Thesis defence

PhD thesis defence: Sarah Whyte, "The Rhetorical Life of Surgical Checklists: A Burkean Analysis with Implications for Knowledge Translation"

Maha Eid — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 18:06:53 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Sarah Whyte, "The Rhetorical Life of Surgical Checklists: A Burkean Analysis with Implications for Knowledge Translation" Maha Eid Mon, 06/18/2018 - 14:06

The Rhetorical Life of Surgical Checklists: A Burkean Analysis with Implications for Knowledge Translation

Sarah Whyte

This dissertation uses the terms of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism to identify rhetorical aspects of surgical team checklists as they have been promoted, performed, studied, and surveilled. I argue that these terms can help to account both for the rapid uptake of checklists into policy and for their more variable effects and uptake into practice. I develop this argument by analyzing a large archive of texts published between 1999 and 2016, including popular media, news coverage, promotional campaigns, primary research, and other forms of scholarship. These published texts are considered alongside ethnographic fieldnotes from a study in which I collaborated to design, introduce, and evaluate an early version of a preoperative checklist at four Canadian hospitals. My analyses are guided heuristically by the first principles and central terms of dramatism, including action and motion; motive and situation; identification and division; attitude, form, and circumference. I use these terms to chart the early emergence of checklists within professional literature; to trace their rapid uptake as a standard of professional communication; to discern their multiple functions or purposes; to illustrate how and why they are enacted, accepted, and sometimes rejected in the operating theatre; and to locate blind spots in applied health services research. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate the importance of diverse rhetorical processes both to the uptake and to the basic functions of checklists. They also demonstrate the value and versatility of dramatistic terms. I contend in particular that the concept of rhetorical situation, as elaborated by Burke, holds significant potential for understanding and negotiating the material and symbolic dimensions of practice and practice change. This dissertation points the way toward a uniquely rhetorical approach to the study and practice of knowledge translation in healthcare work.

PhD thesis defence: Jason Lajoie, "Technologies of Identity: A Queer Media Archaeology"

Maha Eid — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 12:28:38 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Jason Lajoie, "Technologies of Identity: A Queer Media Archaeology" Maha Eid Fri, 10/11/2019 - 08:28

Technologies of Identity: A Queer Media Archaeology

Jason Lajoie

This dissertation explores how queer people use media technology to make and construe their identities through a series of cases extending from the Victorian era to the present day. Each case is driven by three interlocking questions: How have people used technology to make queer identities? How can practices of re-using and repurposing media technology express queer identities? How can the identity of a given technology impact and influence these expressions?

Drawing on key texts from gender studies, the history of sexuality and the philosophy of technology, this dissertation first offers a theory of how queer interactions with media technologies can make identities; which it applies to developments of queer identities from the 1890s up to 2018. My media archaeological framework explores the development of terms like gay, lesbian, and gaymer through media systems and reflects on how these terms have influenced the social, cultural and technological networks in which they developed. Using a methodology that engages with cultural objects by situating them within the specific social and technological contexts of their emergence, I explore the obscenity trials of two notable queer authors, Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall, as well as the rise of gay liberation discourses between the 1940s and 1970s. I pay particular attention to the media involved in each instance to show the importance of the technological context to the development of discourses about being queer and expressing queer identities. Other chapters examine the queer potentialities of Alan Turing’s Imitation Game and the pioneering queer magazine Vice-Versa, both created between 1947-1950, to show how media can be queered and produce queer meanings. With this potential in mind, I analyze the discourse of the r/Gaymers subreddit from 2017-2018 by situating it within the technocultural context of its social media platform. To explore this theory in a more concrete way, the dissertation concludes by putting research into practice with the creation of a critical speculative media object that emphasizes the influence of the gendered discourse on the possibilities for creating media. Taken together, these cases suggest how non-normative identities can be constructed, shared and then understood by others to form links, to develop communities, and eventually to lead lives beyond heteronormative demands.

By excavating these media scenes and placing them into correspondence with one another, this dissertation focuses on the role of media technologies in the construction of identity. It shows the consequential role of media technologies in making and sharing identities, and considers how queer identities are informed by the tools used to express them and how the need for queer expression can influence the development of media technologies in response.

