VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Mapping Futures, Making Selves: Subjectivity, Schooling and Rural Youth
Keywords: subjectivity
rural youth
schooling
space

This dissertation explores how rural young people imagine their futures in neo-liberal times. The analysis is based upon three months of ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in ‘Fieldsville,’ a predominantly white and working-class rural community in Southeastern Ontario. I examine students' participation in a widely-used career-education program called The Real Game, in which they are encouraged to become entrepreneurial subjects capable of crafting productive futures in an uncertain world. My study asks: How do these young people produce and perform their imagined future selves, and what does this suggest about the opportunities and constraints that shape their current identities? Integrating insights from feminist poststructural theory and cultural geography, the project extends and challenges studies of the neo-liberal subject by integrating an analysis of place. The thesis builds upon, and contributes to, critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. Integrating classroom and playground observations with focus groups and interviews, the analysis reveals that young people draw upon diverse discourses in order to envision the person they hope to become. In addition to the subject positions on offer in The Real Game, popular culture provides a key resource in practices of self-making, as students invest in middle-class ideals of the “good life,” and distinguish their own rural location from racialized mappings of urban and global others. Although Fieldsville students are deeply invested in their rural community, tensions emerge where local attachments meet dominant narratives of mobility that encourage them to locate their futures elsewhere. These place-based tensions present particular challenges for girls, who must negotiate the gendered dynamics of rural social space alongside popular discourses of “girl power” that proffer unlimited possibilities for today's young women. Teasing apart the intersections of gender, race, class and space within students' narratives, I argue that studies of neo-liberal subjectivity must examine how dominant discourses are negotiated from particular social and geographical locations. Methodologically, the analysis demonstrates how school-based ethnography can shed light on broader socio-historical processes as they are lived in specific geographical and cultural spaces.
People at the Rim: A Study of Tai Ethnicity and Nationalism in a Thai Border Village
Keywords: Tai
Shan
ethnicity
nationalism
ethnonationalism
ethno-nationalism
North Thailand
northern Thailand

Based on ethnographic research in Ruam Chai, a large and remote village in northern Thailand, this dissertation seeks to examine the emergence of ethnic identity and nationalistic consciousness of the Tai people within the context of Thai nation-building, state development, and the history of the area in the 20th century. The Tai—generally known as the Shan—are the predominant residents of this multi-ethnic frontier community, once occupied by the notorious opium warlord, Khun Sa, prior to absolute control and administration by the Thai state in 1982. These people migrated from various areas of Myanmar’s Shan State over different periods of time, for a variety of reasons. Due to their illegal immigration, the Thai state classifies them into different non-citizenship statuses according to their migration background as well as survey and registration periods. As a result of recent revisions of the Thai Nationality Act, the documented Thailand-born offspring of these displaced Tai, whose parents’ statuses fall into certain non-Thai categories, meet the nominal requirements for becoming naturalised. Within the theoretical framework of constructivist approach and the notion of ethnic dynamism and nationalistic sentiments as a cultural practice in borderlands, this dissertation suggests the investigation of the Tai ethno-nationalism through three interconnected levels of analysis: village or community, national, and transborder. On the village level, while the Tai acknowledge their ethnic diversity and have a logical, conventional system of identification among themselves; they maintain ethnic boundaries amid interactions with village members of other ethnic origins, and (re)construct identities in response to both internal and external forces. On the national level, a nation-building process has induced a stronger sense of “being Thai” to both Thailand-born Tai children and pre-existing generations of Tai. This process emphasises ethnic homogeneity—through the employment of the Thainess concept—and exclusion of the Non-Thai from the Thai, where categorically ineligible Tai are driven to embrace outlawed conduct to secure Thai citizenship. On the transborder level, movements back and forth as well as relationships across various international borders have played a vital role in constructing Tai identity and imagining the nation of the Tai people, both in Ruam Chai and beyond.
The Politics and Pedagogy of Young People's Digital Media Participation
Keywords: participatory culture
popular culture
media education
digital literacy
youth studies
fandom
internet television
fan video
commodification
parody
user-generated content
cultural studies
remix
online discussion

