Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University

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Open Access
Worshipping at the Shrine of Wagner: Fandom, Media and Richard Wagner
(2023-03-28) Hurst, Emilie; Bailey, Steven C.
Nineteenth-century opera composer Richard Wagner has long inspired passionate responses, with contemporary commentators often noting the cult-like reverence with which lovers approached his operas. In the years since, however, interest in Wagner’s art has not disappeared. In this dissertation, I explore the contours of modern Wagnerism using as my primary case study the Toronto Wagner Society, asking how members incorporate opera into their lives and what Wagner means to them. To do this, I employ a multimethodology of ethnography, an examination of Wagner’s art and rhetoric, and a consideration of the materiality of opera. These findings are analyzed through a dual lens of fan studies and cultural techniques, with which this dissertation makes two principal moves: first, to highlight how fandom of high culture is different in nature, not in kind to fandom of popular culture; second, to propose a networked model of fandom, one which conceptualizes fandom as a dynamic assemblage of audience, media and text. Chapter 1 opens by asking what is a fan, which I resolve through the introduction of cultural techniques, and subsequently, my networked model of fandom. I also consider how cultural techniques research might expand to include ethnography. Chapter 2 lays out the main findings of my interview. Particularly, I examine how aging intersects with reception, how fans re-enact the distinction between German and Italian opera, and the joy of opera as an explicitly performance art. Chapter 3 tackles the dual description of Wagner as both “work” and “overwhelming.” By taking seriously Theodor Adorno’s criticism, I illustrate how his music and rhetoric exert their agency onto fans. The final chapter studies the materiality of reception. Employing the metaphor of Michel Serres’ parasite, I analyze how the media which host opera shape reception through an examination of the role of the theatre, and by tracking mentions of Wagner in Toronto’s Globe newspaper in the years 1875–1876.
Open Access
Ignored and Deleted: Understanding content moderators as racialized media of social network services
(2022-12-14) Baek, Seung Woo; Elmer, Greg
This thesis investigates how Facebook moderates its social media platform and mediates content flow by employing subcontracted Filipino workers as a form of racialized media filter. Scholarships on social media networks have often focused on the contents that flow through its networks, rather than the material and historical make-up of the infrastructure that enables said circulation. The thesis seeks to highlight the colonial and racist logic that undergird commercialized content moderation and its practice of global labour outsourcing that seeks to meet the Western social media and tech companies’ demand for cheap, fast, and available labour. The research looks to the history of transcontinental railway and its usage of Chinese migrant labour as a parallel media history and to Armond R. Towns’ “Black mediality” as a conceptual framework that helps illustrate the colonial mode of racialization inherent in contemporary network of social media.
Open Access
From one Place to an 'Other": Meanings, Ideologies, Identities, and Representations on the Covers of Japanese Self-Help Translations
(2022-12-14) Sampson, Esther Elizabeth; Pelkey, Jamin
This study addresses gaps in paratextual, translation, and cultural theory research concerning the covers of Japanese self-help book translations. The study looks at five book covers of The Courage to be Disliked: the original Japanese and four culturally Western English translations from Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. This study uses a novel approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis specific to cross-cultural self-help book covers based on John Bateman’s GeM model. My results indicate that elements on the covers create disparate meanings between the original Japanese version and the English translations. In addition, the difference in meanings on the covers influence which ideologies and identities are represented on the covers. Ultimately, although the Japanese cover focuses on the book’s ability to provide the expertise of Alfred Adler on self-enlightenment, the English translations centre on the foreignness of the book, representing the book’s content, source text, and source culture as ‘Other’.
Open Access
"What makes a great story?: Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives On Digital Stories By Youth Formerly In Foster Care In Canada
(2022-12-14) Ludlow, Bryn Ashley; Flicker, Sarah
What makes a great story? This qualitative arts-based dissertation study explores multidisciplinary and international perspectives on digital stories created by youth formerly in foster care. Over Skype, thirty-five participants from the arts, healthcare, education, and social services sectors watched three short digital stories about experiences of youth in foster care. Then, each participated in a 90 minute semi-structured interview to discuss the value, impact, and potential for digital storytelling to influence social change. All participants spoke about how the three digital stories presented honest and personal experiences that contrast dramatically with stories presented in the media about foster care. After viewing these stories, all participants asserted that there is a need for the creation and sharing of authentic and emotional stories that connect with specific audiences to subvert idealistic narratives in the media about youth currently and formerly in foster care. I drew on participant narratives using Constructivist Grounded Theory approaches to develop the 4A model to describe the attributes of “great stories”: Anticipation, Actualization, Affect, and Authenticity. I also created seven multimodal outputs that contributed to the shaping of the findings and enhanced reflexive praxis. The implications of this work varies across disciplines. Digital storytelling facilitators may develop insights into better supporting future participants to think critically about the impact and value of their stories before they write them. Artists may consider how best to employ their aesthetic skills and techniques to create compelling and storied artworks. Social service professionals may consider how to further leverage stories to build empathy and positively impact care delivery.
