Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Romance, Politics And Minor Art: A Nomadology Of Inamoramento De Orlando And Star Wars, Andrea Privitera

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While existing theories of romance (in particular, those formulated by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson) accurately characterize this literary mode as a highly politicized example of art, this thesis contends that the political nature of romance is broader and more complex than discussed so far. In order to offer a new and comprehensive political theory of romance, this work proposes a comparison between two historically and culturally diverse examples of romance, that is Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric poem Inamoramento de Orlando and George Lucas’ space opera film Star Wars. By reading Boiardo and Lucas’ texts via Gilles Deleuze and …

A Data-Driven Analysis Of Video Game Culture And The Role Of Let's Plays In Youtube, Ana Ruiz Segarra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Video games have become an important part of the global popular cultures that are connecting broader audiences of all ages around the world. A recent phenomenon that has lasted almost ten years is the creation and upload of gaming-related videos on YouTube, where Let’s Plays have a considerable presence. Let’s Plays are videos of people playing video games, usually including the game footage and narrated by the players themselves. In this work I use the metadata, of popular channels and their videos to analyze the current state of video game culture in YouTube and what is the role of Let's …

Science And Theology In Religious Education And Faith Formation With Children And Youth: Towards A Post-Foundationalist Approach, Judy S. Steers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The intersections of Science and Theology have received a great deal of attention in recent decades. A broad range of approaches and discourse exists within academic environments. Within popular culture, however, the public perception often is that science and theology are in conflict and at odds with one another.

Many authors have attempted to write about science and theology from a dialogical standpoint. Educational projects over the past ten years have attempted to address the supposed conflict between religion and science, and affirm the validity of religious beliefs in a scientific era. Too often, however, scientific concepts are misappropriated as …

Pragmatic Holiness In The Early Salvation Army: A Theology Of Holiness As Action, Terence Hale

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The notion of holiness and sanctification are central to most Protestant understandings and expressions of religious life. This thesis explores whether a pragmatic understanding of holiness, particularly in the Wesleyan-Arminian stream, can have a meaningful place in the postmodern world.

This thesis endeavours to establish a theological argument for a non-linear pragmatic understanding of holiness in the Wesleyan tradition. The theological argument is supplemented by a substantial case study of the early Salvation Army, focusing on its missiology and theology.

The argument presented is that a pragmatic understanding of sanctification, as seen in the theology and practice of the early …

True North Strong Canada 150: Canadian Identity And Its Contribution To Doping Free Sport, Helena A. Hlas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis, a reflective piece inspired by “Canada 150” events, explores the psychosocial and sociocultural factors surrounding the ongoing evolution of the clean sport movement in Canada. A literature review recounts the critical events in the history of doping, viz. the Ben Johnson scandal, which resulted in a call to overhaul sport culture and realign it with fair play values. Theories in sports philosophy and psychology provide a further understanding of the meaning of sport, and psychosocial factors that are inextricably linked to doping behavior, respectively. The autoethnographic method provides insight into current Canadian values to compare with those in …

Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents the theory of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book and thereby seeks to fill an existing gap in English-language Benjamin literature. On the one hand, it performs its task by closely reading this thinker’s early, epistemo-linguistic writings up to and including the “Prologue”: most prominently, “On Language as Such,” “The Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Concept of Criticism,” and the theoretically inclined sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” On the other, it does so by positioning Benjamin’s theory of language within existentialist philosophy and by applying his theory of …

Biopolitics, Risk, And Reproductive Justice: The Governing Of Maternal Health In Canada's Muskoka Initiative, Jacqueline Potvin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I examine how Canada’s Muskoka Initiative discursively constructs and addresses maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) as a global development problem. I evaluate how the Muskoka Initiative aligns with, and departs from feminist articulations of sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice. I do this by analyzing how the Muskoka Initiative drew on and reinforced dominant norms of motherhood, and aligned with neoliberal development frameworks. I also examine how the reproductive bodies and lives of women in the Global South were configured as sites of both development intervention and biopolitical governance. My findings are based on a …

