Humanities

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Open Access
Messiah, Muselmann and the Return of Paul's Real: Evidence for a Trauma of Secularism
(2014-07-09) Principe, Concetta Valentina; Balfour, Ian G.
This project addresses the anomaly evident in the use of religious terms for secular projects. If secularism was a system that intended to free the state from religion and the subject from religious superstition, then why would religious terminology be used in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural secular projects? For example, why would noted Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin draw on the messianic figure in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”? Moreover, what could be meant by the identification of the most abject inmate in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp predominantly populated by European Jews, as the Muselmann? This project argues that the return of the religious terms, messiah and the Muselmann in twentieth-century secular texts is symptomatic of what psychoanalysts define as a trauma. Freud identifies trauma as evident only in its symptom of compulsive repetition, which motivates a working-through of what was missed. Lacan identifies trauma as the subject’s encounter with the real, where the real is inexplicable and missed, and what returns of the trauma is a remainder of the encounter: Lacan calls this remainder the objet a. The messiah and the Muselmann in secular texts are objets a and therefore, stand as a return of a trauma. Since these two religious terms seem to have no relation to each other apart from being of the religious within secularism, which is a system that has excluded religious presence in the operations of the state, then the objets a would suggest that the trauma is located within secularism itself. What is this trauma and where does it come from? Taking into account the limitations of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, which stresses that the original trauma is forever lost to us, this project traces a connection between contemporary secular messianism and the largest group of earliest-extant texts citing the messiah, St. Paul’s letters. On establishing the connection between Pauline messianism and the twentieth-century terms, messiah and Muselmann, I provide an analysis of four ‘case studies’ of the trauma of secularism expressed in twentieth-century philosophical texts and contemporary cultural works.
Open Access
Sexuated Topology and the Suspension of Meaning: A Non-Hermeneutical Phenomenological Approach to Textual Analysis
(2014-07-28) Urban, William John; Bailey, Steven
This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology. Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning.
Open Access
Outside and Inside: Representations of Interracialism and American Identity in White Jazz Autobiography
(2015-01-26) Marin, Reva; Sanders, Leslie
This dissertation explores concepts of race, national identity, and gender formation in fifteen autobiographies published by white male American jazz musicians— that is, jazz autobiographies written by male subjects who self-identified, and were identified by their collaborators and by the general public, as white—between 1939 and 2001. A central concern within these autobiographies is the search for authentication within a musical form that has been intrinsically linked to African American musical and cultural forms and practices. A key feature of this quest for authentication is the immersion experience, through which the white male musician seeks immersion in African American musical and cultural spheres as a requirement of his jazz education, and later of his status as a professional musician. In this respect, these accounts reinforce the notion of jazz as one of the few spheres within American society in which cultural authority has been historically granted to African Americans, and in which white musicians, as Burton W. Peretti suggests, “innovated and rebelled by willingly becoming musically subordinate to a socially and culturally subordinated group” (96–97). Through their descriptions of this process, these autobiographers reveal that the playing of jazz created and necessitated interracial and interethnic mingling to a degree rarely seen in the mainstream society out of which these stories emerge. Yet discussions of race in these texts seldom move beyond its specific impact on these musicians’ lives and careers; rarely do white jazz autobiographers attempt a more reflective analysis of race in the United States, nor do they seem willing to acknowledge the benefits that their whiteness conferred upon them in respect to career opportunities and economic security. For these reasons, white jazz autobiography provides a fertile source for considering both the possibilities and limitations of culture—and of individual cultural producers—within 20th-century US society to disrupt, challenge, or circumvent dominant legal and social practice.
Open Access
The Jewish Prohibition Against Wastefulness: The Evolution of an Environmental Ethic
(2015-01-26) Yoreh, Tanhum Siah; Lockshin, Martin I.
