Female Artists' Perspectives, Nicole Bussey

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This article examines the relationship between tradition and modern elements of Indigenous music through a cyclical perspective, and challenges colonial concepts of Indigenous modernity. Indigenous culture is often portrayed in mainstream culture as a relic of the past, which renders it incompatible with modernity. With a special focus on Indigenous female artists’ perspectives, I examine the ways in which women placed in this unique intersection challenge the binaries of past/present and tradition/modern.

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

War And Wilderness: Intersections With Patriotism And Masculinity In Canadian Second World War Alternative Service Work, Rosemary Giles

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis shows how ASW work in Canadian wilderness during the Second World War offered conscientious objectors the opportunity to prove themselves good citizens to the nation, and good men to themselves. Conscientious objectors’ work in Alternative Service Camps is used to demonstrate how masculinity and patriotism were constructed within the camps. This thesis addresses the interactions that conscientious objectors had with wilderness, primarily through their work with forestry and fire fighting. It also addresses the construction of masculinity and national identity in the context of the Canadian wilderness. Furthermore, this work seeks to expand understanding of the conscientious objector …

Mapping Governmental Engagement With Community Engaged Learning In Canadian Higher Education: An Environmental Scan Of Key Trends, Hannah R. Argiloff

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This is an environmental survey my supervisor and I conducted pertaining to the landscape of government engagement with Community Engaged Learning in Canadian Universities.

Community Engaged Learning (CEL) is a valuable type of experiential learning characterized by collaboration between student and community partner/ stakeholder for the creation of a mutual outcome.

Given the relations between provincial governments and their influence over publicly funded universities, compounded by a recent uptick in CEL programs across Canada, we wanted to survey government rhetoric, policy, and legislation across the country to create a picture of the interactions between provincial governments and CEL in the …