In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.
It's Not A Parade, It's A March!: Subjectivities, Spectatorship, and Contested Spaces of the Toronto Dyke March
Keywords: Dyke March
Toronto
feminist poststructuralism
queer theory
history of sexuality
sexuality and space
women's activism
spectatorship

In this thesis I address the following questions: (1) How do dykes take up space in public in contemporary cities? (2) How does the ‘marching dyke’ emerge as a subject and what kind of subject is it? (3) How, in turn, do marching dykes affect space? In order to examine these questions I focus on the Toronto Dyke March to ask how it emerged in this particular time and place. The answer to each of these questions is paradoxical. I argue that the Dyke March is a complex, complicated and contradictory site of politics, protest and identity. Investigating ‘marching dykes’ reveals how the subject of the Dyke March is imagined in multiple and conflicting ways. The Toronto Dyke March is an event which brings together thousands of queer women annually who march together in the streets of Toronto on the Saturday afternoon of Pride weekend. My research examines how the March emerged out of a history of activism and organizing and considers how the March has been made meaningful for queer women’s communities, identities, histories and spaces. My analysis draws together queer and feminist poststructuralism, cultural geography literature on sexuality and space, and the history of sexuality in Canada. I combine a Foucaultian genealogy with visual ethnography, interviews and archival research. I argue that the Dyke March is an event which is intentionally meaningful in its claims to particular spaces and subjectivities. This research draws connections across various bodies of scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the literature, contributing to discussions of queer women’s visibility and representation. Although my analysis is focused on Toronto as a particular site, it offers insight into broader queer women’s activist organizing efforts and queer activism in Canada.
Exploring Teacher Identity: Teachers’ Transformative Experiences of Re-constructing and Re-connecting Personal and Professional Selves
Keywords: teacher identity
teacher beliefs
ESL teachers
teacher professional and personal selves
self-understanding
personal/professional development
holistic perspective
autobiographical journaling
rational/intuitive research methods
perspective transformation

This research explored the complexity of language teacher identity from a holistic perspective involving two features: the integration of teachers’ personal and professional experiences, and the application of conscious/rational and intuitive/tacit thought processes. The study examined four ESL teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations about the influences of their important personal, educational, and professional experiences on the development of their teacher identity. It also investigated the overall impact of an autobiographical reflective process combined with a guided visualization activity on the re-construction of participants’ perceptions of teacher identity. The interdisciplinary theoretical orientation was grounded in theories and concepts from psychology and educational research, e.g., Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955, 1963), the complementary nature of reason and intuition, and the concept of “perspective transformation” (Mezirow, 1978, 2000). The methodology was heuristic research (Moustakas, 1990, 1994) and methods included reflexive autobiographical journaling, guided visualization, and in-depth interviews. The results confirm that teacher identity is deeply embedded in one’s personal biography. Participants’ beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations nurtured in the family environment strongly influenced their school experiences, career choice, instructional practice, teaching philosophy, and teacher identity. The use of the guided visualization technique, integrated with rational reflection, considerably enhanced the depth and breadth of participants’ self-understanding and personal/professional growth, which is an important methodological contribution of the study for teacher development. The results strongly suggest that it is essential to explore teachers’ personal life experiences in order to gain a holistic understanding of the dominant influences on the development of teacher identity. The study presents a model for designing a longitudinal professional development program offered in a series of workshops to raise teachers’ awareness of the implicit influences on teacher identity and instructional practice through the application of both conscious/rational and intuitive/tacit methods to access their beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations of their life experiences.
Outcrop Studies of Soft-sediment Deformation Features in the Navajo Sandstone
Keywords: Navajo Sandstone
soft-sediment deformation
eolian
Jurassic

