Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Smile and a Neutral Attitude
This thesis examines the ways in which body image is discussed in online settings. There are three different communities discussed: body positivity, proED (pro-eating disorder), and body neutrality. Both body positivity and proED content are fairly popular online, and both have found significant support and followers on various social medias. In this thesis, I argue that both of these types of content cause significant harm to those who engage with them, primarily because both communities (though different in their approaches to body image) work to uphold the thin ideal. I then bring up the third type of content: body neutrality. Body neutrality has not been given the same academic attention as body positivity and proED content, likely due to its relative infancy. In this thesis, I propose body neutrality as a much healthier way to frame body image online because of its completely neutral stance on fat, thinness, and general body image. Though any work relating to social media is quickly out of date, I hope that this thesis provides an overview of body neutrality and how, in its current form, it provides a more balanced approach to online body image discussions. Author Keywords: body image, body neutrality, body positivity, eating disorders, social media
Socioloegal Mediation of Rave Sound System Technologies
The central scholarly contribution of this dissertation develops through bringing the theories of Michel Foucault to bear in a sociolegal study of rave culture's criminalization by the United Kingdom's 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. My methodology develops rave as a cultural keyword. This keyword navigates through a quasi-materialist definition of rave as a cultural codification of sound system technologies. I theorize the way in which sociocultural discourse indexes aestheticized representations and the cultural mythologies that rave sound system's technical mediation generate. These ideas trace the facticity of the legal documentation of rave’s criminalization. I inform this sociolegal history by situating Foucault's work on the genealogy of liberalism as a practical toolkit for associating the legal discourse on rave culture with the genealogy of festival. This opens up a dialogue with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin's theorizing of the festival’s ambivalent political climate. Such ideas are useful in documenting rave as an enduring mimicry of the tension between State and civil society. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting, “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, captures this tension beautifully. The aptness of reading rave's criminalization in relation to Bruegel’s portrayal of landscape is accomplished by returning to Foucault, who defines liberalism's political technologies in relation to Judaeo-Christian precedents. I explore how these political technologies, pastoral power in particular, are helpful in tracing rave's genealogical relation to the festival's sociotechnical cartography. Author Keywords: Bakhtin, Carnival, Christianity, Festival, Liberalism, Materialism
Finding Space, Making Place
Independent music venues are important hubs of social activity and cultural production around which local punk scenes are both physically and conceptually organized. Through interactions with participants over extended periods of time, these spaces become meaningful places that are imbued with the energy, history and memories of local music scenes. When a venue is shut down, local punk scenes experience a temporary disruption as participants struggle to begin the process of re-establishing a new autonomous social space free from outsider interference. Therefore, moving from the local, to the national, to the international, from the small and personal to the vast and global, as well as from the physical to the virtual, this dissertation illustrates the actual, everyday practices of local scenes across Canada, addressing the larger issue of the loss of alternative music venues occurring on a global scale and the resulting impact on punk scene participants. Through the use of ethnographic research methods such as participant observation, photographic documentation, interviews and surveys, this dissertation engages with contemporary punk scene participants in order to give voice to those often ignored in grand narratives of punk history. As such, traditional concepts of punk as a utopic countercultural space are challenged to reveal the complexity and diversity that exists within contemporary local punk scenes, where participants often experience equal amounts of cooperation, competition, tension and struggle. By choosing to engage with contemporary experiences and interpretations of punk culture, this research addresses the changing landscape of local scenes, as punk participants attempt to carve out spaces of representation for themselves in an exceedingly mediated world. Author Keywords: Canada, music venues, punk, scene, social space, subculture
Transcendental Turn
This dissertation traces the concept of transcendentalism from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Michel Foucault's historical a priori and Pierre Bourdieu's field and habitus, with implicit reference to Deleuze's `transcendental empiricism,' and the influence this trajectory has had on contemporary theory and culture. This general conceptual framework is used as the basis for a critical analysis of a series of examples taken from popular culture to highlight their transcendental conditions of possibility and the influence this conceptual paradigm has had on today's theory. The examples include the NFL `concussion crisis,' South Park's problematization of the discourse surrounding it, as well as the literature of Charles Bukowski, as an exemplification of an immanent writer-written situation. It is further suggested that, not only is transcendentalism an epistemological framework for thought, but it also doubles as an ontological principle for the emergence of a constitutively incomplete and unfinished reality. Author Keywords: Bukowski, Concussion, Foucault, Kant, South Park, transcendental

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2004 - 2024
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Format: 2024/03/29