Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Grasping For The Ends Of The Earth: Framing And Contesting Polar Sovereignty, 1900-1955, Peter Kikkert

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During the first half of the twentieth century, state officials, international lawyers and polar experts struggled to apply an underdeveloped and unclear international legal discourse on territorial acquisition and the establishment of state sovereignty to the harsh environment and unique conditions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Drawing upon fresh archival research undertaken in several countries, as well as a thorough interrogation and synthesis of existing historical and legal scholarship, this dissertation explores the knowledge production that occurred on terrestrial polar claims, thus reconstructing the transnational web of ideas, adaptations, strategies and best practices developed to address the confusion and uncertainty …

Moral Sense Theory And The Development Of Kant's Ethics, Michael H. Walschots

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This dissertation investigates a number of ways in which an eighteenth century British philosophical movement known as “moral sense theory” influenced the development of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral theory. I illustrate that Kant found both moral sense theory’s conception of moral judgement and its conception of moral motivation appealing during the earliest stage of his philosophical development, but eventually came to reject its conception of moral judgement, though even in his early writings Kant preserves certain features of its conception of moral motivation. In the mature presentation of his moral philosophy Kant offers detailed objections to moral sense …

Limitation To Innovation In The North American Console Video Game Industry 2001-2013: A Critical Analysis, Michael Schmalz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In today's marketplace the ability to innovate is considered a key driver of success and economic prosperity (Florida, 2002; Howkins, 2001). From an innovation perspective, video game development has often been viewed as an exemplary case of a creative digital industry whose products and services are quickly consumed and hence require a constant flow of new content. This dissertation reviews innovation in the video game industry more critically. After examining the main lines of contemporary innovation theory, it proposes a model of the innovation process in the development cycle of console video games, evaluating the roles of three principle actors: …

Lacan's Cybernetics, Svitlana Matviyenko

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This project explores the synchronicity of psychoanalytic and cybernetic practices from the mid-to-late nineteenth century by recovery and analysis of a shared material media culture. This project takes as a starting point the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who observed the affinity between cybernetics and psychoanalysis, “two roughly contemporaneous techniques,” related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: exact and “conjectural.” I investigate their shared patterns of figuration in the two fields, before they developed significant, and even irreconcilable, differences. This project demonstrates that what Lacan discussed explicitly in the 1950s, particularly, in his “cybernetic” Seminar …

Paradise Lost: Astronomy, Scepticism, Perspective, Yanxiang Wu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent breakthroughs in Milton studies have demonstrated that the cosmological frame of Paradise Lost is not the Ptolemaic cosmos but most likely the infinite multiverse, and critics were wrong to think that Milton had chosen the geocentric model to accommodate his Christian epic. My thesis builds on this new understanding of Milton’s cosmology and re-examines three interpretational problems in Paradise Lost. Two of them are from the astronomical dialogue in book eight: God’s derisive laughter at astronomers who endeavor to “save appearances” and Raphael’s admonishment to Adam that he “be lowly wise.” The third concerns a group of Milton’s …

Building Canadian National Identity Within The State And Through Ice Hockey: A Political Analysis Of The Donation Of The Stanley Cup, 1888-1893, Jordan Goldstein

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The Stanley Cup elicits strong emotions related to Canadian national identity despite its association as a professional ice hockey trophy. This strong link between the Cup and Canadian national identity emerged in its creation and donation. Lord Stanley, in addition to his love of ice hockey, donated the Cup partly as a political action. The cup stood as a physical symbol to unite the disparate Canadian population around a new national sport. Given Lord Stanley’s position as Governor General (1888-1893) this donation carried political authority. The purpose of this study is to investigate the donation of the Stanley Cup as …

In Search Of Transformative Music Learning Experiences: Voices From The Margins In Northeastern Brazil, Nan Qi

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Transformative learning occurs when individuals not only learn only some specific knowledge or skills, but also achieve a more inclusive understanding of themselves and of society through the learning process. To transform means to overcome limiting assumptions, with the potential of engendering new attitudes, psychological attributes, and behaviours. This integrated-article dissertation explores the possibility of transformative learning experiences through music with marginalized individuals in Northeastern Brazil.

