Graduate Theses & Dissertations

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"I like big books"
The purpose of this study was to determine whether students at the Royal Military College (RMC) preferred electronic or print texts, their reasoning for this preference, and whether preference was related to student characteristics. Students (N=139) in a core course were provided with both formats. Due to a limited number of e-text users, statistical analyses of most variables were not possible. Instead, qualitative responses were analyzed to gain insight into student preferences. Students reported on the benefits and concerns of using each format. Their discussion of the benefits to the e-text and concerns about the print text were related to the level of convenience of each format. When considering the benefits of print and drawbacks of e-texts, students explained how these features could impact their reading experience. This study provides qualitative support for the continued use of print texts. Although they frequently use various forms of technology in the classroom, students are reluctant to study using electronic devices and feel their reading experience is best with print. Author Keywords: Educational technology, Qualitative, Textbooks, Text preferences
"Learning to Be Mad, In a Dream"
The Beat Generation shaped, and was shaped by, the post-WWII containment culture that arose in 1950s America. This so-called cultural containment reflected the social, political, and economic factors that were unique to the post-WWII period and are often considered concurrent to post-war McCarthyism, which promoted a national ideology of exclusionism that was foremost opposed to the threat of Communism. I propose in my thesis that containment was a major influence in the rhetoric of resistance that is found within the most prominent works of the Generation. My thesis also looks at the how Beat literature shifted from the counterculture to the mainstream and the impact that celebrity had on the Generation. When the Beats achieved literary fame their counterculture represented the forefront of the New Left and was synonymous with succeeding protest cultures of the 1960s. Author Keywords: Beat Generation, Cold War, Containment Culture, McCarthyism, Postmodernism, Second Wave Feminism
"Non-compliance" in the system
This thesis examines how co-creators Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s 2014 graphic work, Bitch Planet, is in all conceivable ways a seminal and prescient example of — to use their term — “non-compliance” in the comics form and industry. From its inception as a feminist dystopia, written by a white woman and illustrated by a Black man, in an industry that is over-represented by white men, Bitch Planet is a prime example of activist comics that is situated perfectly within the “Blue Age” of comics, to use the term coined by comic scholar Adrienne Resha. This is evident in the main narrative of Bitch Planet in which, in an industry still over-represented by white characters, the main cast of characters are four Black women and one Japanese-American woman, each of whom we see come up against a theologically patriarchal white supremacist system that imprisons them for crimes that are gendered, racialized, classist and ableist. DeConnick and De Landro’s collaboration with other artists extends from Laurenn McCubbin’s satirical paratextual in-universe advertisements on the back page of each comic which complement Bitch Planet’s main narrative to an invitation to world- building to the greater comic community, allowing creators with marginalized identities to craft short comic stories that satirically and deeply explore the socio-political issues developed in the main narrative of Bitch Planet. The final act of “non-compliance” comes out of the expansion of authorship of Bitch Planet to the readership via the letters pages, and beyond: highlighting readers’ Twitter messages, connecting with them through Tumblr, and posting pictures of fan “non-compliant” tattoos within the pages of Bitch Planet. Author Keywords: Bitch Planet, comics, critical race studies, dystopia , gender studies, intersectional feminism
"TOUGH BUT NECESSARY"? AN ANALYSIS OF NEOLIBERAL AND ANTI-FEMINIST DISCOURSES USED IN THE ELIMINATION OF THE NEW BRUNSWICK ADVISORY COUNCIL ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN
This study demonstrates that the New Brunswick government rationalized the 2011 elimination of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women (NBACSW) by discursively framing it as a duplication of services and as a non-essential service. The study relies on interviews with women who had been involved with the NBACSW, as well as literature about the use of neoliberal and anti-feminist discourses at the national level. I argue that the two rationalizations offered by the New Brunswick government rely on similar neoliberal and anti-feminist discourses to those used at the national level to eliminate women's institutional machinery and thus diminish women's capacities for advocacy and political representation. I argue that this discursive move positioned the province's largest women's advocacy group as an impediment to the common good of the province and as a threat to "Ordinary New Brunswickers," signalling a negative step for women in the province. Author Keywords: Anti-feminist backlash, Canadian Feminism, Canadian Women's Movements, Discourse Analysis, Neoliberalism, New Brunswick
