Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University
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Browsing Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University by Author "Berland, Jody"
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Item Open Access Mediated Meat: Buying and Selling Beef in Canadian Supermarkets(2024-07-18) Speakman,Kelsey Leigh; Berland, JodyRevealing supermarkets as significant mediators of food ethics, this dissertation delves into the contemporary “beef” with beef. Critics wonder if ethical beef consumption is possible, since dominant beef systems have been associated with environmental deterioration, health crises, and unsafe work. As supermarkets are primary places where people encounter beef, they are valuable sites for research on these deliberations. The ubiquitous role that supermarkets play in beef distribution is indicative of the power they hold at key junctures of the material and affective networks that facilitate foods’ movements. To assess the extent to which supermarkets promote ethical beef consumption through these “infrastructures of feeling”, the dissertation presents a case study of beef shopping in supermarkets owned by Canada’s largest food retail company, Loblaw Companies Limited. The study compiles evidence from promotional materials, in-store observations, expert interviews with management, and focus groups with shoppers. Using critical discourse analysis, it investigates the relationships between beef shopping participants that are expressed in the data. The project builds on the literature of “cryopolitics” (the governance of frozen time-spaces between life and death) to characterize Loblaw’s supermarkets as “cryopolitical mediators” that shape conditions for flourishing in Canada’s cattle-beef infrastructure. Chapters address central themes that emerge from the data—trust, choice, ghosts—to depict multiple interpretations of the (un)ethical beef futures that Loblaw offers: from support for Loblaw as a credible risk manager; to critiques of Loblaw’s activities that have been reinvented as corporate social responsibility initiatives; and rejections of Loblaw’s plans for beef provisioning, as inspired by haunting signs of organic mutability. The study finds that Loblaw approaches ethical beef consumption through a logic of freshness, whereby profitable elements of the current cattle-beef infrastructure are preserved based on perpetually deferred promises of nourishment. The dissertation reimagines the apparent gap between eaters and food sources that has been blamed for perpetuating the harms of the beef industry. Whereas an emphasis on separation invokes corrective efforts to fill in missing information, the framework of mediation shifts attention to the work of adjusting perceptions in the interest of finding responses to the relational entanglements of eating and being meat.Item Open Access Modernist Urbanism in the Age of Automobility: Producing Space in the Suburbs of Toronto and Prague(2015-12-16) Logan, Steven Elliot; Berland, JodyTheorizing the effects of the expanding system of automobility has been an important area of inquiry in urban studies. What remains largely absent, though, are concrete investigations into the relationships between automobility and the transformations and production of urban space. Automobility is defined by its contradictions. This dissertation explores how urban planners, architects and theorists have historically responded to and attempted to resolve the contradictions of automobility. I locate these responses within the broader theoretical framework of the production of space, considering how the mode of conceiving space from the 1920s on was directly related to the car and the expanding system of automobility. Automobility as an assemblage of objects, ideologies, and institutions was central to the way architects and planners conceived of urban space: as a work of art. I argue that this conception of space circulated globally, which I show through the work of the Czechoslovak architectural avant-garde theorist Karel Teige in the 1920s and the urban theorist Humphrey Carver in post-war Canada. In this dissertation I explore automobility and the production of space by way of two post-war suburbs: Jižní město (South City) in Prague and Willowdale in Toronto. Both places were considered as solutions to problems associated with automobility and both were key nodes in the circulation of ideas on modernist urbanism. I argue that the building of South City and the rebuilding of Willowdale are the culmination of the circulation of a modernist urbanism across space and over time that attempted to respond to the forces of urbanization and automobility through planning and designing the suburb. Overcoming the contradictions of automobility will involve more than just new technologies of mobility—urban planners, architects and theorists will have to consider the production of a wholly different space for urban life. To move beyond automobility means accounting for the ways the system of automobility unevenly affects city and suburban dwellers. In an attempt to offer a critique of the city-suburb dichotomy, this dissertation argues that to go “beyond automobility” means collapsing the separations that mark both modernism and automobility.Item Open Access The Life Cycle of the Computer: A Study in the Materialities of Risk(2015-01-26) Lebel, Sabine; Berland, JodyThe environmental effects of personal computers, from dangerous chemicals used in chip production to e-waste, have largely been ignored in pop culture, mainstream media, and much academic research. In order to take up these questions, this dissertation pursues a cultural study of the personal computer. The life cycle analysis (LCA) is a scientific method that calculates all the resources used in the life of a given object, from resource extraction, production, use, user, to disposal. As partial method for my study it brings an environmental accounting, as used in the sciences, and a structure to my cultural study, which approaches the computer as a cultural artifact. In order to more fully consider cultural aspects from daily personal negotiations to larger political questions, I extend the LCA with assemblage theory to consider the social and representational spaces associated with computers and the environment. What my primary sources have in common is that they represent moments of visibility of these problems. My research sources include documents from news media, policy papers, art practice, management discourse, corporate texts, and activist reports. The relative absence of these topics in academia, the news, and popular culture functions as the structuring absences of this project. A large part of my work has been to follow these fleeting moments in academic and mainstream sources. Because of the emphasis on the visual in our culture, my central problematic involves theorizing the visible, especially in relation to the visual, in risk culture in order to theorize how and why environmental risks remain outside to so many understandings of computers and the information age. I argue that to fully understand the environmental effects of technological culture we need to examine six interlocking factors: notions of materiality and immateriality; the geopolitics of toxicity and risk; the shift from industrial to risk society; cybernetics and the environment; the relationship between visibility and visuality; and risk culture.