In contrast to early work establishing the importance of earthquake-induced liquefaction in producing soft-sediment deformation (SSD) of the Navajo Sandstone, this report advances the use of SSD analysis to: characterize wet climatic conditions and flood events during the depositional history of ancient eolianites; discriminate the signatures of multiple deformation events from those of complex deformation features formed in a single event; and to document the occurrence of liquefaction features unrepresented in modern Earth analogues. The diversity of deformation styles, presented here, is very unusual in a report from a single formation; yet the high resolution of interpreted time relationships between various processes of deposition, erosion, water table fluctuation, and deformation is even more notable. These exceptional features derive from the extraordinary outcrops of the Colorado Plateau, which expose many large-scale (tens of meters) features throughout their entire extent and reveal an extended history of episodic deformation through thick (hundreds of meters) sections of cross-bedded units, which frequently continue along several kilometers of cliff face. Prior studies of fluid escape from unconsolidated sand that support the present work are outlined in Chapter II. These include laboratory simulations of liquefaction and fluidization as well as analyses of analogous deposits, both ancient and modern. Chapter III provides an overview of outcrop evidence, gathered during the course of this study, for dramatic alterations in the topography and sedimentation patterns of the Navajo erg. Interpreted perturbations include: the foundering of active dunes; sediment eruptions; and the subsidence of interdune surfaces. Chapter IV constitutes an example of the detailed analyses that support the overview of Chapter III. Outcrop features from a site in West Canyon, Arizona provide the basis for interpreting the subsidence of a dry interdune surface to a position several meters below the contemporary water table, followed by the filling of this depression with a succession of mass flow, lacustrine, and eolian deposits. Chapter V outlines the implications of various outcrop features for the prevailing model of soft-sediment deformation in the Navajo Sandstone. Proposed modifications of this model accommodate a broader range of deformation dynamics and specifically incorporate the impact of wet climates.
Physical Models of Human Motion for Estimation and Scene Analysis
Keywords: computer vision
physics
human motion
motion estimation
tracking

This thesis explores the use of physics based human motion models in the context of video-based human motion estimation and scene analysis. Two abstract models of human locomotion are described and used as the basis for video-based estimation. These models demonstrate the power of physics based models to provide meaningful cues for estimation without the use of motion capture data. However promising, the abstract nature of these models limit the range of motion they can faithfully capture. A more detailed model of human motion and ground interaction is also described. This model is used to estimate the ground surface which a subject interacts with, the forces driving the motion and, finally, to smooth corrupted motions from existing trackers in a physically realistic fashion. This thesis suggests that one of the key difficulties in using physical models is the discontinuous nature of contact and collisions. Two different approaches to handling ground contacts are demonstrated,one using explicit detection and collision resolution and the other using a continuous approximation. This difficulty also distinguishes the models used here from others used in other areas which often sidestep the issue of collisions.
Gender, Power, and Persona in the Poetry of Baudri of Bourgueil
Keywords: Medieval Literature
Classical Literature

The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw a revival in the study of Ovid in the literary circles of the Loire Valley region of France. The poetry of Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil from approximately 1078-1107 and archbishop of Dol from 1107 until his death in 1130, exemplifies this trend. Baudri’s determinedly Ovidian collection contains 256 poems, several of which are addressed to nuns and to boys subject to his authority as abbot. Baudri’s use of Ovid displays an intricate understanding of the issues of gender and power at play in Ovid’s works, in particular the Ars Amatoria and Amores. Baudri uses his position of authority to manipulate his inferiors into behaving in ways that are pleasing to him, crafting an unflattering persona that shares many characteristics with the unsympathetic Ovidian amator and praeceptor amoris. Baudri’s letters to boys problematically evoke the tradition of monastic friendship letters, using classical allusion to represent an inappropriately sexualized and manipulative discourse. His letter to the nun Constance and her reply depict a struggle for control of discourse. Constance, by following Ovid’s instructions to the elegiac puella in her reply to Baudri, demonstrates that she is circumscribed by Baudri’s dominant male discourse, which she nonetheless manages to undermine from within. Baudri’s depiction of the power relationships between himself and his social inferiors mirrors the relationship between the Ovidian praeceptor amoris and the elegiac puella, and consequently engages with the plight of his inferiors in the same way that Ovid’s poetry draws attention to the dangerous lives of the courtesans in his elegy. Furthermore, his Ovidianism can be situated within the context of the contemporary Gregorian Reforms. In the same way that the puella can be seen as a projection of elite Roman males’ experience of disenfranchisement amidst the rise of the Principate, Baudri’s problematic correspondence with his social inferiors reflects social anxieties in the face of the Church’s assertion of centralized power and curtailment of clerical freedoms.
Decolonising Trauma Work: Indigenous Practitioners Share Stories and Strategies
Keywords: Indigenous trauma, First Nation, Aboriginal, wholistic healing, wellness, critique of psychiatry, mental health