PhD thesis defence: Judy Ehrentraut, "Disentangling the Posthuman: Broadening Perspectives of Human/Machine Mergers Through Inter-relational Subjectivity"

Maha Eid — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 12:56:40 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Judy Ehrentraut, "Disentangling the Posthuman: Broadening Perspectives of Human/Machine Mergers Through Inter-relational Subjectivity" Maha Eid Wed, 10/09/2019 - 08:56

Disentangling the Posthuman: Broadening Perspectives of Human/Machine Mergers Through Inter-relational Subjectivity

Judy Ehrentraut

In the conclusion of How We Became Posthuman, N. Katharine Hayles states that the terror of posthumanism comes from its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, implying the end of the human. Some theorists interpret posthumanism as marking the human’s fall and subsequent rise as a transcendent being imbued with technological adornments, while others rightly see it as the disbanding of the human of Enlightenment philosophy. Yet as this dissertation argues, even iterations of posthuman thought that attempt to reject anthropological and sociocultural essentialisms inadvertently re-affirm humanist ideologies. This is mainly due to normative and dogmatic ideas about technology’s place in the human world that frame it as dehumanizing and oppositional on the one hand, or transcendent and empowering on the other. In both cases, the human/technology relationship is pre-coded by the assumption that technology gesticulates a dislodging of “natural” human purity, which encourages the fear that human agency predicated on self-possession is at risk.

Engaging with the works of Hayles, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, I propose that agency is not something one possesses, but an outcome of entanglements where identity is formed when the subject recognizes difference over assimilation. My contention is that when technology is perpetually seen as an intrusive addition to the human, a false dichotomy develops where authentic self-representation is endangered by technological mediation. Thus, in response to the increasing demonization of communication technologies, my critique of digital abstinence initiatives reveals the ableist, racist and classist underpinnings that discount the varied ways all humans entangle with artifacts to participate in subject-making. Rather than theorizing how posthumanism represents the promises of technological extension, I evaluate the underlying exclusions that assign certain humans as lacking and needing improvement. Building on Braidotti’s ethics of becoming and the movement from a unitary to nomadic subject, my conception of “inclusive posthumanism” disengages from the idea that the human’s purpose is to progress. By rejecting individualism and self-interest to promote a larger inter-relationality with other human and non-human artifacts, I see the inclusive posthuman as an opportunity to theorize subjectivity as a decentralization of the human’s role within a larger system. This both recognizes the human’s importance without implying its obliteration, and offers constitutions of a collective self that is uncovered through chance encounters.

PhD thesis defence: David Thiessen, "The Flesh Made Mind: Language and Embodiment in Fourteenth-Century Middle English Literature"

Maha Eid — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 18:54:32 +0000

PhD thesis defence: David Thiessen, "The Flesh Made Mind: Language and Embodiment in Fourteenth-Century Middle English Literature" Maha Eid Tue, 10/01/2019 - 14:54

The Flesh Made Mind: Language and Embodiment in Fourteenth-Century Middle English Literature

David Thiessen

My dissertation compares contemporary cognitive models of self, that posit an interconnection between body and mind, with Pre-Modern conceptions of an embodied self as represented in late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Middle English poetry. The medieval authors that I focus on are Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and James I of Scotland.

My dissertation asserts several close affinities between late medieval conceptions of self and contemporary models of embodied consciousness proposed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Such models challenge models of consciousness that posit an objective mind (i.e. distinct from the body) that perceives before sensation. Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and James I each engage with their poetic interests through models of an embodied self. While Chaucer utilizes architectural space to map the processes of memory, intellect, and perception as embodied experience, the Gawain-poet employs several schemata, cognitive metaphors, and structured movement to demonstrate the embodied underpinnings of experience. And, after living through his childhood as a political prisoner, James I depicts consolation through cognitive metaphors built upon embodied experience. In sum, my dissertation engages present models of embodied consciousness from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to examine late medieval models of mind and body.