'Land Displacement and Coping Strategies'
This thesis explores the social history of the Marange people of eastern Zimbabwe from the 1960s to 2015. It uses historical episodes like the recurring droughts, the 1970s war of independence, the ‘crisis in Zimbabwe,’ that has been traced from the late - 1990s, and the diamond mining story to demonstrate how the inhabitants interacted with their environment. It argues that the relocation project that began in 2010 had a severely disruptive impact on the families relocated to the relocation area - ARDA Transau - making the case that the Marange relocation project was a ‘development disaster.’ While the provision of accommodation had a notable positive impact on the majority of the displaced households, family needs were not always met. For instance, large families such as those of the dominant polygamous followers of the African Apostolic Church of Johanne Marange were not provided with adequate housing. Also, the livelihoods of the displaced households were shattered by the relocation exercise. In their efforts to creatively adapt to these new constraints, the displacees had diverse coping strategies like selling firewood, illegally extending space for crop cultivation, artisanal mining, vending and begging for food to eke out a living. Author Keywords: Coping Strategies, Crisis in Zimbabwe, Development, Displacement, Land, Livelihoods
'This is where the poetry comes out'
Since 1984, poetry slams have emerged as a politicized expressive movement of performing the personal and political through poetry competitions. Slams are also discursively spatialized, often represented as “spaces” that are “safe,” “inclusive,” etc. In this thesis, I investigate how, why, and to what effect the Peterborough Poetry Slam produces, consolidates, and challenges such “resistant spaces.” Drawing on interviews and participant observation, I consider how the slam’s reiterative practices facilitate its space-making by encouraging performances that resist, reimagine, and sometimes inadvertently reify dominant societal norms. I argue that this space-making is imperfect yet productive: though not resistant space in any straightforward or static way, the slam continuously produces possibilities to challenge norms and confront power. This thesis contributes to scholarship on performative space and creative resistance movements. In an era when political resistance to power structures is often silenced, this research offers insights of potential significance to other resistant space-makings. Author Keywords: Nogojiwanong Peterborough, performative space, poetry slam, resistance, space-making, spoken word
(un)Natural Provocation
My thesis examines anthropomorphism and many avenues in which humans represent nonhumans to evaluate their own lives. Using Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno webseries, a collection of two-minute films starring Rossellini as a multitude of nonhumans with costumes transforming her into nonhuman, I posit that a new form of anthropomorphism -- one that values the nonhuman in all his or her nonhumanity -- is emerging in contemporary media. Rossellini describes the mating, seduction, and maternal instincts of these nonhumans, regularly drawing parallels between nonhuman and human behavior and uncovering crucial intersections in femininity, masculinity, queer theory, and abjection. In more recent films, I see Rossellini performing certain nonhumans to critique particular characteristics of Western human society and incredulously addressing the human viewer as a member of a species that might not be as high in the caste system of living beings as he or she is led to believe. In turning this sense of grotesque Otherness onto the human, I identify Rossellini as engaging in counterabjection, or the reversal of extreme degradation often projected upon nonhuman bodies by humans. Author Keywords: abjection, animal studies, nonhuman, queer studies
Affective Power of Intimacy
This case study’s fan fiction and its subsequent non-RPF romance novel version reveal a complex blend of the fan fiction, romance novel, intimatopia, pornography, slash fan fiction, Real Person Fan Fiction, and Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction genres and subgenres. Intimatopia’s ideological framework provides a specific method for the romance novel’s reordering of self and society, as well as a description of the resulting ordered society and self. As analysis of the reader comments left on the Archive of Our Own fan fiction reveals, intimacy is also critical to the fan fiction’s community, because the reader is driven to comment by the text’s affective power. The relationship between the reader and the text is primary for the reader, whereas the author’s primary aim is to seek an intimate relationship with their readers. There is a conceptual link between the literary and social contexts through their privileging of intimacy as a mode of interaction for the texts’s characters, readers, and authors. Author Keywords: Archive of Our Own, community, fan fiction, intimatopia, Men's Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction, romance novel
