Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis studies a subset of players of video games called "power-gamers" who play games in a way that mirrors labour as opposed to leisure. Through ethnographic fieldwork and exploration this thesis examines what constitutes "power-gaming" and seeks to unpack the differences between skill, fun, and labour. Chapter One analyzes how ethnographic fieldwork is… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>New conditions of materiality are emerging from fundamental changes in our ontological order. Digital subjectivity represents an emergent mode of subjectivity that is the effect of a more profound ontological drift that has taken place, and this bears significant repercussions for the practice and understanding of the political. This thesis pivots around mathematician Grigori '… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>In my Master's thesis, I consider how the space of the animal laboratory shapes human-animal relationships, and how, in turn, these relations impact the laboratory, and more specifically, the spatially-bound practices that unfold in this space. I use the frameworks of biopolitics and animal geography, both of which help in illuminating the space of the lab as a site of power, within… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>On the first page of the much read, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes reveals his motive: "I was overcome by an "ontological" desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was "in itself," by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images." The impetus of this thesis might be called a Barthesian desire to learn what… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>Institutional military strategists are developing theories of asymmetric and unconventional warfare that complicate the notion of strategic agency, the idea that military action emanates from a coherent agential source or subjectivity. This thesis attempts to push the conceptual trajectories of the theories of Hybrid War, Unrestricted War and Onto-power towards an even more radical… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis examines a specific figure that appears throughout contemporary Japanese detective fiction (across different media), which I have termed the Shaman detective. A liminal figure that combines Japanese folk cosmologies with contemporary detective work, the Shaman detective is at once similar to, yet separate from, western postmodernist detective fiction. Invested in narratives… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>Gilles Deleuze claims that understanding the eternal recurrence as a recurrence of the same is a misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche, yet, this assertion is not supported by Nietzsche's texts. In all instances where Nietzsche describes the eternal recurrence, he emphasizes that it is one of the same events. One's willingness to love one's fate and to will the eternal… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis is a critical response to Evgeny Morozov's article proclaiming the death of the cyberflâneur. Suspicious of the superficiality of his argument, I developed a practico-theoretical project to prove that the cyberflâneur is not dead but alive – or, if it were dead, to rescue it from its grave and bring it back to life. In the course of my response to Morozov, I develop a… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis is an investigation of the theme of freedom in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Chapter One investigates Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming as it is articulated in their book A Thousand Plateaus, and seeks to resolve a problem related to their shifting descriptions of the role of agency in the process of becoming, at times described as voluntary,… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Name(s): Creator (cre): Kane, Owen Hugh, Thesis advisor (ths): Symons, Thomas H.B., Thesis advisor (ths): Eddy, Charmaine, Degree committee member (dgc): Teskey, Gordon, Degree committee member (dgc): Wernick, Andrew, Degree granting institution (dgg): Trent University Abstract: <p>The future-poetry of Dennis Lee published in Testament (2012) is the culmination of four cycles of creativity in his lifetime, each seeking a Real beyond the nihilism of technological modernity. Ultimately, Lee wagers the role of the poet and the future of poetic language on Earth on a non-modern that risks entangling the poet who enters void and embodies its meaninglessness.</p>… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This project examines the development and deployment of mediation frameworks in Canada with the goal of advocating for the restoration of dispute resolution as the site of democratic politics. In doing so we enlist the work of Petyr Kropotkin's theory of Mutual Aid and a brief history of Alternative Dispute Resolution in Canada to identify procedural differences in mediation… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>Following Baudrillard's conceptual and stylistic shift of the mid-70s, this thesis argues that said shift is accounted for by understanding the ontological quandary Baudrillard found himself in after developing a theoretical agonism impossible to divorce from the practice of writing. By tracing the conceptual metamorphoses of key terms including semiotic ambivalence, symbolic… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis critically analyses the connection between ideology and nature, and in particular, aims to reflect on the dominant discourses on the topic of ecological crisis. The ecological thought framework that I adhere to rests on a combination of Frankfurt School and Žižekian theories. This combination is not without serious tensions and deviations; however, central to this project are… more