Bal tashḥit, the Jewish prohibition against wastefulness and destruction, is considered to be an environmental ethic by Jewish environmentalists. This dissertation investigates whether this prohibition has the historical basis to be considered an environmental principle, or whether its environmental interpretation is mainly a contemporary development. To this end, the study uses the methodology of tradition histories. This research critically examines the conceptualisation of bal tashḥit as it develops throughout history. The dissertation traces the evolution of bal tashḥit through the examination of relevant passages dealing with wastefulness and destruction in Hebrew Scripture, rabbinic literature, halakhic codes, responsa, the accompanying commentary traditions, as well as the works of scholars in the field of Religion and Environment. It highlights the important stages in the development of the prohibition, notes the most influential scholars, and uncovers the critical vocabulary that emerges. The most significant finding of this research is that in the earliest stages of development (c. 1st-2nd centuries C.E.), the prohibition against wastefulness was conceptually linked with the prohibition against self-harm. This connection was rejected by sages of the Talmud (3rd-6th centuries C.E.) who asserted that these prohibitions are qualitatively different from one another. Ultimately, the separation between the two prohibitions became the predominant view, and their connection disappeared almost entirely from Jewish literature. When combined, these prohibitions create an environmental ethic: wastefulness and destruction are harmful to oneself; and in environmental terms: to harm the environment is to harm oneself.
Open Access
After "Postmemory": Coping with Holocaust Remembrance in Postmodern Hebrew Literature
(2015-08-28) Seliger, Yael; Horowitz, Sara Reva
This interdisciplinary study suggests that the time has come to pursue a new modality of Holocaust remembrance. It assumes that when we speak of “remembering” we are referring to acts of remembrance, for, with the exception of those who lived through the Holocaust, those of us who were not “there” cannot remember the actual events of the Holocaust. The study further contends that acts of Holocaust remembrance ought to be perceived as forms of coping with remembrance of the Holocaust. It also suggests that critical frameworks and narrative strategies developed in postmodern Hebrew literature – specifically the writings of Etgar Keret – offer a literary exemplar of coping with Holocaust remembrance. The articulation of the raison d’être for a paradigmatic shift in conceptualizing Holocaust remembrance is defined in the context of the general field of Holocaust representation. More specifically, the modality of coping with Holocaust remembrance is juxtaposed with an existing and prevalent conceptualization known to scholars and writers as “postmemory” – a structural framework of Holocaust remembrance applied to the second generation. Of special significance is the interlacing of the modality of coping with Holocaust remembrance with postmodern thinking. Foremost in this alignment with postmodernism is the acknowledgement that the events of the Holocaust destabilized Enlightenment-modern metaphysical faith in human rationalism and linearity of epistemological, ontological, scientific, and humanistic progress. Prominent in this discussion is the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the ethics of the language of deconstruction. These theoretical insights are then applied to the writings of Etgar Keret. Apart from presenting Keret as a consummate storyteller, Keret’s art and its relation to the modality of coping with Holocaust remembrance is analyzed as integral to the cultural, social, and political ambiance of a postmodern Israeli milieu.
Open Access
The Symbols of Eternal Return and the Eternal Return of Symbols in Freidrich Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra
(2015-08-28) Zhavoronkov, Ivan Nikolayevich; Ingram, Susan
This work argues that Nietzsche employs the circle image to communicate his idea of eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The recurrences of circular and diurnal symbols (cycles) represent the eternal return on both contextual and narrative levels, thereby creating within the narrative the ring of rings, the ring of recurrence, i.e., affirmation of affirmation, as implicit in the circular image of the will willing itself. Importantly, it demonstrates that diurnal symbols represent the eternal recurrence by returning to themselves in the text, while Zarathustra’s identity changes throughout the diurnal cycle: morning symbolises his rebirth; noon, his maturity; evening, his decline; and midnight, his death – thereby manifesting the literary hero’s affirmative, creative response to meaningless existence in accordance with the doctrine of life affirmation. Nietzsche’s work is revealed to harbour a hidden symbolic diurnal structure comprised of twelve chronological diurnal cycles representing his most abysmal thought. The underlying structure revealed by this reading demonstrates the eternal recurrence to be the unifying idea of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Conflicts in existing interpretations of the eternal return reflect their commentators’ failure to solve the problem of its communication in Nietzsche’s work due to their underestimation of the symbolic form of the doctrine. Employing the methods of analogy and association, this project undertakes to solve this problem by examining the relation between the circular and diurnal symbols and the eternal recurrence. Careful analysis reveals the three-dimensional character of the doctrine as the return of the moment inaugurating the moment and sequence of time: the return of same meaninglessness, meaningful differences, and same meaningfulness – through the roundness (moment, or same meaningfulness) and continuity (sequence, or meaningful differences) of circular symbols and the moment (moment, or same meaningfulness) and temporality (sequence, or meaningful differences) of diurnal symbols, employed to counter the same meaninglessness of daily existence. Thus, while the circular and diurnal symbols incorporate the idea of eternal recurrence, thereby emphasising its life-affirmative aspect, the eternal return calls for the creative recurrence of circular and diurnal symbols, with the symbols and the eternal return merged into one creative, affirmative whole.