After the Fall
Utilizing pre-existing scholarship on post-conflict reconstruction in twentieth-century Europe, as well as a variety of French primary sources, this thesis explores the concept of national-moral reconstruction as utilized by French political leaders in the wake of their country's defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. In particular, this study analyzes the competing discourses employed by the Vichy regime and the various organizations of the French Resistance, as each group sought to explain to a broader public both the causes of the French defeat, as well as the repercussions of the German occupation of the country from June 1940 to August 1944. While previous scholarship has emphasized the physical and/or economic dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction--especially when considered in the context of the Second World War--this thesis focuses on issues of cultural identity and national history/memory in order to look at how French political leaders hoped to reconstruct the moral and cultural, as opposed to the strictly physical, fabric of their country in the wake of the comprehensive social, political, and military disaster brought about by the German occupation. Author Keywords: collective memory, German occupation, national-moral reconstruction, Philippe Pétain, post-conflict reconstruction, Vichy France
Agony of Writing Or Ambivalent Reversal In Baudrillard's Stylistic Metamorphoses
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 exchange and theoretical writing itself as a total agonistic process, this thesis demonstrates that theory is not reducible to epistemic production but is rather the contentious site of challenge and aesthetic (dis)appearance. Each chapter examines a conceptual tension revealing insoluble, conflicting social forms. These forms reveal the reversibility Baudrillard finds at work in all social phenomena. These culminate in a chapter that tackles Baudrillard's writing itself as a social form that endeavours to embody the agonistic theoretical concept as a process rather than remaining a representation, or commentary on, ambivalent social conflict. Author Keywords: agonist, ambivalence, Baudrillard, reversibility, style, writing
All I've Found is Pain and Terror
This thesis is concerned with how specific aesthetic elements function in various contemporary texts to distort, obscure, or illuminate the immoral actions and behaviours being represented. This thesis applies the moral status philosophy of Mary Anne Warren, along with the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Zygmunt Bauman. Close reading and critical analysis are supported by Michele Aaron’s theory of spectatorship. The sublime is explored in Dexter (2006) and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the uncanny in Battlestar Galactica (2003) and Westworld (2016), and the abject in The Walking Dead (2003) and World War Z (2006). The intentions of this project are to conduct a formal examination of the relationship between audience and text as it is filtered through aesthetic representation and moral frameworks. This thesis argues that aesthetic effects must be understood in connection to morality for active consumers to engage with these texts as sites for ethical consideration. Author Keywords: aesthetic theory, moral status philosophy, Popular fiction, spectatorship, The Walking Dead, Westworld
Alone in Power
The thesis uses three case studies of President Nixon’s foreign policy in South-east Asia to analyze presidential domestic-making. The theoretical concept of personality politics is used to analyze the Nixon administration and foreign policy. Nixon’s secretive nature combined with his mistrust of the press and bureaucracy to create an office structure that restricted the involvement and notification of others of his foreign policy. This thesis also takes into account the domestic climate that Nixon was operating within, including significant antiwar opposition, an adversarial media, and an ideologically opposed bureaucracy. Nixon’s foreign policy was ultimately the result of a perfect storm of factors. The president’s natural penchant for secrecy, along with his mistrust of the press and bureaucracy, combined with the American political environment that was in many instances ideologically set against him, also helped shape his foreign policy. Author Keywords: American Presidency, China, National Security Council, Richard Nixon, US Foreign Policy, 1969-1973, Vietnam War

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Graduate student theses produced at Trent University. You may also browse theses and dissertations by year, program, or author.

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