PhD thesis defence: Evelyn Deshane, "Wish You Were Here: Transgender Road Narratives and The Place for Identity"

Maha Eid — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 15:21:37 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Evelyn Deshane, "Wish You Were Here: Transgender Road Narratives and The Place for Identity" Maha Eid Mon, 06/17/2019 - 11:21

"Wish You Were Here: Transgender Road Narratives and The Place for Identity"

Evelyn Deshane

When Christine Jorgensen stepped off a plane in New York City from Denmark in 1952, she became one of the first instances of transgender celebrity, and her intensely popular story was adapted from an article to a memoir and then to a film. From this point on, her story became the foundation for how to tell transgender narratives, be they in print or on the screen or inside medical documents. Though not the first transgender case study or gender memoir ever written, Jorgenson's narrative set a standard archetypal pattern of confusion, discovery, and homecoming which often evokes literal or metaphorical travel. In 2019, transgender stories still repeat this standardized self-realization narrative, either in stories trans people tell about themselves or those which are told about them in print, film, and other media. Not only are these narratives steeped in a neoliberal idea of progress and productivity where only some genders and bodies count, but by evoking travel in these stories, especially travel to other countries, these narratives often suggest imperialism and colonization rather than romantic self-discovery.

In my dissertation, I use film adaptation theory and transgender history to examine how the medical documents of the early 1900s influenced the memoirs told both pre- and post-Jorgensen, and how these memoirs and other life writing then became the source material for films involving transgender people in the follow decades. Even without the tagline of 'based on a true story,' I argue that films which are made about transgender people are still influenced by real life medical case studies and memoirs which replicate a teleological gender discovery narrative predicated on progress. These narratives often exploit the transgender body, deprive these characters of interiority, and silence the history of the community which it attempts to represent. By presenting singular narratives of transgender success--or alternatively by punishing gender deviations--these films reinforce the hegemonic idea of neoliberal identity, along with cissexist, racist, and classist ways of reading gender itself. The road film, like the persistent transgender travel narrative in memoirs, emerges as a way to depict the feelings of dysphoria and gender transition while simultaneously suggesting the problematic and harmful ideologies which hold back the trans community in their everyday lives. Be it The Christine Jorgensen Story or The Danish Girl or Boys Don't Cry, the transgender travel narrative is still dictated by the surgeon's strict gender binaries or the therapist's perception of 'true' feelings, which in turn means that transgender representation has not changed very much since Jorgensen's 1952 flight.

PhD thesis defence: Patricia Ofili, "Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela’s Braided Rhetoric"

Maha Eid — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 12:50:30 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Patricia Ofili, "Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela’s Braided Rhetoric" Maha Eid Mon, 04/01/2019 - 08:50

"Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela’s Braided Rhetoric'

Patricia Ofili

This dissertation revolves around the complex political circumstances in apartheid South Africa that produced Nelson Mandela the rhetorician, human rights activist, and the longest political prisoner in human history. The manner in which Nelson Mandela deploys a braided rhetoric that is a combination of the African and Western rhetorical traditions for spearheading the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa is investigated. Mandela draws upon the African rhetorical tradition through which his identity, selfhood, and ethos were forged, while appropriating the Western rhetorical tradition through which he attained his education and training as a lawyer. Also examined is the complexity of inter-ethnic strife among Black South Africans; a situation that was exploited by the apartheid regime and which made the western rhetorical tradition inadequate for the addressing apartheid domination. The dissertation also studies Mandela’s dynamism as he navigates the murky waters of apartheid policies, which were not only smoke screens for veiling their racist intent, but enactments that kept morphing for the purpose of crushing any form of dissent. The complex situation produced an audience that was very diverse, and to appeal to these local and international audiences, Mandela required a rhetoric that was nuanced and effective enough to dismantle the apartheid racist order. Mandela employs narratives, which are performed in keeping with the African oral tradition - to unify, organize, and inspire his people; to call on the world beyond the borders of South Africa to account for their support of Apartheid; and to call out whites South Africans for implicit and explicit consent to the evils of a racist social, political, and economic order. Mandela’s rhetoric is strengthened particularly because, even as he speaks and writes in service of a struggle against systemic racism, he rises above the reification of essentialism and thus resists complicity.