Open Access
Savages, Saviours and the Power of Story: The Figure of the Northern Dog in Canadian Culture
(2015-12-16) Riche, Maureen Elizabeth; McNab, David T.
This research was motivated by a recent pattern in animal welfare texts in Canada that portray northern dogs as “savage” trouble-makers, and indigenous people as backward barbarians incapable of caring for the animals that share their spaces. With this comes the troublesome idea that, yet again, the only positive force in indigenous Canada is the civilizing force of outsider intervention: northern dogs need to be rescued; non-indigenous people are their rightful saviours. It is a story that has been circulating in the dominant culture in Canada for centuries, and has urgent implications for both human and non-human animals in Canada’s North. This dissertation consists of three sections. In the first section, I explore the roots of the colonial figure of the “noble canine savage” through representations in explorers’ journals, ethnographic films and tourism marketing texts. In section two, I consider how the represented dog differs in texts created within the framework of indigenous knowledge, including origin stories, indigenous cinema and elder testimony regarding the sled dog cull in Canada’s North in the mid-20th century. In section three, I return to the current media texts, and explore how they reproduce the racist rhetoric of the past. The aim of my study was to validate the indigenous view of northern dogs in order to better incorporate local stories into animal welfare projects in northern Canada. Future interventions in this regard may include the use of cultural exchange activities between indigenous and non-indigenous partners in such projects (e.g. between local community groups and visiting veterinary teams); prioritization of narrative approaches to relationship-building; and the use of more culturally sensitive language in public relations and marketing texts.
Open Access
After Collective Memory: Postnational Europe and Socially Engaged Art
(2015-12-16) Synenko, Joshua Francis; Reisenleitner, Markus
This thesis focuses on works of public art that enjoy proven success in challenging the national bias of European heritage practice. By developing methods at the intersection between collective memory, critical historiography, and theory, I situate heritage debates in relation to forms of discrimination that emerged as symptoms of the financial crisis (2008-present). I then describe how public art interventions help to unsettle the grand narratives of cosmopolitan idealism that work to neutralize anti-racist strategies in the public sphere. The progression of my thesis eventually poses a challenge to the cosmopolitan reach of the Jewish diasporic tradition in particular. To that end, I explore the archival strategies of Holocaust memory practitioners, including their express aim of including diverse (i.e. non-Jewish) histories of violent exclusion into the historical record; the social and political conditions for the emergence of counter-monuments in West Germany during the 1970s, and the subsequent efforts that were made to turn this memorial aesthetic into a global standard for the memory culture industry; the haunting resurgence of cosmopolitan aspirations in Yael Bartana’s video installation, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2011); and a meditation on Bartana’s attempt at revisiting the racial dynamics of intergenerational violence in the aftermath of genocide.
Open Access
On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence
(2016-09-20) Balan, Neil; Berland, Jody
This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations.