The Differentiation Of Smallholder Farming And Household Food Responsibilities In Northern Ghana, Siera Vercillo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the most urgent problems facing sub-Saharan Africa is that many people lack access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food, particularly in semi-arid regions such as northern Ghana. An important indication of this problem within Ghana is that stunting rates due to prolonged undernourishment are significantly higher in the northern regions than in other parts of the country, despite claims of an overall increase in the availability of food. Broadly, this dissertation employs qualitative case study research in the Northern Region (interviews N=109 and 12 focus groups) to describe the changes in access to resources, roles and …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

Narrativa Multiterritorial Hispanoamericana, Ana Maria Gonzalez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Esta disertación examina dos manifiestos literarios y dos novelas producidas por escritores de origen y formación hispanoamericana durante finales del siglo XX e inicios del siglo XXI. Los manifiestos son los presentados por los grupos McOndo y Crack en el año de 1996. Por otra parte, las dos novelas que se examinan son El sueño del celta (2010), escrita por Mario Vargas Llosa, y En busca de Klingsor (1999) cuyo autor es Jorge Volpi. En el primer capítulo se presenta el marco conceptual e histórico alrededor de nociones como nacionalismo y nación, globalización, ciudadanía global, e hibridez cultural. En el …

L'Auteur Dramatique Et La Conscience Professionnelle (1610-1640), Heather N. Kirk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation falls within the scope of a number of socio-literary studies published since Alain Viala’s La Naissance de l’écrivain (1985). According to Viala, the “author” is the professional incarnation of the writer (in the mechanical sense of “scribe”). He is recognisable by his participation in the Republic of Letters and his validation by the various socio-political structures of his era (academies, salons, paying public, critics, printers). To be considered an author, or a professional man of letters, one must successfully emancipate oneself from purely intellectual milieus in order to build networks that allow for competition. Contrary to Viala’s assertion …

A Study Of Six Nations Public Library: Rights And Access To Information, Alison Frayne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary Indigenous public libraries play a critical role in providing access to information in Indigenous communities. My research focuses on the relationship between rights and access to information for individuals and communities within the context of Indigenous public libraries. I use a qualitative case study methodology of the Six Nations Public Library (SNPL) in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada. Interviews were conducted with SNPL patrons and library management and with off-reserve participants from government and library associations.

I analyse four themes, library governance, rights, library value and access to information, which are outcomes of the SNPL case study findings. This analysis reveals …

An Interventionist Approach To Language Study Abroad: Exploring Metalinguistic Awareness In The Acquisition Of Spanish Through Digital Portfolio Documentation And Expert Mentorship, Meredith Mcgregor

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Language study abroad offers the possibility of acquiring a multitude of competencies, linguistic and otherwise. While historically study abroad research has emphasized linguistic gains in isolation, it has gradually moved towards a more sociocultural approach whereby individual factors and intercultural competencies are seen as integral to the process of acquiring knowledge of a language. With remaining gaps in the literature, and as new instruments emerge, so too do new opportunities for tracking and measuring learning outcomes in innovative ways. The present study, framed by the intervention hypothesis and sociocultural theory, utilizes the social media platform Google+ as a space to …

Searching For Wisdom: A Phenomenological Investigation Of Women's Perspectives Following Participation In An Ovarian Cancer Supportive Care Group, Helen Butlin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study used a novel methodology of hermeneutic-poetic-phenomenology to explore perspectives of women living with ovarian cancer. Each had participated in a supportive care group process Soul-Medicine prior to volunteering. Three women, Beth, Carrie, and Denise contributed to this study. The methodology was grounded in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of poetic-phenomenology. Data was analyzed with attention to image-centred knowledge; material imagination; reverie; and horizons of hope to elucidate their implicated aspects of wisdom and the ways participant’s formed their personal wisdom integrating feminist theories of embodiment and bioethics.