This dissertation explores the areas of healing and wellness within Indigenous communities on Turtle Island. By drawing on a decolonising approach to Indigenous health research, this study engaged 10 Indigenous healthcare practitioners in a dialogue regarding Indigenous worldviews; notions of wellness and wholistic health; critiques of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnoses; and the cultural strategies that Indigenous healthcare practitioners utilise while helping their clients through trauma, depression, and experiences of “parallel and multiple realities.” Importantly, this study addresses a gap in literature and puts forth a necessary contribution in regards to Indigenous peoples and psychiatry. Indigenous healthcare practitioners reveal their thoughts and strategies in relation to psychiatric diagnoses, cultural treatment, and psychotropic medication. The stories and strategies gathered during the interview dialogues created a broader discussion that is situated among the existing literature. This research found that Indigenous knowledge and experience was deeply embedded in the practises of Indigenous healthcare practitioners. The strategies presented by these practitioners offer purposeful and practical methods that originate from Indigenous worldviews, yet can be utilised by any practitioner that is seeking therapeutic strategies to help traumatised individuals and communities. Moreover, this research will be a particularly relevant resource for health policy initiatives, agency programming, and education and training institutes. Bringing forth Indigenous strategies for helping and healing is a vitally important contribution to the field of trauma work.
Music and the Making of a Civilized Society: Musical Life in Pre-Confederation Nova Scotia, 1815-1867
Keywords: 19th-century music
Nova Scotia history 19th-century
transatlantic music studies
Maritime history 19th-century
amateur music 19th-century
Canada music history
music social aspects 19th-century
wind bands 19th-century
sheet music publishing 19th-century
piano building 19th-century
music in rural communities
community music
music and society 19th-century
Halifax, Nova Scotia
concert life in 19th-century North America
choral societies 19th-century
piano trade 19th-century
music trade 19th-century
music profession 19th-century
Nova Scotia music
music and character
music and progress

The years 1815 to 1867 marked the first protracted period of peace in Nova Scotia’s colonial history. While the immediate effects of peace were nearly disastrous, these years ultimately marked a formative period for the province. By the eve of Confederation, various social, cultural, political, economic, and technological developments had enabled Nova Scotia to become a mature province with a distinct identity. One of the manifestations of this era of community formation was the emergence of a cosmopolitan-oriented music culture. Although Atlantic trade routes ensured that Nova Scotia was never isolated, the colonial progress of the pre-Confederation era reinforced and entrenched Nova Scotia’s membership within the Atlantic World. The same trade routes that brought imported goods to the province also introduced Nova Scotians to British and American culture. Immigration, importation, and developments to transportation and communication systems strengthened Nova Scotia’s connections to its cultural arbiters – and made possible the importation and naturalization of metropolitan music practices. This dissertation examines the processes of cultural exchange operating between Nova Scotia and the rest of the Atlantic World, and the resultant musical life to which they gave rise. The topic of music-making in nineteenth-century Nova Scotia has seldom been addressed, so one of the immediate aims of my research is to document an important but little-known aspect of the province’s cultural history. In doing so, I situate Nova Scotia’s musical life within a transatlantic context and provide a lens through which to view Nova Scotia’s connectivity to a vast network of culture and ideas. After establishing and contextualizing the musical practices introduced to Nova Scotia by a diverse group of musicians and entrepreneurs, I explore how this imported music culture was both a response to and an agent of the formative developments of the pre-Confederation era. I argue that, as Nova Scotia joined the Victorian march of progress, its musicians, music institutions, and music-making were among the many socio-cultural forces that helped to transform a colonial backwater into the civilized province that on 1 July 1867 joined the new nation of Canada.