Open Access
Henry Langley, a Man Who Built Churches: Religion and Architecture in 19th-Century Ontario
(2016-11-25) Iron, Candace; Thurlby, Malcolm
Henry Langley (1836-1907), was the most prolific church architect for all denominations in what would become Ontario in the nineteenth century. This dissertation considers the church architecture of Henry Langley and his practice through an examination of the church designs and a close analysis of those works against the architectural literature and theories that were in existence in the nineteenth century. Central to the success of Langleys firm was his background in the Gothic Revival and architectural theory. Through his training with the Scottish-born architect William Hay (1818-88), Langley became familiar with the work of A.W.N. Pugin and ecclesiology. This theoretical foundation was almost certainly complimented by contemporary theory and printed pattern books regarding architectural style and church planning from Britain and the United States. Evidence of this resides in the fabric of Langleys churches, which are analyzed formally throughout this dissertation. Moreover, Langleys firm was a leader in the development of Gothic Revival architecture in nineteenth-century Ontario, designing large-scale city churches across the province, which used traditional forms in new and innovative manners to contend with urbanization and industrialized society. While tracing Langleys career from apprentice and student to successful architect and leader in professionalization, this dissertation examines Langleys role within the Gothic Revival movement of the nineteenth century locally, nationally, and internationally, and demonstrates how the churches that resulted from his practice are effective social and cultural texts that reveal their religious, social, and architectural associations, while reflecting the religious spirit of nineteenth-century Ontario culture.
Open Access
The Standing Stones of Medieval Bosnia: Heresy, Dualism and Symbols in Pre-Ottoman Balkans
(2016-11-25) Dizdar, Gorcin; Buturovic, Amila
The aim of this dissertation is to interpret the enigmatic imagery of the steak, the roughly 60,000 monumental, monolithic standing stones found on the territories of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbouring regions. Around 30% of the stones are adorned with low reliefs depicting a variety of symbols such as crosses, crescents, rings and rosettes, as well as more complex figural compositions involving orants, circle dances and stag hunts. The rare and terse inscriptions found on the stones allow us to date their production between the 13th and 15th centuries and to link their creation to the medieval Bosnian state and its indigenous religious organization known as the Bosnian Church. My thesis is that the Bosnian Church adhered to what is known as a moderately dualistic theology. In order to justify this interpretation, I firstly analyze the terms heresy and dualism in their historical context(s). Secondly, I provide a re-reading of the primary documents linked to the Bosnian Church, arguing that it was related to other medieval dualist movements such as the Paulicians of eastern Anatolia, the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the Patarens/Cathars of Western Europe. Finally, I interpret the steak imagery in accordance with this view, demonstrating that it can be understood as a symbolic language with several layers of meaning. The dissertation encompasses historical, theological, iconographic and anthropological questions, shedding new light on the nature of medieval heresy/dualist Christianity, the history of medieval Bosnia, and the symbolism of a neglected aspect of European material culture.
Open Access
Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath
(2016-11-25) Lee, Jessica Jasmine; Steigerwald, Joan
Hampstead Heaths eight-hundred acres of field and forest were acquired for the public in 1871. It was the first metropolitan open space in London to be acquired as a result of decades of campaigning, and is therefore central to discussions of public spaces, landscapes, and urban open spaces in Britain. This dissertation takes the Heath as its subject, arguing that its history is palimpsestic, offering a many-layered, multitudinous array of narratives that have not yet been adequately reflected in historical studies of the site. As Britain faces a new wave of privatization and threats to public spacea situation likened by some to the rampant enclosures of the nineteenth centuryI argue that the Heath and its history remain central to conflicts over access to public spaces. Through the lenses of environmental history, environmental aesthetics, and multispecies ethnography, I consider the ways in which human and nonhuman agencies have shaped the landscape and its management from the eighteenth century to the present. I consider cases as diverse as how water flow has shaped the Heath, as debates rage over dam construction work taking place on the site, to the ways in which sheep, corpses, and bramble scrub have contributed to the development of a management plan for the site. Specifically, this dissertation brings environmental history, environmental aesthetics, and multispecies ethnography into conversation, underscoring the ways in which the tools of each can contribute to a richer retelling of a landscapes many historical narratives. I draw on the work of aesthetician Arnold Berleant and ethnographer Anna Tsing to tell a fuller story of the Heaths complex history. I explore the Heath through a variety of methods: archival research; analysis of landscape aesthetics; descriptive accounts of my own aesthetic experience; participant ethnography in the form of interviews and first-hand accounts; and on-the-ground study of the Heaths landscape and natural history. In doing so, I call attention to the ways in which the many histories of Hampstead Heath are bound up with social, political, aesthetic, and nonhuman worlds, arguing that attending to their entanglement allows for a more nuanced understanding of the complex forces that shape access to public open spaces in Britain today.