Findings are framed through three images of a uniquely formed inner ‘wisdom-compass’, an …

The Event Of Blues Music And The Effects Of Technology On The Artistic Event, Adam Rejak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of this dissertation is to find out whether or not blues music is an event. I explore what constitutes a musical or artistic event in modern times and to see how this has changed in relation to earlier periods. I also identify its essential formal elements. I divide blues music into two categories, namely, its technical playing qualities (the micro) and its historical changes (the macro). This division frames the entire project and illustrates that in order to discuss an artistic event, we must account for both its technical and historical aspects. I examine several theories of the …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

"I Have A Seat In The Abandoned Theater": Post-Foundational Subjects, Inoperative Teleologies, And The Aesthetics Of Dispossession, Averil L. Novak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What is the nature of political ‘reality,’ and in what ways are we capable of affecting it? Who (or what? and where?) is the subject of democratic politics? Of revolutionary politics? Are they opposed to one another? The grand narratives that ‘ground’ this project and the resistances that unground them form the basis for a post-foundational analytic of the subject of politics, of identity, and of community, which constitutes a mobilization of democratic resistance as a commitment to persistent (and in some cases, relentless) contestation, interruption, and disruption. These questions are explored through the argument that modern politics is …

Charting Continuation: Understanding Post-Traditional Six Nations Militarism, 1814-1930, Evan Joseph Habkirk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Until recently, military historians failed to consider First Nations military participation beyond the settlement of a particular region, including the end War of 1812 in Ontario and Quebec, and the post-Northwest Rebellion era in the Western Provinces. Current historiography of Six Nations military between the end of the War of 1812 and the First World War has also neglected the evolution of First Nations militarism and the voice of First Nations peoples, with most military histories including First Nations participation as contributions to the larger non-First Nations narrative of Canada. By charting the military participation of one First Nation community, …

The Art Songs Of Kyrylo Stetsenko: Ukrainian Lyric Diction Guide, Olena Bratishko

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The genre of Ukrainian art song represents a significant body of work to be discovered. Yet, in the twenty-first century the Ukrainian art song repertoire still remains one of the less explored genres of the Eastern European music, mainly due to the political factors playing a significant role in the history of Ukraine.

The present monograph serves a purpose of a reference guide for singers interested in performing Ukrainian art song. A brief history of Ukrainian art song will explore the development of song as a vocal genre at a certain period in time: the importance of folk song tradition …

Kant And Tetens On Transcendental Philosophy, Richard D. Creek

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the significance of Johann Nikolas Tetens, a German empiricist philosopher working in the 1770's, to the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I begin by examining Tetens' discussion of philosophical methodology in his 1775 essay \textit{Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie}. I make the case that Tetens' criticism of the methodology of the Scottish common sense philosophers and his subsequent attempt to incorporate what he takes to be their valuable insights into the approach of the broadly Wolffian philosophical tradition provides important context for interpreting Kant's methodology in the \textit{Critique of Pure Reason}. I then examine two different cases …

The Mirror Of Humanism; Or, Towards A Baudrillardian Posthuman Theory, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis considers the relationship between Jean Baudrillard’s thought and theories of posthumanism. I argue that Baudrillard’s work is fundamentally posthuman, but that Baudrillard’s posthumanism is one that stands in opposition to main currents of contemporary posthuman theory. Most contemporary posthuman theory, I argue, focus on the dissipation of a liberal humanist subject--and celebrate its loss. Baudrillard’s thought, by contrast, suggests that the posthuman figure only arrives in the age of hyperreality and is therefore intertwined with the oppressive logic of the simulacrum. In my consideration of contemporary posthuman theory, I focus primarily on the work of Katherine Hayles, Cary …

Indigenous Political Organization In Huamachuco, Peru, In The Early Seventeenth Century., Carolina Delgado Domínguez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores socio-political practices in the former Huamachuco province (upper Virú valley, northern Peru) through the analysis of a legal document from the first decade of the 17^th century. I analyze a litigation regarding indigenous political organization during the first centuries of the Colonial period. This case sheds light over the interaction between a cacicazgo (chiefdom) in the highlands of Huamachuco, and a cacicazgo in Simbal in the middle zone between the coast and the highlands (the chaupiyunga ecological zone), and on endurance of pre-Hispanic political practices during the early Colonial period in the Peruvian north. The 16 …

Monuments Of The Present: The Document And Monument In Michel Foucault's Archaeology, Alexander Walker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates Michel Foucault’s distinction between the monument and the document in his key methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), originally released in French as L’Archéologie du Savior in 1969. Foucault attempts to formulate a new form of history based on the examination of the monument, where previous methodologies had examined the document.