The first article is based on interviews with five renowned Brazilian scholars, in order to provide a broader contextualization of Brazilian music education, as well as to shed light into issues explored in the …

Cityscape, Urban Nobodies And War: Modern Transformation Of Nianhua In Suzhou-Shanghai, Hua Huang

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This dissertation explores the continuities and ruptures of the nianhua practice and representations in the Suzhou-Shanghai region during the mid-18th – 19th century. It explores a city-based nianhua tradition in Jiangnan’s urban centers that supplements current scholarship, which focuses geographically on northern print centers, economically on village-based production, and thematically on religious, auspicious and moral subjects of universal value. Challenging current scholarship that treats nianhua as a folk tradition rigidly adhering to an established pictorial vocabulary and conventional symbols of religious and moral significance, this study demonstrates the adaptive and innovative energies within the nianhua industry. Taking nianhua as a …

An Esoteric Doctrine: Nietzsche's Politics And Way Of Life, Andrew Evans

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Two current perspectives within Anglo-American Nietzsche studies are Nietzsche as radical aristocrat who supports the exploitation of the masses, and Nietzsche as thinker who revives the ancient understanding of philosophy as a way of life. A Hellenized Nietzschean way of life, however, shares the liberal concern for the suffering individual that the aristocratic Nietzsche condemns for contributing to modern decadence. This thesis reconciles the two interpretations by examining the way Nietzsche’s way of life is the condition of his politics. Before a new aristocratic order dedicated to the promotion of greatness can arise, there must be philosophers of the future …

Phenomenal Intentionality And The Problem Of Cognitive Contact, Christopher A. Young

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Abstract

Part 1 of the thesis questions the traditional relation model of intentionality. After fixing reference on the target phenomenon, intentionality, and explaining my interest in it, I ask what sorts of things intentionality might be a relation to. I consider ordinary objects, properties, propositions and hybrid views, and conclude all make the intentional relation appear rather mysterious. From there, I move on to examine the relation view’s most prominent proponents, the tracking theorists—pointing out some challenges such views face, and concluding that it might be worthwhile looking into alternatives to the relation view.

Part 2 asks whether the newly …

Reading The Canadian Battlefield At Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, And Vimy, Rebecca Campbell

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Early Canadian cultural history is punctuated by a series of battlefields that define not only the Dominion’s expanding territory and changing administration, but also organize Canadian time. This dissertation examines the intersection between official military commemoration, militarism as a social and cultural form, and the creation of a national literature, with specific reference to poetry. By outlining the role war has played in defining Canada’s territory and the constitution of its communities, this dissertation will also uncover both the military history of the post-colonial nation, and the construction of belonging and territory in the “empire” of Canada, from its cultural …

More Than Plumbing: The History Of Sexual Education In Ontario, 1960-1979, Michelle K P Hutchinson Grondin

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During the 1960s and 1970s, Ontario educators were concerned that the “sexual revolution” would encourage youths to engage in sexually promiscuous behaviour, become unwed mothers, and contract STIs. As parents were perceived as unreliable sex educators, school administrators and educators felt compelled to teach traditional sexual values, and the importance of the nuclear family through sexual education. This dissertation analyzes the creation and instruction of sexual education in physical and health education courses throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Ontario. This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of sexual education in Ontario during the sixties and seventies through an examination …

Applicative Structure In Wolof, Christen Harris

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This dissertation investigates applicative structures in Wolof, based on new data collected from native speakers in Saint Louis, Senegal. The dual purpose of this dissertation is to describe the applicative constructions available in Wolof and to identify their syntactic structure. Following previous work on applicatives, the description of these applicatives focuses on their object properties and the c-command configuration of the VP. The analysis falls within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000). I propose multiple function heads involved in applicative formation which account for the properties in Wolof.

Four types of applicatives, benefactive, dative, instrumental, and locative in Wolof. …

Representationalism About Sensory Phenomenology, Matthew Ivanowich

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This dissertation examines representationalism about sensory phenomenology—the claim that for a sensory experience to have a particular phenomenal character is a matter of it having a particular representational content. I focus on a particular issue that is central to representationalism: whether reductive versions of the theory should be internalist or externalist. My primary goals are (i) to demonstrate that externalist representationalism fails to provide a reductive explanation for phenomenal qualities, and (ii) to present a reductive internalist version of representationalism that utilizes the empirical framework of psychophysics and neuroscience to develop a philosophical theory of content. The bulk …

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 …

Detective Policing And The State In Nineteenth-Century England: The Detective Department Of The London Metropolitan Police, 1842-1878, Rachael Griffin