Open Access
The Enduring Goddess: Artemis and Mary, Mother of Jesus
(2016-11-25) Ionescu, Carla; Wilson, Barrie A.
Tradition states that the most popular Olympian deities are Apollo, Athena, Zeus and Dionysius. These divinities played key roles in the communal, political and ritual development of the Greco-Roman world. This work suggests that this deeply entrenched scholarly tradition is fissured with misunderstandings of Greek and Ephesian popular culture, and provides evidence that clearly suggests Artemis is the most prevalent and influential goddess of the Mediterranean, with roots embedded in the community and culture of this area that can be traced further back in time than even the arrival of the Greeks. In fact, Artemis reign is so fundamental to the cultural identity of her worshippers that even when facing the onslaught of early Christianity, she could not be deposed. Instead, she survived the conquering of this new religion under the guise of Mary, Mother of Jesus. Using methods of narrative analysis, as well as review of archeological findings, this work demonstrates that the customs devoted to the worship of Artemis were fundamental to the civic identity of her followers, particularly in the city of Ephesus in which Artemis reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but also as Mother, Healer and Saviour. Reverence for her was as so deeply entrenched in the community of this city, that after her temple was destroyed, and Christian churches were built on top of her sacred places, her citizens brought forward the only female character in the new ruling religion of Christianity, the Virgin Mary, and re-named her Theotokos, Mother of God, within its city walls. The fundamental position of this work is that a fusion took place between the ancient worship of Artemis in Ephesus, and the elevation of Mary to Theotokos, and that this fusion is not a result of the church-initiated action to convert the Ephesians, but rather the Ephesians forcing the early church to accommodate their traditions of Artemis by reshaping and reinterpreting the authority and responsibilities of the Virgin Mary.
Open Access
Standing Tall, the Stiletto Heel as Material Memory: A Contemporary
(2016-11-25) D'Angelo, Francesca; Ingram, Susan
Employing a material culture analysis, this dissertation functions as a general compendium on the stiletto heel, as it recounts the history of the stiletto from its introduction as a technological marvel in the post-WWII period to its present-day manifestations as a glamourous accessory. It surveys womens relations to stiletto heels and the reasons why women wear, and do not wear, them. Through a comparative cross-cultural analysis, the study examines a group of Canadian and Italian womens uses and perceptions of stiletto heels, and reveals cultural distinctions manifested in their uses and interpretations of stilettos. The womens personal relations to and cultural interpretations of the stiletto were measured through a phenomenological analysis of material collected through surveys, interviews and online forums. The study also considers the general sentiments stilettos engender in regard to the portrayal of women in society and the feminist discourses that the stiletto challenges and reinforces.
