Digital Commons Network^™

Contemporary Painting: Autopoietic Improvisation And A Relational Ecology, Philip James Gurrey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary painting as a form of research-making and knowledge acquisition through applied practice calls for a re-evaluation of the relationship between painter and painting. This dissertation examines the complexity of this relationship by displacing authority over the artwork and its meaning from the artist. From this poststructuralist starting point the thesis expands upon Derridean ideas of deconstruction by folding them back into Martin Heidegger’s concepts of earth and world. The aim is to reintroduce the physical materiality of paint back into the relationship between painter and painting, prompting a reassessment of the importance of a wider ecological context. Through an …

“We Make Things Today For Tomorrow”: Artists’ Publishing For The Future, Ruth Skinner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an exploration of artists’ book, artists’ publishing, distribution, and archival practices from a number of vantages in order to explore the activist possibilities of contemporary arts publishing. The concept of urgent artifacts, developed by publisher Paul Soulellis, reverberates throughout this research. The liveliness of this term is enhanced through applying additional modes of experience: clairvoyance, forensics, thinness, as well as their tricky interplay. In exploring what artists’ publishing might require for the present and the immediate future, this research-creation project considers the possibilities that clairvoyance—in particular, the figure of the medium—and archival intuition might offer. Borrowing from …

Extinction Anxiety As Zeitgeist: An Examination Of The Cultural Anxiety Surrounding Extinction Threats, Spencer J. Kett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines extinction anxiety as a zeitgeist that manifests through nuclear war anxiety and climate change anxiety. I define extinction anxiety as the cultural mood of anxiousness surrounding extinction threats in the past, present, and future. I use Monika Krause’s sociological conception of zeitgeist to understand these anxieties as a cultural mood. I demonstrate using Jean-Paul Sartre’s conceptualization of materially derived subjectivity, how these moods of anxiousness are internalized through material conditions. I build my concept of extinction anxiety by comparing and contrasting the mood of anxiousness surrounding nuclear war during the Cold War and the current mood of …

Listening To "Silence": Alternative Modes Of Communication In Korean And Korean American Women's Literature, Judy Joo-Ae Bae

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

South Korean feminist activity may be relatively unknown to many Western readers; however, a distinct form of feminist activism can be seen when considering alternative modes of communication that are not less than, simply different from “speech” or “voice” as forms of agency celebrated in the West. Alternative modes of communications such as silence, song, touch, and performance also speak important messages which can be heard when understood through local knowledges. In the three cases of South Korean and Korean American women’s fictions used in this dissertation, I unpack these alternative modes of communications used by the female protagonists through …

The Only Labourer Left: Resituating The Nonhuman Animal In The Language Of Labour And The History Of Philosophy, Mina Rosefield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an investigation of the ontological position of the nonhuman animal within the Marxist tradition and as it concerns both the language of value production and the slaughterhouse. The premise of my study is an engagement with Marx’s oeuvre and influences, as well those who respond to his work. Within this context, I propose that the nonhuman animal’s ontological position—as it concerns labour, language, and intellect—is subject to a gesture of erasure which marks their being as performing the action of interest in the absence of the possibility to claim either determination, or fluency of capability. This paradoxical …

The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial …

In Society's Shadow: Identifying Structural Violence In Muna, A Burial Community From Late Intermediate Period (1100 - 1470 Ce) Pachacamac, Peru., Ashley C. Ward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Structural violence (SV) highlights how social structures harm communities via inequities in health, risk of trauma, and post-mortem treatment, however its applicability outside of Euroamerican capitalist contexts is unclear. Fifty-nine individuals from the MUNA cemetery (Pachacamac, Perú) from the Late Intermediate to Late Horizon Periods (1100-1532 CE) were analysed for evidence of SV. Nonspecific stress markers, osteoarthritis, pathological dental conditions, and physical trauma were recorded and compared as they related to age, sex and/or status and then contextualised using the Spanish Chronicles, ethnographic, and archaeological research. Inequities in resource or labour distribution but not amount to SV, but SV did …

Vibes At The Village Vanguard: Hauntings, History, And The Construction Of Jazz Place, Mark Mccorkle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There are ghosts that haunt the Village Vanguard. Or at least that’s what people say.

