Cultural Studies

In 1995, Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation held its inaugural symposium titled "Art in the Landscape". During the roundtable discussion, walking artist Hamish Fulton asserted that there are fundamental differences between his art and American Land Art. Drawing on Fulton's assertion, this dissertation argues for the redefinition of British environmental art, conventionally called Land Art after the American tradition. Through the exploration of the work of several contemporary and living British artists, the British School of Aesthetic Chorography is articulated. The practice of aesthetic chorography involves an embodied experience of place, such as walking or gardening, which results in a creative response. This creative response is the place-work of aesthetic chorography and can take a plethora of forms including the attachment of language to place, the creation of an ephemeral marker, an image or a representation or the creation of a printed object which recalls the place in some way. Derived from the unfolding of this place-work, the role of language in art is a theme which is carried through the dissertation. The role of language in childhood, memory and constituting knowledge claims is also explored particularly as this relates to place and to loss and the conservational potential of language with respect to place is theorized in a place theory of language and a recollective theory of place. The conservational element of this work is further developed through the articulation of aesthetic chorography as a parochial tending practice which devotes attention to place as an experienced phenomenon. The persistence of parochial places and vernacular tending practices, however, require conservation. The heritage work of the Common Ground Trust in the UK which seeks to promote the "local distinctiveness" of places is explored and the keeping place is raised as a way of thinking about the engaged and living preservation of vernacular places, particularly in the face of environmental crisis.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Aesthetic Chorography, Art, Common Ground Trust, Concrete Poetry, Conservation, Critical Topography, Environmental Aesthetics, Environmental Ethics, Epistemology, Heritage, Keeping Place, Land Art, Landscape, Language, Lieu de Mémoire, Local, Memory, Monument, Parochial, Place, Place-work, Tending, Vernacular, Walking, Jonathan Bordo, Lionel L. Ferguson, Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Robert Macfarlane, Brian Nichols, Ferdinand de Saussure, Richard Skelton, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, W.J.T. Mitchell

Author Keywords: Aesthetic Chorography, Critical Topography, Heritage, Keeping Place, Landscape, Place

An interesting question arises upon viewing the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz (MGM). The main character Dorothy Gale faces a long arduous journey on foot. Why did she not have a car? Women had formed strong associations with the automobile in its early years, yet they appeared to have weaker associations with the automobile a few decades later. A look back to three other "Dorothies" from the World War I era demonstrates the evolution of women's associations with the early automobile, and how war impacted them. In the pre-World War I years, women drivers appeared in film, while Dorothy Levitt wrote columns for other women on how to drive and repair a car and many other women invented safety technologies for automobiles. During World War I, the pinnacle of recognition for women's driving emerged with the woman ambulance drivers on the front lines. Dorothie Feilding was one of the first women to arrive in Belgium to drive ambulances, often while under fire. Feilding and many women like her were given war medals for their service, and their bravery was touted in newspapers. However, once the war ended, their accomplishments would be erased and ignored. In the post-World War I years, Dorothée Pullinger's experience as CEO of the Galloway factory illustrate how ideas of masculinity and femininity. promoted by governments after the war, impacted women. The Galloway factory in Tongland Scotland, was staffed by women engineers and workers. After World War I ended, these women were pushed out of their jobs. War-induced disability and its economic costs to governments were at the heart of gender inequities and served to displace women from automobile technology. Policies such as Britain's "Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act" set the stage for a script that constructed women's jobs as expendable and marketed ideas of the disabled soldier needing to "re-gain his manliness" by re-entering the labour force at women's expense. As a result, the state imbued a new relational, gendered analytic onto automobile use and production that remains with western society today. Keywords: woman's labour, woman driver, automobile, factory labour, gendered technology, World War I, ambulance, silent film, Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, Galloway, Tongland, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, Munro Flying Ambulance Corps, Dorothy Levitt, Dorothie Feiling, Dorothée Pullinger.