Open Access
Redefining Female Talent: Chinese Women Artists in the National and Global Art Worlds, 1900s - 1970s
(2016-11-25) Sung, Doris Ha Lin; Judge, Joan
This study examines the art practices of three generations of Chinese women who were active between the 1900s and the 1970s. Its conceptual focus is on the reassessment of female talent and virtue, a moralized dichotomy that had been used to frame womens social practices and cultural production for centuries in China. The study opens in the period when female poetic practice was harshly vilified by reformists of the late Qing era (1890s-1911). It questions why womens art production was not directly condemned and examines how womens increasingly public displays of artistic talent were legitimized through the invocation of long-standing familial norms, the official sanction of new education, and the formulation of various nationalist agendas. Most importantly, this study demonstrates how women artists joined female writers, educators, and political figures in redefining gender possibilities in the early Republican period. Women artists discussed in this study practiced both Chinese-style and Western-style art. It examines their participation in several different public contexts, including art education, exhibitions, art societies, and philanthropic organizations. Representatives of the first generation, Wu Xingfen (1853-1930) and Jin Taotao (1884-1939), advanced the artistic legacy of their predecessors, the women of the boudoir (guixiu), while at the same time expanding the paradigm of traditional womens art practices. In addition to their emerging visibility in the local art world, they also exhibited works in international expositions, engaged with foreign concessions, and traveled abroad. Members of the Chinese Womens Society of Calligraphy and Painting (Zhongguo nzi shuhuahui) who represent the second generation, embraced new institutional possibilities by studying, teaching, and forming a collective to reaffirm womens position in the traditional-style art milieu. Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) and her cohort of Western-style artists who formed the third generation, contributed to modern art reform in China in the early twentieth century. Pans distinct life trajectory and subsequent career in Paris illuminate the ways race and gender figured in transcultural artistic representations from the 1940s to the 1970s. These artists public presence in both the national and global art worlds redefined and repurposed female talent as both a patriotic virtue, and new expressions of gender subjectivities.
Open Access
University-Community Partnerships: An Action-Humanities Approach to Addressing Homelessness
(2017-07-26) Sandhu, Megan; Reisenleitner, Markus
This dissertation is a study of the function of the 21st century Canadian university and how it engages with communities to address social issues such as homelessness. The study looks at university projects that address homelessness, scholarly literature, websites, and primary data as collected through a survey sent out to project participants across Canadain order to answer the main research question, What role should the 21st century university play in addressing issues of homelessness? The guiding thesis of this dissertation is that in order to address these issues, and to design positive and progressive homelessness-related projects, universities could address homelessness using an interdisciplinary array of resources, taking on an action-humanities approach, which facilitates empowerment of people with lived experiences of homelessness and engages students and faculty in a pedagogy of social responsibility.
Open Access
Horace Kallen Confronts America: Jewish Identity in Discursive Formation
(2017-07-27) Kaufman, Matthew Joseph; Lightman, Bernard V.; Brown, Michael
This study of the life and thought of American Jewish philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974) explores the discursive fields from which American Jewish modernity developed. Through a close analysis of Kallen's writings and relationships, of his engagement with print culture, and of his understanding of science and scientific culture, I describe one trajectory in the American Jewish community's discourses concerning science, religion, and secularism from the early twentieth century to mid-century. I trace how Kallen gained social capital through the popular press, and then used that capital to negotiate a new understanding of the place of Jews in America, becoming an architect of American Jewish ethnicity. I suggest that his importance as a theorist of ethnicity is located, in part, in his anticipation of current theoretical models. I contextualize Kallen within literary modernism, and suggest a new way to interpret his discursive interventions regarding America and democracy. I seek to recover Kallen's centrality to the social circulation of ideas concerning secularism and religion in America, and argue that his significance may be assessed by analyzing his deep and extended engagement with a number of prominent, public discourses. I contend that both the positive and negative responses to Kallen helped to establish the discursive frameworks in which Jewish ethnicity and its relationship to religion were debated. I conclude that Kallen's commitment to Jewish identity, seen as rooted in an evolving and diversified ethno-cultural process, is inextricably intertwined with the formative discourses of twentieth-century Jewish American life.