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This thesis evaluates the development of surveillance-based undercover policing in Victorian England through an examination of the first centralized police detective force in the country, the Detective Department of the London Metropolitan Police (1842-1878). It argues that the Detective Department overcame British fears that detective police were incompatible with individual liberty and parliamentary democracy, making the English detective a familiar and reliable public servant. The Detective Department, which worked from Scotland Yard, was formed in 1842 in response to criticism that the Metropolitan Police was unable to successfully investigate homicide. This was a surprising development in a country where property …

The Aesthetics Of Romantic Hellenism, Derek Shank

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This study examines the aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism in theory and practice. I trace various forms of Hellenism’s ambivalence, which manifests in certain paradoxes. Such paradoxes include the aesthetic of desire, which longs for a union with ancient Greek culture even as it is aware of the impossibility of such fulfillment, and the Romantic notion of mythology, which exhibits a tension between order and system. Such tensions work to energize Hellenism with aesthetic potentiality by preserving the mysteriousness of ancient Greek culture, and thus frequently turn upon the interdependence of the reading of Greece with the writing of literature or …

Defending Liberal Education: Implications For Educational Policy, Christopher W. Lyons

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This thesis advocates for the inclusion of liberal education in discussions of the college and university missions and mandates in North America. It is conceived with the purpose of influencing policy thinking and generating the theory and ideas required for sound education policy decision making. Research into liberal education is a special and atypical kind of inquiry and requires innovative theoretical approaches. Liberal education is foremost a philosophical problem and requires philosophical approaches. The method used is, therefore, conceptual in nature and drawn from analytical philosophy.

My research approaches liberal education conceptually in three ways: historically, philosophically, and politically. Historically, …

Physical Culture As Citizenship Education At Pelican Lake Indian Residential School, 1926-1970, Braden Paora Te Hiwi

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Pelican Lake Indian residential school, also known as Sioux Lookout Indian residential school, was an Anglican run institution that was a part of the Canadian residential school system; the school operated from 1926 to 1970. It is well established in the literature that the Department of Indian Affairs intended to evangelize, assimilate, and civilize its students, but the function of citizenship in the residential schools is less well known. The focus of this study was to examine physical culture activities, specifically sport, exercise, and recreation as a form of training for citizenship. In particular, I centered this research on the …

From Lion To Leaf: The Evacuation Of British Children To Canada During The Second World War, Claire L. Halstead

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From Lion to Leaf is a study of the evacuation of British children to Canada in the Second World War. While European refugee children were excluded purposely from Canada, Canadians anxiously called for Britain to send her children as a display of philanthropic, patriotic, imperial, and wartime sentiment. Yet overseas evacuation is often overshadowed, in both the historiography and social memory of the war, by Britain’s domestic evacuation. From Lion to Leaf contributes to the study of evacuation, the British home front, wartime Canada, Canadian childcare and immigration policy, and the changing British Empire. Reflecting the transnationalism of the movement, …

Searching For Sakitawak: Place And People In Northern Saskatchewan's Île-À-La-Crosse, Signa A. K. Daum Shanks

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This presentation is a history of a small community, Île-à-la-Crosse, located in an area now part of Saskatchewan, Canada. With an historic reputation for cooperation and enviable trading circumstances, its residents traditionally have determined that protection of the community ensured the best opportunities for the advancement and security of individuals. As a result of this belief, residents reinforced their own understandings of sustainability as a means to ensure personal success. The community’s fame for hosting such a set of norms grew, particularly from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and outsiders often visited to improve their own efforts as a …

J. S. Bach's Modal Compositional Practice In The Chorale Preludes For Solo Organ: A Schenkerian Perspective, Michael Fitzpatrick

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This dissertation proposes a Schenkerian perspective of J. S. Bach’s modal compositional practice in his chorale preludes for solo organ. It develops two major themes: first, a viable framework for reconciling Schenker’s theory of tonality with the kind of composition that Bach’s modal music exemplifies (chapter 3); and second, a definition of Bach’s modal compositional practice in the chorale preludes as revealed through analysis of the repertoire (chapter 4). Additionally, the dissertation explores the pertinence of traditional modal theory to Bach’s modal music (chapter 1), confronts Schenker’s evaluation of modal composition (chapter 1), and responds to other scholarly work in …

Impassioned Objects And Seething Absences: The Olympics In Canada, National Identity And Consumer Culture, Estee Fresco

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This dissertation critically analyzes the commercial practices and products of the 1976 Montreal, 1988 Calgary and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The central questions I ask are: how did the Olympics in Canada become a platform for the intersection of patriotism and consumption? What were the key ideas about Canadian identity, history, and citizenship that Olympic organizers and corporate sponsors promoted? How did commodities symbolize these ideas? Finally, how do these ideas relate to political policies and practices?