Author Keywords: ambulance, automobile, Galloway, gendering, women, world war I

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

The goal of this dissertation is to formulate a critique of embodiment through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and in the context of digital media and intelligent technologies. Along with psychoanalysis, our research methodology and philosophy are informed by Badiou's philosophy of the event, Stiegler's philosophy of technics and infrastructuralism in media studies. Our study aims to uncover and articulate the implicit conditioning by the primordial trauma constitutive of the subject's encounters with the medium. In our analysis of embodiment, we make extensive use of psychoanalytic concepts such as: the breach, the lack, the signifier, the construction of the object, the object-a, the transitional object, fetishism and phobia. Each of the four parts of the dissertation approaches the topic from a specific angle, such as the theoretical critique of the basic concepts of the subject and object, the function of the metaphor in the context of intelligent technologies, the role of technological infrastructure in the embodiment of the trauma, the construction of a transitional object such as a pop song in the context of technological dystopianism. We demonstrate that the cognitivist presumption concerning the pivotal role of intellectual motivation behind the subjective attachment to information technologies can be significantly shaken from the point of view of the psychoanalytic understanding of drives and jouissance. On the basis of Alain Badiou's argument, we show the limitations of structurally-determined forms of embodiment considered by psychoanalysis and draw a dividing line between them and the more rare cases of the subjectivation by events suggested by Badiou's theory. We discuss Badiou's concept of the work of truth as an advanced alternative to the psychoanalytic concept of the object and the paradigm of the construction of the (transitional) object. We distinguish the Badiouian concept of the event from the idea of technological/digital disruption, on the one hand, and correlate the latter with the problems discussed in psychoanalysis such as the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the crisis of the paternal metaphor along with the problems of the futurity and the disruption of intergenerational communication discussed by Bernard Stiegler on the other.

Author Keywords: Badiou, digital media, Lacan, metaphor, transitional object, work of truth

This thesis examines the impact that digital labour and work from home have across different populations. This work is framed with regards to Marxist-feminism and particularly examines the impact of work from home across different genders. To demonstrate the depth and breadth of the impact that work from home has on worker agency, four unique industries are analyzed: office jobs, gig economy, affect labour, and sex work. Additionally, the lens of critical race theory is invoked to highlight the distinct challenges that BIPOC workers face in the transition to digital labour. This thesis would not be contemporary without addressing the COVID-19 pandemic which was occurring during the time of its writing. This thesis uses those established lenses of gender, industry, and race to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the workplace and home (office). Work from home increases the amount of labour that needs to be performed by each worker in exchange for some flexibility and agency in some domains.

Author Keywords: Covid-19, Digital Labour, Hybrid, Work from Home

This dissertation is about Forests, their loss and the grieving that arises from their loss. The loss of ancient and old-growth forests by way of clearcutting and or anthropogenically driven disturbances, including climate change, presents the quandary of loss of both biological and cultural diversity. Following Umeek's/E. Richard Atleo's term, I suggest that "dis-ease" in the dominant relationship to forests in parts of the Western world significantly rests within inherited cultural and political pasts at play in the present, carried in much of the language and lifeways of modern Anglophone societies today. I do so by a critical topographical exploration of thematic patterns that go back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written account of deforestation in the history of Western civilization. I offer at the center of my inquiry a collection of witness trees as North American case studies. Each tree is a witness object, a station from which I confront and explore social-ecological grief as it has accumulated over time from English colonization, with one focusing on Indigenous cultural reclamation and place-based ecological co-management. Lastly, I turn to a multispecies exploration of social-ecological grief, using bears in North America as a face for reflection and consider who and what more is lost when old forests are degraded and gone. By asking the place question—"what place is this?"—of forests, or the Forest Question, my dissertation is thus an exploration of the connection and responsibilities to other place-based human and other-than-human communities in a rapidly changing climate.

Author Keywords: critical topography, environmental grief, forests, multispecies, social-ecological relations, witness trees

The central question of this research is "What is poetry?" The ambiguity and unintelligibility of the question itself forces the writing to take two different approaches to it. The first approach is to define poetry not by what it is but by how it is related to the human being and to the world. Seeing poetry as its relation to Being allows a definition of poetry based on its function. This approach draws on philosophical discussions how poetry is related to the human and how Being can be extended into poetic creation. Martin Heidegger's move from seeing poetry as the possibility of worldmaking to seeing it as a place of dwelling, and, in his later works, as unconcealment and the extension of Being as the House of Being, marks the direction of philosophical discussions in this paper. In this sense, poetry is defined as a creative possibility, where the speaking being comes in close contact with the speaking things and speaks of being.The second approach is to define poetry not as a whole but as some of its essential parts, as "poetic imagination" for instance. This attempt to define the poetic imagination draws on long-running discussions of imagination, metaphor, metaphorical thinking, image and imaging. It also relies on Freud's discussions of how dreams function as textual phenomena: the poetic imagination, this approach argues, is similar to dreaming. The poet's conscious and unconscious engagements with language create an uncanny experience where the relation between object and its poetic image is simultaneously known and unknowable. The third part of this study focuses on Lacan's move from the symbolic unconscious to the real unconscious, in order to shed light on how the real is related to its linguistic reality. This brings the discussion to a point where language is replaced by lalangue in order to knot the real directly to the symbolic.