Open Access
Housework and Social Subversion: Wages, Housework, and Feminist Activism in 1970s Italy and Canada
(2017-07-27) Rousseau, Christina Adelina; Michaud, Jacinthe
My dissertation, Housework and Social Subversion: Wages, Housework, and Feminist Activism in 1970s Italy and Canada, presents a history of the Wages for Housework movements in Italy and Canada (1972-1978), looking at the parallel development of autonomist feminist politics in these locations. Based on a series of interviews with feminists involved in the movement, my dissertation highlights the significant political value in the way the groups theoretical perspective influenced our current understanding of social reproduction. Social reproduction refers to the unpaid activities associated with family and societal maintenance procreation, socialization, and nurturance as well as paid work in social sectors such as health care, education, childcare, and social services. In the context of Wages for Housework, my dissertation re-examines the movements understandings of wages, housework, and the gendered relations of production in the home. In critiquing the capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist nuclear family, they re-conceptualized wages and housework in a way that allowed for the uncovering of the most hidden aspect of housework: emotional labour and care. Looking at the parallel development of Wages for Housework movements in Italy and Canada, I also highlight the emergence of similar tensions regarding the demand for wages and the role of the working class housewife in their analyses. As Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici wrote, Our power as women begins with the social struggle for the wage, not to be let into the wage relation (for we were never out of it) but to be le out of it, for every sector of the working class to be left out of it (1975, 11). In light of the continued pervasiveness of care as work, this dissertation contributes to building a better understanding of social reproduction in a global context.
Open Access
Ecology out of Bounds: Environmental Humanities Scholarship for Multi-Species and Transdisciplinary Contexts
(2017-07-27) Derry, Justin Eastwood; Ingram, Susan
This dissertation argues that the critical, political and ethical resources shaping popular and scholarly forms of Anglo-North American environmentalism lack the theoretical and imaginative tools to address the challenges of the Anthropocene (that is, the notion that the human species, enabled by a globally expansive petro-industrial apparatus, has become a dominant geological force). Unsettling notions of progress, agency, nature and the individual in novel ways, the Anthropocene changes the way humanists understand what it means to be human and what environmentalists have understood nature to be. As a result, I argue that the anthropogenic landscapes of the Anthropocene challenge writers, theorists, storytellers, artists, scientists and activists to open different kinds of intellectual and imaginative space. Therefore, drawing on feminist science and technology studies, multi-species anthropology and posthumanism, this dissertation contributes to the emerging field of the Environmental Humanities by contextualizing forms of environmental mediation responsive to Anthropocene environments. Making a mess of strict disciplinary and species divisions, my work addresses the way that different kinds of knowledge practice show up in and make a difference in the way bodies and multi-species assemblages materialize and function. Moreover, I distinguish my contribution to environmental thought by avoiding knowledge practices predicated on into the wild narratives and return to nature tropes. Problematically, these kinds of narratives are at risk of advocating masculine imaginaries of control and conquest, and moral superiority complexes about self-sufficiency that delimit boundaries between the natural and the unnatural, the pure from artificial, and thus close off knowledge making work from play, experimentation, wonder and curiosity. More than a question of accurately representing what the Anthropocene is or is not, my research amounts to a pragmatic challenge about how to craft theoretical and textual practices that foster anthropo(de)centric, multi-species and transdisciplinary media, publics and futures.
Open Access
Sympathy for the Orcs: Evil in Urban Fantasy
(2018-08-27) Ashton, Cassandra; Weiss, Allan
This dissertation argues that urban fantasyfantasy set in citieshas a more nuanced conception of evil than high fantasy, which favours pastoral settings, and which was heavily influenced by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien wrote his Lord of the Rings trilogy in part as a critique of the effect of industrialism on the English countryside and on human lives in general. His work has been so influential that the effect has been an anti-urban tradition in high fantasy, and his portrayal of absolute good versus absolute evil has carried forward into many other fantasy works. The factors that create compelling and satisfying stories do not necessarily reflect or shed light on human behaviour, and it is useful to be able to distinguish what Robert Ellwood calls moral evil and mythical evil, and to understand when each is being deployed, to what end. The urban fantasy genre arose in the early 1980s, and derives from its setting a greater level of comfort with multiplicity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. In short, the urban setting itself affects how evil is portrayed. This argument is supported with close reading and content analysis of twenty-four novels by four authors of urban fantasy: Charles de Lint, Mercedes Lackey, Kelley Armstrong, and China Miville. My analysis asks about the nature and source of evil in each text, the values that are associated with evil and set in opposition to it, the texts handling of moral and mythical evil, and the role of the urban landscape.