Humanities - Master's Theses

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://laurentian.scholaris.ca/handle/10219/2854

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Alcoholics anonymous: from spiritual void to spiritual awakening
(2017-06-19) Vermeulen, Carla J.
Examining the program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) reveals that it grew out of a Christian fundamentalist group known as the Oxford Group. This history connects AA to the writings of St Paul and St Augustine. Their writings look into the lives of every human being, into the struggle of the divided will, into obsession, and made them particularly well suited to the study of addiction. There was no castigation, simply an acceptance and understanding as to the scope and needs of those who struggle with the chains of boundless appetite. The program of AA presents the twelve steps as the process one is required to undergo in order to return to health. The gift of a spiritual awakening is the promise in having worked these steps. This distinguishes AA from other recovery programs. This thesis traces spiritual awakening through the program of AA utilizing literature from the early Christian church to demonstrate how those works were integral in the original program of AA.
Blubbering on: representations of whale identity in literature, film, and science
(2018-05-09) Turkington, Emmett
Representation of nonhuman animals is a complex and multifaceted subject. Through the act of representation, it is important for us to consider the impact humans have on constructing the identity of nonhuman animals. Due to the variety of ways humans engage in the act of representation, this project looks at how three representative modes (literature, film, and science) shape our understanding of whales and construct a whale’s identity in the process. The study is based on a human-animal studies framework and uses Vinciane Despret’s notion of agencement to deal with the subject of nonhuman identity.
Conscientious objection to effective referral for medical assistance in dying: an analysis in terms of Rawlsian liberal political theory
(2020-02-27) Bulman, K. Rachel
The recent legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAID) and the contentious mandatory effective referral policy implemented by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) have spurred robust legal and academic debate around the following question: to what extent should the CPSO limit physicians’ ability to conscientiously object to referrals for healthcare services? Rawlsian political liberalism ranks conscience freedoms as fundamental liberties central to justice in a liberal democracy, whereas equality of access to goods or services rank secondarily. Mandatory effective referrals make unjust demands on some physicians by requiring them to take positive action against their consciences. Patients should have direct access to assenting physicians for services where fundamental moral disagreements are common, as is the case with abortion, for example. In order to protect patient autonomy, conscientious objections should be public so that patients can make informed choices about their primary healthcare providers prior to coming under their care.
Drawing anime as a cross-cultural therapy & rebellion for young girls in foster care
(2019-12-10) Zygmont, Kaitlynn
Adolescent girls in the foster care system are sometimes misunderstood, mistreated and negatively labelled. Along with changes in governmental social policies, the female foster demographic is at higher risk of becoming involved in the judicial system. Programs such as The Holistic Arts Based Program (HAP) aim to provide an environment that nurtures creativity and teaches resilience to young foster children/adolescents who have learning disabilities and have faced loss, neglect and trauma. This study focuses on a particular group of adolescent girls from the foster care system who attended HAP for 24 weeks to seek insight into their use of anime as a therapeutic process. Through textual analysis and psychoanalysis, I trace the difference between the anime inspired art produced in past HAP sessions compared to the art from the anime activity. Anime allows for a therapeutic revision of their past and engages an active identification process. The girls consciously use anime to oppose authority figures and structures that rejected them. The cross-cultural use of anime also serves as a vessel for defiance, creativity and therapy.
Excavating the obscure: labouring women, their writing, and eighteenth-century England
(2017-11-23) Bertrand, Carmen
This study looks at the poetry of labouring women writers in eighteenth-century England, specifically, Susannah Harrison, Elizabeth Hands, and Ann Wilson, who contributed substantial literary works, but have remained mostly obscure. Their writing, along with the historical, social, and political climate of the period are discussed. Many other labouring women writers of the period have also made valuable contributions but have gone unnoticed, and although there has been renewed interest in labouring writers and their works over the past three decades, the majority, especially women, remain unknown. It is the intent of this author that the poetry of Harrison, Hands, and Wilson, along with other labouring women authors will be observed and recognized as significant contributions to eighteenth-century literature.
Family Dynamics and COVID-19: Homeschooling in Northeastern Ontario Prior to and During a Global Pandemic
(Laurentian University, 2024-05-10) Allarie-Sathaseevan, Stacy