PhD thesis defence: Morteza Dehghani, "“In Works of Hands or of the Wits of Men”: The Elegies of Wim Wenders, Laurie Anderson and Alexander Sokurov"

Maha Eid — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 19:09:19 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Morteza Dehghani, "“In Works of Hands or of the Wits of Men”: The Elegies of Wim Wenders, Laurie Anderson and Alexander Sokurov" Maha Eid Tue, 01/29/2019 - 14:09

“In Works of Hands or of the Wits of Men”: The Elegies of Wim Wenders, Laurie Anderson and Alexander Sokurov

Morteza Dehghani

This dissertation explores the concept of loss and the possibility of consolation in Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog and Alexander Sokurov’s Oriental Elegy through a method that inter-reads the films with poetic elegies. Schiller’s classic German elegy “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”) and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies have been used in examining The Salt of the Earth and a late Hölderlin poem “In libleicher Bläue” (“In Lovely Blue”) is utilised in perusing Oriental Elegy. In Heart of a Dog, Rilke’s “Schwarze Katze” (“Black Cat”) and Derek Walcott’s “Oddjob, a Bull Terrier,” among others, shed light on the working of the elegiac. I have put these films in a conversation with poems to investigate how a filmic elegy can be informed by poetic elegies and how the two arts operate similarly while they are governed by varied sets of rules. While most studies on loss are informed by psychoanalytical theories, I have focused on the formal ways in which these films portray loss and consolation, using one art, poetry, as a guiding framework to illuminate the other art, film. I propose that in The Salt of the Earth, the movement of the elegiac benefits from Deleuzian montage as the film strides towards solace manifested in resuscitation of Amazonian forests and the art of photography. The technical montage and the thematic elegiac converge. Heart of a Dog, however, bases such a motion of elegy on the Buddhist concept of Bardo, where the narrator “decreates” and then re-creates her self through the remedy of love. Finally, Oriental Elegy operates within an apophatic discourse, proposing metaphor and poetic thinking as potential yet transitory sources of consolation. While these films grieve different object of loss, ranging from humans, animals, lands, and even abstract, philosophical concepts such as the meaning of life and happiness, and whereas they introduce various remedies such as art, love, and metaphor, they function similarly formalistically. Taking its cue from Diana Fuss who revisits Freudian melancholia and benefitting from the idea that correlates loss and creativity or “figuration” as observed in Julia Kristeva and Peter Sacks, this dissertation shows how the grieving subjects are positioned in an in-between status which allows them to move forward in the face of loss. This in-betweenness, I have proposed, is manifested in an elliptical structure in the films. In their passage from sorrow, the bemoaning subjects resort to small sources of solace, loci amoeni, signified by different formal and technical elements in the films. Once analysed cinematically and placed in a dialogue with poetic elegies, the Epilogue brings all the films in one place, examining them in relation to Robert Hass’s poem “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Inter-reading the films with this poetic elegy reveals that the musing speaker in the poem and the narrators in the films face loss similarly. What defines loss is the distance between the subjects and their loved lost ones or things, a lacuna that cannot be filled and, hence, the bewailing subjects resort to a kataphatic expression, to naming, which is repetitive, open-ended, and elliptical.

PhD thesis defence: Amna Haider, "A Transmogrifying Discourse of Sexual Violence: Resisting, Redressing and Re-writing Racial Scripts in Contemporary African American Women's Theatre"

Maha Eid — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 14:53:27 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Amna Haider, "A Transmogrifying Discourse of Sexual Violence: Resisting, Redressing and Re-writing Racial Scripts in Contemporary African American Women's Theatre" Maha Eid Wed, 01/02/2019 - 09:53

A Transmogrifying Discourse of Sexual Violence: Resisting, Redressing and Re-writing Racial Scripts in Contemporary African American Women's Theatre

