Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) convened in 2008 and focused on the impact of the residential school on Indigenous people in Canada. It was intended to initiate healing in Indigenous communities while contributing to new understandings between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. In 2015, the TRC's mandate must be completed, and its final task is creating… more 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>ABSTRACT</p><p>The Art of the Sustainable Street</p><p>Miriam L. R. Mutton</p><p>The street influences our sense of community every day. It is argued that getting the street right communicates a collective vision for action leading to sustainable community.</p><p>This investigation continues conversations for community repair and resilient… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>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… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Women as Gifts and the Triple Hecate Myth in Shakespeare's</p><p>Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline</p><p>Women are placed into sexual roles by the patriarchal system in which we live. Gayle Rubin terms this a "sex/gender system" and explains that within this system women are exchanged as "gifts… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Name(s): Creator (cre): McCallum, Jenn, Thesis advisor (ths): Bocking, Stephen, Degree committee member (dgc): Nisbet, Elizabeth, Degree committee member (dgc): Whillans, Tom, Degree committee member (dgc): Bardecki, Michal, Degree granting institution (dgg): Trent University Abstract: <p>Wetlands were once widespread in southern Ontario, but many have been drained through land use changes. Using a case study of twelve landowners in the Kawartha region, I explored motivations for restoring wetlands. Psychological research suggests that people who are more connected to nature and attached to place are more likely to behave sustainably. Results showed that having land… 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
Name(s): Creator (cre): Millar, Isaac Jordan, Thesis advisor (ths): Palmer, Bryan D., Thesis advisor (ths): Durand, Caroline, Degree committee member (dgc): Dunaway, Finis, Degree committee member (dgc): Sheinin, David M.K, Degree granting institution (dgg): Trent University Abstract: <p>The Reagan era instigated a fundamentally conservative shift in the political, economic and discursive climate of America. As Ronald Reagan is a highly divisive symbolic figure in American politics, much of the historiography of his presidency has been characterized by polarized interpretations. Over the past decade there has been a noticeable shift towards more favourable and triumphal… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis explores the rhetoric of theft imposed on online music by comparing file</p><p>sharing to shoplifting. Since the litigation between the music industry and Napster, file sharing has been perceived, both by the entertainment industry and by a music listening public, as a criminal act. However, file sharing has more in common with home taping and music archives than… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This study examines the elite national print media reaction to, and coverage of, the Cuban Revolution, between 1956 and 1962. It finds that media, equally alienated by both Fidel Castro and the United States, progressively pursued an independent narrative predicated on an homage to Cuban sovereignty. Specifically, media uniformly adopted veteran New York Times' reporter Herbert L.… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>While there is an emerging body of literature on the role and effectiveness of community-based research (CBR) in addressing the needs of local communities, few studies have explored its promise in areas lacking established collaborative models. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of CBR to meet the sustainable community development needs of the primarily urban Durham… more