This dissertation examines the role of the contemporary jazz club as a site of heritage and meaning making in jazz cultures. I take New York’s revered jazz club, the Village Vanguard, as a case study, as it is the subject of many fanciful tales. These stories describe the club’s history as alive; the spirits of the legendary musicians from a bygone era of jazz who once performed at the Vanguard are said to haunt the present club’s soundwaves. Often described by writers as the club’s …

Technological Fair Play: An Ethical Framework For Olympic Sports, Marwan Hellal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research strived to address age-old concerns clouding the governance of sport technologies, specifically in sports under the Olympic umbrella. Anti-doping has long been a mandatory clause in the Olympic Charter. Yet, other forms of technological incursions have long been left unaddressed or prohibited via premature reactive judgments. Utilizing a multidimensional philosophical lens encompassing scholarship in the fields of philosophy of sport, applied ethics and the philosophy of technology - this thesis is aimed at creating an accessible, structured, and principled ethical framework to guide the integration of emerging technologies within Olympic sports. Taking an analytical look into WADA’s underlying …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Early Twentieth-Century Music Appreciation And Community Music Movements In The United States, Andrew J. Blimke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The music appreciation and community music movements sought to popularize, democratize, and socialize art music. While technology made it possible for anyone to listen to art music, its full aesthetic and social benefits seemed accessible only to those with talent and education in performance. Music appreciation proponents claimed that teaching active listening made it possible for the less talented, and those who needed to be taught to prefer art music to have a full musical-aesthetic experience without any training in self-performance. Community music proponents argued that music’s full benefits came from music making and worked to find ways to prove …

The Exclusion Of Religious Reasons, Jaclyn Rekis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is comprised of three articles, all of which seek to answer the question of how religious reasons for political action are excluded in the public sphere. They answer this question in three ways, corresponding to what I take to be three forms of exclusion: a political kind, an epistemic kind, and a testimonial kind. Supporters of ‘the standard view’ of political liberalism have traditionally argued that these are acceptable and justified forms of exclusion. I argue, in contrast to these views, that such forms of exclusion are unfair. More positively, I suggest that religious reasons for political action …

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 …

What Do We Owe The Other Animals In Health-Related Research?, Jessica A. Du Toit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I provide an account of the protections to which most captive non-human animals are morally entitled when they participate in health-related research. At least in the animal ethics literature, it is uncontroversial that the protections currently afforded to captive research animals are inadequate. This has much to do with the fact that most animals who serve as research participants are 1) sentient and, thus, have important morally considerable interests; 2) unable to provide informed consent to their research participation; and 3) seriously harmed as a result of their participation.

Unsurprisingly, then, a number of authors have proposed …

Acquisition Of Main-Clause Wh-Questions In Egyptian Arabic-English And Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Riham H. Mohamed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the production and judgment of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth EA) main-clause wh-questions in EA-English bilingual children living in Ontario, Canada, or in the United Kingdom. The three comparison groups are EA monolingual children and EA monolingual adults living in Egypt, and first-generation Egyptian immigrants. The results are compared to previous research on the acquisition of obligatory subject-verb (S-V) inversion in Spanish wh-questions.

The focus of this study is to investigate the potential role of cross-linguistic influence in narrow syntactic structures. Until fairly recently, it was believed that only structures that exhibit syntax-pragmatics interfaces are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence …

Lighting The Way Of The Learner: Towards A Social Virtue Epistemology In Aḥmad Al-Ṣaghīr’S The Faqīh’S Lantern, Amani Khelifa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis offers an original translation and analysis of a West African didactic poem in Islamic ethics and law, by the Mālikī-Ashʿarī Mauritanian scholar Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr (d. 1272 AH/1856 CE) called The Faqīh’s Lantern (Miṣbāḥ al-Faqīh). In addition to the critical translation, I examine the poem thematically through the lens of social virtue epistemology. Chapter 1 sketches the background of the text and author, positioning the author historically as a product of a rich scholarly and pedagogical tradition while noting Mauritania’s contemporary place in the North American Muslim imagination. Chapter 2 is the translation of the text, making …