This work contributes to an understanding of how branded commodities shape Canadian identity and citizenship norms by arguing that the objects sold during the …

Canada: Multiculturalism, Religion, And Accommodation, Brittainy R. Bonnis

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In this thesis I use Critical Discourse Analysis to examine discursive constructions of identity (individual, religious, and national) within the framework of Canadian multiculturalism as they are constructed in two Canadian newspapers (the Toronto Star and the Gazette) between 2003 and 2013. I am particularly interested in how understandings of multiculturalism delimit the boundaries of belonging for religious practitioners in Canada. In chapter one I establish the academic context of this thesis and give a brief outline of the history of Canadian multiculturalism. In chapter two I focus on definitions and assessments of Canadian multiculturalism and the integration of …

Historiography In French Theory, Eric J. Guzzi

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This thesis examines historical writing by drawing on the works of historians, philosophers, theorists and intellectuals, from antiquity to the contemporary moment. In order to answer the demand for scholarship that assembles insights of the Annales historians with other French intellectuals, I treat historians as theorists and theorists as historians. Through the course of my analysis, I examine issues of historical writing such as the scope of historical research and the historian’s task and place; I treat theoretical questions of constructivism, potentiality, agency, causality, teleology, and politics. In order to consolidate these issues into a single analysis, my research spans …

Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space, And The Volition Of Thought, Ben Woodard

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This dissertation examines F.W.J. von Schelling's Philosophy of Nature (or Naturphilosophie) as a form of early, and transcendentally expansive, naturalism that is, simultaneously, a naturalized transcendentalism. By focusing on space and motion, this dissertation argues that thought should be viewed as a natural activity through and through. This view is made possible by German Idealism historically, and yet, is complicated and obscured by contemporary philosophy's treatment of German Idealism in both analytic and continental circles. The text engages with the foundations of Schelling's theory of nature as well as geometry, field theory, inter-theory relations, epistemology, and pragmatism.

Sexual Violence At Nyarubuye: History, Justice, Memory. A Case Study Of The 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Nicole M. Ephgrave

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This dissertation raises complex questions about historical truth, the pursuit of justice, and processes of memorialization vis-à-vis one case study of the Rwandan genocide: the Nyarubuye Church massacre, where members of the Interahamwe militia and their accomplices murdered tens of thousands of (mainly) Tutsi men, women and children, April 15^th-17^th, 1994. As a microcosm of larger patterns of the genocide and its aftermath, I analyze official discourses to uncover how this specific event is framed and understood, with a focus on the widespread perpetration of sexual violence. Specifically, I provide a chronological reconstruction of the massacre, …

Probabilistic Reasoning In Cosmology, Yann Benétreau-Dupin

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Cosmology raises novel philosophical questions regarding the use of probabilities in inference. This work aims at identifying and assessing lines of arguments and problematic principles in probabilistic reasoning in cosmology.

The first, second, and third papers deal with the intersection of two distinct problems: accounting for selection effects, and representing ignorance or indifference in probabilistic inferences. These two problems meet in the cosmology literature when anthropic considerations are used to predict cosmological parameters by conditionalizing the distribution of, e.g., the cosmological constant on the number of observers it allows for. However, uniform probability distributions usually appealed to in such arguments …

Praesentia Sublimis: Studies In The Differend, Dylan T. Vaughan

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Interrogating the notion of the differend, taken from Jean-Franҫois Lyotard’s book of the same name, in which a wrong occurs along with the impossibility of its representation as a wrong, this thesis attempts to rearticulate the relationship between the distant and heterogeneous theories dealing with a supposedly common subject matter: namely, the sublime. The sublime as it is taken up in the rhetorical pedagogy of Longinus, the transcendental aesthetic of Immanuel Kant, and the postmodern theory of Jean-Franҫois Lyotard refuses to yield a shared dimension that could bind together these major moments of thought. There are sublimes, it seems, …

Jouissance And Being In Lacanian Discourse, Mazen Saleh

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This thesis discusses the theoretical implications Lacanian psychoanalysis may have on any articulation of historical experience. It takes as its starting point the Lacanian dictum that “the big Other does not exist”, and then attempts to find a way that allows us to go beyond historicist discursive regimes diagnosing these regimes as a refusal to accept the nonexistence of the big Other. The research focuses as well on the discourse of being Heidegger articulated in Being and Time, and how its “failure” may be read from a Lacanian perspective. It is here that the discourse of being is opposed …