Amna Haider

This dissertation examines contemporary African American women's theater that addresses the absented and erased reality of black women as victims of sexual violence. This thesis investigates how contemporary African American theater and performance unfolds two realities of rape: one reality is of the erased victims, and the second of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Working at the intersections of gender and black feminist studies, critical race theory and performance studies this dissertation studies how the African American creative impulses are re-writing rape narratives by deconstructing debilitating racist myths and stereotypes. It seeks to expand limited definitions of rape in legal discourses, pointing out limitations of concepts like date rape and issues of consent, but also looks at forms of sexual violation that simply do not usually register within legal parameters like lesbian rape, rape through verbal sexual harassment, and medical rape. Furthermore, this project engages with racist stereotypes that either nullify black women's experiential realities of sexual violence or demonize black men. One of the main objectives of this dissertation is to examine the perpetrators of violence as well as the victims through dramatic and performative engagements with sexual violence. Therefore, this thesis examines the rapist, be it a man, a lesbian, a mother, or an adolescent youth as part of African American contemporary theater's engagement with the narratives of rape. This equalizing representation of sexual violence as an act not just done to black women, but is done by men and women to black women makes African American theater and performance redress the imbalance wherein black women as victims of sexual violence bore the burden of the violence committed against them alone. This impulse to redress the imbalance raises many thorny issues of black manhood, black motherhood, and the role of black community that these playwrights fiercely bring into conversation, not to repeat historical racist narratives this dissertation contends, but to re-evaluate the roles and responsibilities of black people, and what it means to be black in the face of sexual violence.

PhD thesis defence: Philip Miletic, "Only Connect: The Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace"

Maha Eid — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 12:57:51 +0000

PhD thesis defence: Philip Miletic, "Only Connect: The Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace" Maha Eid Tue, 08/14/2018 - 08:57

Only Connect: The Virtual Communities of Gertrude Stein and David Foster Wallace

Philip Miletic

My dissertation compares Modernist imaginations and applications of early radio with Late Postmodernist imaginations and applications of the early internet. The American authors that I focus on and compare in my dissertation are Gertrude Stein, a Modernist, and David Foster Wallace, a Late Postmodernist.

My dissertation asserts that Stein and Wallace each incorporate the techno-cultural imaginations and feelings of community through the democratic poetics and aesthetics of their work. Both Stein and Wallace engage with facilitating literary communities that form around emerging mass media––for Stein, the radio, and for Wallace, the blog––and provoke readers to participate in auto/biographical practices as a mode of discussing American identity, community, and democracy. Where the orality of Stein’s texts invites readers’ auto/biographical engagement, Wallace’s written depictions of mental health, addiction, and loneliness prompt readers to share auto/biographical narratives/disclosures related to those topics in the reading group discussions.

Altogether, my dissertation engages with a unique media archeological combination of literary analysis, media studies, and critical media production in order to suss out the dynamic exploration of identity, community, and democratic participation these authors and their readers feel for within the mediascape of their respective eras.

PhD thesis defence (closed)*: Lacey Beer, "Tongues Tide: Translingual Directions for Technologically-Mediated Composing Platforms"

Maha Eid — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 16:25:01 +0000

PhD thesis defence (closed)*: Lacey Beer, "Tongues Tide: Translingual Directions for Technologically-Mediated Composing Platforms" Maha Eid Fri, 08/03/2018 - 12:25

Tongues Tide: Translingual Directions for Technologically-Mediated Composing Platforms

Lacey Beer

This dissertation examines the link between classroom practices, language policies, and writing technologies in a translingual framework. Specifically, in the context of higher education, I explore the ways in which English-only policies dominate the academy and discourage linguistic diversity and inclusivity. This monolingual approach is emulated by composing software like MS Word and Google Docs, which surveil and constrain the languages and discourses available to student writers. These programs take a Current-Traditionalist approach to writing that is characterized by preoccupation with error and the positioning of the teacher as disciplinarian. In doing so, they inhibit translingual teaching and learning. Drawing upon the results of my ethnographic study on the composing processes of students in ENGL 109: Introduction to Academic Writing (a course taught at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ), I offer suggestions for improving the design of these technologically-mediated composing platforms to better accommodate translingual users.

*This is a closed defence, if you would like to attend you will need to sign a confidentiality agreement which will be available for signature at the defence.