Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Program: Theses
Recent Submissions
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The Shelter of Prophets: A journey within autonomous migration networks
This MA thesis is a creative and poetic examination of everyday relationships and moments of cross-border solidarity taking place within informal autonomous mobility networks. It argues that in the connections and habits ... -
Religion in the Aspirations-(Cap)abilities Framework of Migration: A Case of Ghanaian Emigration and Integration in Canada
Over the last three decades, there has been extensive research on religion and migration. Yet, existing approaches focus more on the consequences of migration in destination countries than the conditions that generate ... -
Moral Phenomenology in a More-Than-Human World: A New Approach to Buddhist Environmental Ethics
This dissertation works to accomplish two goals. First, it defends Jay Garfield’s interpretation of Buddhist ethics as a moral phenomenology and develops this ethical system through the Tibetan framework of lta sgom spyod ... -
Ec(h)oing across Borders: A Dialogue between Contemporary Environmental Literature and Ecocriticism in China and the Asian North American Context
This Portfolio Project is a dialogue between Chinese and Asian North American contemporary environmental literature and ecocriticism. The cultural exchange between China and the West has a long history that has not always ... -
Living Undocumented in Canada
Illegalized immigrants in Canada are a growing community, yet narratives about their lives are rarely in the public eye. Discourses on the importance of safeguarding national security have shaped how vulnerable immigrants ... -
On Care & Carcerality at the Prison for Women (P4W)
This thesis reflects on the entanglement between settler-colonialism, prison reform, carcerality and “regimes of care” through an interdisciplinary study of the Prison for Women (P4W), a former women’s prison in Kingston, ... -
Pink Triangles, Blue Feelings: Depression in Queer Contemporary Art
In this dissertation, I explore how depression is represented, communicated, and/or articulated within queer contemporary art—that is, art created by Two-Spirit, Indig(e/i)queer, queer, and/or trans-identified artists or ... -
“A Ruin, More or Less, or a Place of Dark Nostalgia”: Prison Tourism and the Mobilization of Dark Heritage at Kingston Penitentiary
Through case studies of the St. Lawrence Parks Commission’s Kingston Pen Tours and other prison-themed heritage and art exhibitions, this research project examines the phenomenon of “dark tourism,” defined as the act of ... -
The Postwar Debate over Collaboration in Vichy
This thesis is about two histories, the history of the Vichy regime in France between 1940 and 1944, and the evolution of postwar memory and scholarship about Vichy until today. The objective of this research is to investigate ... -
High-Stakes Testing for Adibashi Students: Colonial Approaches to Education for Indigenous Communities of Bangladesh
This dissertation investigates how the standardized, high-stakes testing system operates as a political tool used by Bengali elites to advance a nationalist agenda in education that in effect marginalizes Adibashi/Indigenous ... -
Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction
Quotidian Trauma and Everyday Pain: Emancipation Through Creative Destruction is a research-creation thesis shaped by subjective embodied memories of abuse trauma. The research-creation comprises a series of sequential ... -
Commodifying Baul Spirituality: Changing Baul Literature and Music in Bangladesh
The Bauls, itinerant minstrels of rural areas of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, follow a practice that combines elements from both monotheistic and polytheistic beliefs centered around spiritual experiences that ... -
Changing Our Tune: Exploring Collaborative Songwriting with Choirs as a Process for Disrupting Traditional Eurocentric Compositional Practice, Increasing Participation in Music Creation, and Supporting Well-Being
Western classical music institutions have, in recent years, been forced to contend with the weight of their long traditions of white hegemony, patriarchy, and ableism (see Kajikawa 2019; Nettl 1992; Younker 2014). While ... -
Unsettling Geography: Exploring Truth and Reconciliation in Geography Departments at Canadian Universities
From the onset of colonial exploration, professional and scholarly geographers have played a prominent role in establishing the systems of colonial and imperial expansion embedded in Indigenous dispossession and genocide, ... -
Abolitionist Intimacies
Abolitionist Intimacies is a work in three parts that addresses scholarly, creative, and community dimensions of abolitionist thought, organizing, and resistance. The first section explores abolitionist theorizing and ... -
Shameless Gentrification Narratives: Towards an Understanding of the Ideological Underpinnings of Urban Restructuring Storylines on Television
This qualitative research project queries the representations of gentrification scenes in the United States (U.S.) version of Shameless to answer the research question: What do the storylines of gentrification on Shameless ... -
Who's at the Table? The Homogenization of Crip Queers in Decision-Making and Policy-Making Processes
The ways that disabled persons are represented in mainstream media, as well as political and social institutions, are shifting. A significant contributor has been the field of critical disability studies, in which disabled ... -
Reel Communities: The Contemporary Practice of Independent Movie Theatres in Toronto
Toronto has long been famous as the film metropolis of Canada, not only because of its production of films but because of its generation of an exemplary form of moviegoing. The formation of its unique filmgoing culture is ... -
On Cinema and Revolutions: Tricontinental Militancy and the Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution
This thesis explores and analyses the Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution as an expression of Third Cinema, a political and aesthetic project created and sustained by filmmakers throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America ... -
Unbelonging and the Citizen-Other in Canada and France
Through a theorization of the production of the citizen-other, this dissertation investigates how "radicalization", "terrorism", and "laïcité" have been mobilized to erode citizenship rights of Muslims in two primary sites, ...
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