Author Keywords: poetic creation, poetic imagination, poetry

The purpose of this research is to highlight the limitations and opportunities for playful expression of gender identity in character creation systems of virtual worlds, and how these might work to reinforce, or disrupt, the heteronormative imperative. The primary sites considered in this analysis are the video game World of Warcraft and the live action role-playing game Amtgard. I provide evidence that while the World of Warcraft's character creation system is sexist and works to reinforce heteronormative ideology, Amtgard's relatively ambiguous design provides opportunity for disruption of these norms. Participant research with Amtgard players demonstrates actual instances of Amtgard's more flexible character creation system being utilized in expression and exploration of gender identity which resists the heteronormative imperative. Based on this, I call on game developers to reject designs which necessitate selection of gender from within the traditional binary and embrace more ambiguous design in development of character creation systems.

Author Keywords: Avatars, Game Design, Games, Gender, Identity, Virtual Worlds

Why show things that aren't people acting like people? In the field of animation, it's a surprisingly big "why?", because it's a "why?" that doesn't lead to any sort of doctrine of ontology, of inevitability, of manifest destiny, or of anything like that. But it does lead to another "why?"—"why did anthropomorphic depictions of animals and non-human entities come to define an entire era of American short-form animation?" When we think about 'classic era' cartoon shorts, the first names that come to mind are likely to be those of anthropomorphic animal characters—Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and a list of others so numerous that any machine Wile E. Coyote tried to build to count them all would probably explode. This can make us lose sight of the fact that human characters had their place as well in these films: Bugs and Daffy regularly tangled with Elmer Fudd; the studio that made cartoon stars of Betty Boop and Popeye produced no famous animal characters at all in its heyday. And yet, it's the animals that steal the show in the animated shorts produced by major studios in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Part of their appeal lies in the fact that they were useful and recognizable substitutes for humans. Without making things too 'personal' for the audience, they could be used to examine and deconstruct social practices in the full-speed-ahead period that took America from World War I to the war in Vietnam. Animals weren't the only ones to get a full-on anthropomorphic treatment in these shorts. Machines and other artefacts came to life and became sites of interrogation for contemporary anxieties about the twentieth century's ever-expanding technological infrastructure; parts of the natural world, from plant life to the weather, acted with minds of their own in ways that harken back to the earliest animistic folk beliefs. No matter when or how it's being used, anthropomorphism in animation is a device for answering, not one big "why?", but a lot of little "why?"s. What you're about to read is an exploration of a few of those little "why?"s.

Author Keywords: America, Animation, Anthropomorphism, Cartoons, Deconstruction, Popular Culture

From Altdorfer and Poussin to Cézanne, Monet and to the Group of Seven, landscape has been a focal point of artistic inspiration for most of what we think of as modern art history. In contemporary times the concept and representation of landscape has shifted from visions of an idealized and exalted place to notions of the landscape as a ruins and site of ecological disaster. Because of this seismic inversion, artists are no longer solely making visual the beauty and serenity of nature but are rather finding novel ways of problematizing it and incorporating themes of its eventual disappearance, its inescapable transformation into ruins. The following dissertation puts forward a critical topographical study of three sites and three different artists who deal with this new found relationship to landscape. The three landscapes are located in different parts of the world and from different artistic contexts yet showing that they retain an aesthetic and conceptual character that links them together is part of the work of the dissertation. The first site is El Sol del Membrillo, a film by Víctor Erice in which the filmmaker chronicles painter Antonio Lopez García's attempts to paint the ephemeral, he attempts to paint that which is in the act of disappearing. The second site is The Mill St Cemetery in Cambridge, England where artist Gordon Young has contributed a work of public art titled Bird Stones that blurs the line between landscape, sculpture, monument and artwork. The third and final site is Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto, Canada that presents itself as an ecology park of retrieval, recovery and as a public art space. My investigation of this last regional research site is offered both as a chapter and as a videography about wilderness as wasteland.

Author Keywords: Aesthetics, Anthropocene, Art, Cinema, El Sol del Membrillo, Toronto: The Leslie Spit