The Visual Culture Of Niagara Falls: From Kitsch To Keepsake, Sonya M. De Lazzer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation uses the visual history of Niagara Falls to argue that iconic touristic landscapes promising Sublime moments can benefit from embracing their often-eclectic mixture of images, experiences, artefacts, and small-scaled private collectors and collections. This study takes up two distinct areas of Niagara’s visual history; how the site is depicted and copied, and how the site is collected and memorialized. The natural site, charted through attractions, themed environments, souvenirs and amateur home collections, is an apparatus that generates everlasting spectacle. Niagara’s current attractions connect the earliest physical encounters of the site with contemporary experiences along tourist corridors, bridging the …

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 …

Kierkegaard And The Assumptions Of Philosophy, Ryan K. Shea

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the philosophy of early existentialist Søren Kierkegaard as implicitly critiquing the assumed essence of objectivity both directly understood as Absolute Truth in a classically Hegelian sense, but also in a more oblique meta-textual fashion in the presence of his varied pseudonymity. The first chapter takes on classical readings of Kierkegaard as a philosophy of stages—sometimes as aesthetic-ethical-religious, or otherwise despairing-anxious-faithful—and offers the alternative comprehension of a philosophy of moods which encompasses all these same “stages” as existing in and through each other in subjective existence. In the second chapter, I take the traditional reading of stages and …

Clever Minds And Nimble Hands? Making Embroidery In Late Qing And Republican China, Lu Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The handiwork of embroidery signified gentry lady’s intelligence and refinement in late imperil China. Yet in late Qing and Republican China, embroidery was practised by a wide range of makers – gentry ladies, male professionals, home-based female workers, young students, and peasant women. Why was the exquisite art of embroidery able to be crafted by makers of a diverse backgrounds? My study explores various contexts and investigates the secrets for the maintenance of the technical virtuosity of different embroidery genres and argues that the making of embroidery in late Qing and Republican China was a constantly changing knowledge redistribution process …

Algorithmic Hypnosis, Suarjan Prasai

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is about futures which are inscribed in the present. It is about the past determining the future and the future determining the present. It is also about artificial intelligence, algorithmic learning and the politics of mediums as they curate our sense of time. Today’s landscape is curated by algorithmic machines that are quickly taking over all aspects of social relations. Looking at media-theorist Wendy H.K. Chun’s analysis of homophily (i.e., love of sameness; commonality), I observe the regionality of standard critiques of capital and feel out new modes of resistance which do away with the discourse of the …

Singing Our Stories: Building Community And Developing Self-Empowerment In The Childless Voices Choir, Laura Curtis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Involuntary childlessness is a complex and identity-shaping experience moulded by parameters of a pronatalist society. For the women who participated in this study, isolation, silence, and shame were experienced as a consequence of their childlessness. Motivated by the idea that singing, particularly in group contexts, might aid in unburdening women whose identities have been stigmatized by their childless circumstances, this ethnographic study examined whether, and in what ways, women experienced community and developed self-empowerment through participation in the Childless Voices Choir.

Framed by theories of community (Delanty, 2018) and empowerment (Adams, 2008; McLaughlin, 2016), this research explored how meaningful engagement …

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 …

A Critical Phenomenological Inquiry Into Disabled Embodiment And Identity, Heather Twele

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses critical phenomenology to investigate disabled embodiment and identity. I argue that (in)accessible subjective accounts of disability experience reveal disability to be a unique form of ever-changing embodiment: disability is the lived experience of a critical phenomenology. I turn to eclectic art, film, and poetry case studies involving a medical, surgical gaze to explore how ableist, sexist, and racist systems structure daily experience, forcing disabled people who “misfit” to analyze and confront systems of oppression, exclusion, and stigmatization. Disability experience challenges and resists ableist binaries of ability/disability, well/unwell, subject/object, mind/body, and inside/outside. The interdependence of these fluid, intertwining …