The thesis first examines Foucault’s theorization of this distinction and then questions the stability of these two categories through the comments of art critic Erwin Panofsky. I propose that the monument and document distinction implicates the historian in the power-relations that Foucault articulates later in …

1981: One Or Several Aesthetics?, Jacob Norris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation (1981), proposes a theory of aesthetic experience that prioritizes the material depths of sensation over stable, identifiable forms. Deleuze’s key references in The Logic of Sensation to playwright Antonin Artaud arouse the suspicion that Artaud’s schizophrenic experience of language, wherein words are reduced to phonetic ramblings, illuminates how Deleuze interprets this chaos of sensation in Bacon’s art. My work therefore calls back to The Logic of Sense (1969) and the first section of his book on Masochism (1967) to explore the waves of consistency between Deleuze’s understanding of language and …

The Effects Of Infertility On Female Vocalist Identity, Laura Curtis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This phenomenological research study explores the impact on female singers’ musical and gender identities when confronted with the socially stigmatized issue of infertility. Participants include women actively involved in singing (N=2), who have experienced the phenomenon of infertility. Participants were recruited primarily through the social media platform of Facebook and participated in three one-hour personal, semi-structured interviews over the course of six weeks. Interview transcripts were analyzed to isolate recurring themes within the narratives. While each participant’s experience with infertility was unique, analysis revealed a common tendency for life course alteration due to their experiences with infertility. These …

Pheneticism As A Cultural And Literary Critique Of Human Interaction, Richard Dew

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2010, Wayde Compton proposed, as an experiment, replacing the term ‘passing’ with ‘phehenticizing’ in relation to critical race theory and in conjunction with the manner in which we interpret the relationship racialized subjects possess with agents of the state. Pheneticizing, co-opted as a theoretical term from the branch of taxonomy called phenetics, when it comes to human interaction, has been demonstrated from a Eurocentric position of power from the time of European colonial expansion; through the era of the African slave trade of Europe and the Americas; into the time of American reconstruction; and persists within our current reality. …

Creative ‘Class’: Leading Innovation With Digital Pedagogy In Cultural And Creative Industry (Cci) Programs, Dana Morningstar

The Dissertation-in-Practice at Western University

Leaders of cultural and creative programs (CCIs) in Ontario community colleges are key to realizing potential in higher education related to digital pedagogy, creativity, industry partnerships, entrepreneurship and innovation. In this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP), the role of an academic leadership group is considered from Ontario-centric creative industry and innovation policies and college processes. The problem of practice is the gap of harmonized leadership strategy between higher education classroom practices and regional and provincial overarching educational strategy to increase innovation through digital pedagogy. Colleges have collective capacities in innovating with digital pedagogy in creative industry programs and providing graduates with …

Subjectivity, Passion, And Mystical Intuition: Nietzsche's Early Writing, Joseph Leivdal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

For Nietzsche, the subject is aesthetically creative, meaning that the subject is a dynamic process of self-transformation that involves not only the subject’s sense of self, but the meaning of their world. In my first chapter, I look at "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" to show how Nietzsche deconstructs rationalist epistemology in order to show that knowledge and meaning are an aesthetic activity. In my second chapter, I look at "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" to argue that Nietzsche sees creativity as a passionate, sublime overflow, a rupture with the present that artistically …

Then Again, Maybe I Won't, Claire Bartleman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and accompanying exhibition at MKG (Toronto, Ontario) both titled Then again, maybe I won’t, constitutes my Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Western Ontario. Within this dossier are a comprehensive artist statement, an interview with artist Jennifer Rubell and documentation of my art production over the course of my degree. These components contextualize my practice within the contemporary art world and outline the motivations and theoretical research that drives my work. Specifically, I look at affect theory, femmage, the burden of ownership and art theorist Jennifer Gonzalez’s notion of autotopography and how they are …

Preparing To Receive: On The Revolutionary Questioning Of Being And Time, Joshua Livingstone

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From the question of the meaning of being to the question concerning technology, the theme of questioning runs through the whole of Martin Heidegger’s work and plays a key role in the development of his thought. Despite its importance, however, it is a theme that has largely been left unexplored. This thesis is intended as the beginning of a corrective to a long overdue examination of Heideggerian questioning. I give a close, inner-textual analysis of questioning as it appears in Being and Time. By following Heidegger’s explicit commentary on and implicit use of questioning, I demonstrate that the question of …