Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Program: Theses
Recent Submissions
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Manufacturing Redemption: An analysis of brand responses to the killing of George Floyd.
On May 25 2020, George Floyd, a Black 46-year-old father of five from Houston, Texas, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer arresting Floyd for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store. His ... -
Aerial Captures: Extractivism and the Logistical Media of Air Travel in Postwar Canada
The rapid development of technologies for air travel since the Second World War has contributed to significant changes in how space is perceived, conceived and imagined in Canada. From the extensive mapping conducted by ... -
CURATORIAL CONTESTATIONS: CHALLENGING INSTITUTIONAL MODES OF INCLUSION IN THE ARTS THROUGH CURATORIAL POSITION(S) AND PRACTICE(S)
In today’s climate of political unrest, art institutions and curators play increasingly important roles, serving (their) varied constituencies and cultural communities by creating meaningful points of contact with diverse ... -
The New Moon in Black Space: The Poetics of Ummah
This work examines how diasporic Black and South Asian Muslims in Toronto and New York practice ummah (Muslim brotherhood and sisterhood, global Muslim unity). Through online surveys, in-person interviews, and ethnographies ... -
CONTINUITIES AND CHANGES IN TRADITIONAL AKAN ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION PRACTICES
This dissertation examines traditional religio-cultural beliefs/practices and environmental problems in Ghana using the Kwahu Traditional Area as a case study. Its primary objective is to examine the continuities and ... -
A Rose in the Forgotten Paradise - The Heteronymical Anonymity of João Delgado: towards political solidarity among the different selves.
The following thesis is about the work of the Sala-Manca group, a group of two Argentinean born artists based in Jerusalem, Israel, one of whom is the author of this thesis. Over the past twenty years the group has developed ... -
The Master Plan: Power, Design and the Making of a Place.
This thesis is a personal attempt to tell the story of architecture in modern Jerusalem in the aftermath of the forced 1967 unification of the city. From the perspective of an IsraeliJerusalemite born after the 1967 war, ... -
Colder Now: Surveillance as Contemporary Colonialism in Canada
Canada is a settler state built on systemic racism, and is maintained by systems of contemporary colonialism. Systems of contemporary colonization such as internal colonialism (Tuck and Yang, 2012) take the form of the ... -
UNSETTLING SETTLERS’ COLONIAL PRIVILEGE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: MOVEMENT, SOUND, PARTICIPATION, PLAY, LAUGHTER. PHASE ONE
Unsettling Settlers’ Colonial Privilege Through Performance: Movement, Sound, Participation, Play, Laughter. Phase One is a research-creation thesis on the development and testing of a life-sized board game designed to ... -
BDSM and Women’s Gendered Embodiment: Other-Than-Sex Pleasure, Pain, and Power
Bondage/Discipline/Dominance/submission/Sadism/Masochism (BDSM) is most frequently conceptualized as only non-normative, ‘kinky’ sex. In this dissertation, I combine feminist ethnographic accounts of women’s experiences ... -
A Story of Storytelling: Listening to Narratives of Belonging within the Indigenous Art Centre
The Indigenous Art Centre (IAC) is an Indigenous-led federal program that supports “the creation, preservation and promotion of contemporary art produced by Indigenous peoples in Canada.” Presently, the Indigenous Art ... -
Moving the Academy to Hip Hop Music: Repurposing Canadian Universities with Black Radical Traditions
This project analyzes the important and knotted interventions that hip hop artists bring to the Canadian academy. I think through how university institutions preserve white supremacist values alongside diversity mandates ... -
The Religion of the Heart: Self, Solidarity, and the Sacred in Romantic Liberal Modernity
North Americans and Western Europeans increasingly prefer “spirituality” to “religion.” In response to this “spiritual turn,” a voluminous literature has emerged across the human sciences. Yet the study of spirituality ... -
(Re)Framing Resistance: The Role of Indigenous Comic Books in the Past, Present, and Future
As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has described, “the collective memory of imperialism has been perpetrated through the ways knowledge about Indigenous peoples was collected, classified and then represented in various ... -
Becoming Pornography: White Women, Voyeuristic Surveillance, and Image-Based Sexual Abuse
This dissertation examines the gendered and racialized discourses that inform how we understand the problem of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) in the West. Specifically, it traces out the role that whiteness, and white ... -
Genocide Culture: From Everyday Cultural Doxa and Ethnic Engineering to Genocide of Kurds in Iraq
This interdisciplinary study reconceptualizes the dominant vision of how genocides begin, and the role civilians play in both cultural and physical forms of genocide. I coined the term “genocide culture” and reconceptualize ... -
Not a Joke: Women's work and feminist laughter in stand-up comedy
Live feminist stand-up comedy, and the shared laughter it generates, is a potent form of popular cultural performance that has become increasingly politically relevant and commercially successful in contemporary North ... -
Defiance, Reclamation, and a Call to Mino Bimaadiziwin/ The Good Life Through Ceremonial Performance Praxis
This MA thesis is a bundle that weaves time, space, and form. It includes personal narrative, considerations and reflections on creation and research as well as the production/ performance script, stage directions, and ... -
Between the Dreamtime and the GPS / The Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping
Although many scholars have written about the relationships between land, mapping, power relations, and sovereignty, very few have explored the relationship between the imbricated fields of Aboriginal mapping, Indigenous ... -
Expert Tattooing: The Development of a Profession in Canada, 1891-1986
Expert Tattooing: The Development of a Profession in Canada, 1891-1986 examines professional tattooing in Canada from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1980s, a period that saw the practice’s emergence, expansion, and ...
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