In March 2020, a global pandemic rocked the planet and caused many established educational systems to come to a halt. Months into the pandemic, many decided to take on homeschooling rather than return their children to the public system at a time when the situation was uncertain and the virus was still a threat. Not only did the pandemic create new homeschoolers, but it impacted the seasoned homeschoolers by removing social networks, resources such as group learning, and also by changing household dynamics with partners now working from home. Drawing on oral interviews conducted in early 2021, my thesis investigates the impact that homeschooling has had on family dynamics in Northeastern Ontario prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The thesis concludes that many thematic components to homeschooling were experienced by both sub-groups of homeschoolers. The biggest discrepancy in these groups was in regards to hardships they felt were the most impactful. To pre-pandemic homeschoolers, homeschooling was an extension of mothering and therefore aligned well with the ideals they formed of their families. By contrast, pandemic homeschoolers struggled more significantly with the fear of losing themselves in the lives of their families, and the loss of their identities outside the home.
Freedom in play, as opposed to control in games
(2021-05-14) Soderman, S. Lowell
In this thesis I identify an important distinction: play per se is essentially free, whereas games per se are to the contrary essentially controlled. While free play and controlled games are regularly complimentary, I argue there can be rather substantive dangers when this distinction is variously confused, such that being free is wrongly understood as being controlled, or vice versa where being controlled is wrongly understood as being free.
Landscapes of conversion: the evolution of the residential school sites at Wiikwemkoong and Spanish, Ontario
(2019-02-07) Harvey, Jennifer N.
This thesis explores the history of the Society of Jesus and its efforts at missionary work from the 17th century in New France to the 20th century in Canada and the use of architecture and landscape development to settle and convert Indigenous peoples into Euro-Christian communities. The Jesuits focused on using Indigenous children to aid in the conversion of Indigenous societies and their efforts resulted in the residential school complexes of the 19th and 20th century in the villages of Wiikwemkoong and Spanish, Ontario. Using illustrations, photographs and written descriptions of former student experiences the atmosphere of the physical environments in Spanish are depicted. The ambitious land and architecture strategies of the Society contributed to the failure of the Spanish Indian Residential Schools. The thesis concludes with a discussion regarding the former sites of the Jesuit residential schools in Northern Ontario and the current discourse on Canadian residential school buildings and sites in the media.
Medievalism, the Lost Book, and Handicraft in The Lord of the Rings
(2022-10-18) Istvandi, Scott
This thesis considers medievalism and the lost book in J. R. R. Tolkien’s text, The Lord of the Rings, and the effects of inventing textual history. The Lord of the Rings was chosen for this thesis as the Ur-text of fantasy and medievalism like World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, and Dungeons & Dragons. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae is considered as an example of using the lost book motif to achieve sociopolitical advantages otherwise unavailable. The Lord of the Rings frequently associates handicraft with Good and industry (especially for the purpose of war) with Evil. These ideas are historicized through medievalism. The Middle Ages are made to be a convenient, pre-industrial, golden age of handicraft. While for some, medievalism can be a useful escape from the troubles of one’s own time—for others, symbols of the medieval past can become dangerous icons of ethnonationalism and other hateful ideas.
Portraits of Otherness: Arabs and Muslims in Homeland and Little Mosque on the Prairie
(2019-03-07) Kheshaifaty, Nujood
The U.S. media has often projected Muslims and Arabs in the West negatively, especially after the 9/11 attacks. The negativity identifies Arabs as the “other.” Through numerous symbols of difference, the U.S media helps to create a clear “us versus them” binary imposing homogeneous images of Muslims as “terrorists,” “patriarchal abusers of women,” and “tyrants.” Drawing from literature in religious and gender studies in the framework of Marxistpsychoanalysis, this thesis analyzes the American political thriller Homeland (2011) in contrast to the Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007). Written by a Muslim woman, Little Mosque creates humors out of the conflicting and complicated diversities and realities of being Muslim, while Homeland demonizes Arabs and Muslims. By employing Žižek’s concepts in The Sublime Object of Ideology, I explore how fantasies shapes human society. Žižek’s analyses help to clarify the idea that people’s fantasies are the basis of popular cultures. These fantasies in turn shape the society’s biases and these biases shape individuals’ conceptions. However, while Homeland reinforces the racist ideology and fantasy, Little Mosque challenges it. Little Mosque converts the standard monochromatic stereotypes into a diverse mosaic, thereby moving Muslims from the realm of static otherness to one of dynamic conflicts.
Reading ideological silence in late eighteenth-century English fiction: Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production and the novel of Mary Wollstonecraft
(2021-01-13) Sidun, Jenna
English novels by women of the late eighteenth century rarely if ever reflect the improvements for women’s lives that contemporary radical ideas promised. Using Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production (1966) as a research lens, author and feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft’s political ideas in her famously bold works of non-fiction are read against her novels Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). Macherey’s critique is used to trace the gap between philosophical and fictional imaginations of the late eighteenth century where it becomes clear that ruling modes of ideology are determining the representation and fate of Wollstonecraft’s heroines. Wollstonecraft’s use of sensibility and the gothic shows us that there is not language to delineate a successful feminist heroine. The findings of this study question imagined authorial freedom in the process of literary production and challenge readers to produce new knowledge through literary criticism

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