Islamic Ethical Considerations On Medical Decision-Making In Adolescence, Nuray Catic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Medical decision-making in adolescence has not been studied in-depth from the Islamic bioethics perspective. The objective of this dissertation is to use the Islamic ethical position to explore the adolescent medical decision-making process in Canada so as to contribute to building frameworks for Islamic bioethics consumers such as patients, physicians and policymakers. A descriptive literature review is conducted to analyze data from related disciplines such as Islamic theology, developmental psychology, law and clinical ethics through principles of Islamic ethics such as objectives of Sharīʿa, legal maxims and operational maxims. The concepts of taklīf, ahliyya, bulūgh and rushd are focused on …

Applying 3d Structured Light Scanning To Roman Leather Insoles From Vindolanda: A Novel Approach To Podiatric Data Collection, Maria Lorene Glanfield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis research introduces a novel 3D structured light scanning and digital, post-processing enhancement methodology influenced by digital approaches used in anthropological archaeology, ichnology, and forensic podiatry to the analysis of Roman leather insoles from Vindolanda. The primary objective was to capture 2D and 3D footprint impression evidence on the surface of 81 insoles for enhanced visualization and analysis in order to refine the quality of podiatric data that can be extracted from Roman footwear. I conducted three case studies (pointed toe, sandal, and children’s insoles) based on a set of distinct, but related research questions concerning the refinement of …

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

Shoe Modifications And Foot Health: A Case Study From Roman Britain, Casey Elizabeth Kay Boettinger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, I undertake an examination of foot care practices in Antiquity. The majority of the discussion surrounding foot care comes from evidence of shoe modifications at Vindolanda, a Roman auxiliary fort located in northern Britain. I provide a general discussion about herbal and non-herbal remedies for foot conditions, as recorded by medical authors. This discussion precedes a case study of selected shoes from Vindolanda, where I write about five modification types that demonstrate the sort of knowledge that existed at Vindolanda. The findings from this thesis suggest that podiatric knowledge and foot care existed as early as the …

Sweeping The Forest Floor Of Frequencies, Maria A. Kouznetsova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

sweeping the forest floor of frequencies is a Master of Fine Art thesis project comprised of the dossier and the exhibition presented at the Artlab Gallery July 27 - August 11, 2023. My writing and multidisciplinary work foreground sonic, visual, and imperceptible signals as search modes for grounding and interconnectedness. The Comprehensive Artist Statement is the first chapter of the dossier and focuses on drawing, listening, and exploring forms of language as three dominant modes of my practice that reflect my fragmented life between three countries. In its form, the writing embraces fragmentation and iterative growth through refragmentation, drawing on …

Art Through A Digital Lens: A Study Of The Effects Of New Medias On The Museum, Its Works, And The Public., Shelley Kopp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the last two decades imagery viewed on the internet has grown immensely. Museums, though slow to embrace it, have begun to upload digital images of their traditional artwork to their websites and onto their social media channels. In large measure, the COVID pandemic accelerated this move to engage audiences they feared would dissipate as museum doors closed. Moving digital images online though means giving over control to the protocol and systems of the internet, to profit-seeking corporations, and the volatility of social media platforms. The museum’s long-established authority over artists, artworks, and exhibitions is usurped by power structures existing …

Grounds For A "Third Place": The "Starbucks Experience," Sirens, And Space, Michael A. Bodkin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My goal in this dissertation is to help demystify or “filter” the “Starbucks Experience” for a post-pandemic world, taking stock of how a multi-national company has long outgrown its humble beginnings as a wholesale coffee bean supplier to become a digitally-integrated and hypermodern café. I look at the role Starbucks plays within the larger cultural history of the coffee house and also consider how Starbucks has been idyllically described in corporate discourse as a comfortable and discursive “third place” for informal gathering, a term that also prescribes its own radical ethos as a globally recognized customer service platform. Attempting to …