Open Access
Producing Play: The Political Economy of "Actual Play" Media
(2022-08-08) Chalk, Alex; Jenson, Jennifer; Dubois, Louis-Etienne
"Actual Play" (AP) is a recent genre of online videos and podcasts focusing on unscripted play of tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). Its most popular exemplars, such as Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, account for large revenue streams and are important cultural actors in TRPGs recent surge in popularity. However, despite widespread monetization, only a tiny fraction of AP producers earn enough to make a career of AP. This dissertation approaches AP from a political economic perspective, analysing its composition as a field of cultural production, and exploring its producers' practices in relation to questions of creative labour and what David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker term "good working lives." Building on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and in-depth qualitative interviews with 24 AP producers, it maps out relational networks with key actors that give shape to AP, including the TRPG industry, major brands like Critical Role and Dungeons & Dragons, online distribution platforms, co-production networks, and audiences. This account of the field undergirds an analysis of AP production as labour. The analysis indicates that AP producers are aware of the structural economic limitations of their craft, and underscores the importance of non-economic values, such as cultural participation, enjoyment, and community, in motivating their work. Despite AP's deep imbrication in processes of commodification and neoliberal structuration, this research speaks to its embeddedness in parallel economies of affect and play. The concluding chapter connects AP to broader evolutions in the creative economy, namely ubiquitous commodification and platformization of cultural production, and argues for the necessity of multilayered analyses of labour that are sensitive to questions of pleasure, community, and coping, as significant dimensions in the political economy of cultural production.
Open Access
Playing and Making History: How Game Design and Gameplay Afford Opportunities for a Critical Engagement with the Past
(2022-03-03) McCready, Samuel Calvin Paul; Jenson,Jennifer
For decades there has been a call for educators to explore new possibilities for meeting educational goals defined broadly under a number of 'twenty-first century competencies' curricula (Dede, 2014; Voogt et al., 2013). These stress the need for students to combine critical skills development with an understanding of the processes and reach of technologies in daily life, in order to prepare them for a shifting cultural and economic landscape. In response, an extensive literature has grown up about game-based learning (Brown, 2008; de Castell, 2011; Gee, 2003; Gee and Hayes, 2011; Jenson, Taylor, de Castell, 2011; Jenson et al., 2016; Kafai, 1995; 2012; 2016; Prensky, 2001; Squire, 2004; 2011; Steinkuehler, 2006) that seeks to explore whether/how games can be used productively in education. History as a discipline lends itself particularly well to game-based learning. It is bound up in questions of interpretation, agency, and choice, considerations that gameplay and game design as processes highlight well. My research explores the uses of digital historical games in history education, and most especially in the acquisition of critical historical skills. These skills are defined as the capacity to view and engage with the constitutive parts of historical scholarship and objects: interpretation, argument, evidence, ideology, subject position, class, race, sex, etc. This thesis will present findings from two participant-based research studies that I organized and ran between 2018 and 2019. In the first, participants were tasked with playing a counterfactual historical game, Fallout 4, and talking about their experiences, as well as answering questions about history and historical understandings. The second study took the form of an interactive digital history course. In it, students, working in small groups, were tasked with creating their own historical games. Exploring both gameplay and game production answers the call issued by Kafai and Burke (2016) that researchers should view the potential for games in education holistically, rather than in either/or terms. Taken together, this thesis argues that playing and especially making historical games offers opportunities for learners to engage with epistemological concepts in history in meaningful ways that can advance their critical understanding of history as a subject.
Open Access
Moving with Stories of "Me too.": Towards a Theory and Praxis of Intersectional Entanglements
(2022-03-03) Wiens, Brianna Ivy; MacLennan, Anne
This dissertation offers a critical-theoretical intervention into how we approach the study of mediated phenomena. Using the example of the #MeToo Movement, I bring together intersectional feminism, posthumanism, and new materialism to delineate "intersectional entanglements" in order to develop the praxes of virtual dwelling, vibrant ethos, and vital structuring and to analyze the ways that stories from the "me too." Movement flow throughout individual, collective, and structural domains of power. I argue that we need to envision spaces and relationalities through the lens of intersectional entanglements to better attune to power imbalances and abuses and to more holistically attend to the motions of the "me too." Movement's stories. As such, I follow #MeToo and its digitally-born artifacts as they travel within and between various spaces to trace links, histories, and possible futures, looking towards individual posts, hashtags, comments, images, media stories, the sociopolitical and technocultural contexts from which data emerge, and the relationships between these pieces of data. Within the current technologically motivated big data moment of hashtag research, I take a specifically situated feminist perspective to this work, turning to the ways that the "me too." Movement circulates between different domains of power and various mediated spheres to focus on smaller curated sets of data that may be lost within larger abstracted aggregates. Reflecting the ethos of the #MeToo movement, this dissertation hinges upon personal stories, including some of my own interactions with these stories, and I follow hashtagged posts on my own social media feeds as they travel within and outside social media platforms. Throughout, this dissertation suggests that as stories from the "me too." Movement travel between various temporally and spatially mediated spheres and between domains of power, they reveal new opportunities for critiquing and intervening into white supremacist heteropatriarchal systems. Ultimately, as I develop the approaches of virtual dwelling at the individual level of power, vibrant ethos at the collective level, and vital structuring at the structural level for analyzing #MeToo's intersectional entanglements, I argue that following digital phenomena throughout culturally and digitally mediated spaces provides crucial insights of intersectional protest and resistance beyond the hashtag.
Open Access
Braided Archives: Black hair as a site of diasporic transindividuation
(2022-03-03) Nyela, Océane Ingrid; Langlois, Ganaele M.
This thesis investigates how hair braiding is used by continental African women to negotiate belonging in the diaspora and Canadian society. Scholarship on the cultural significance of Black hair is usually focused on the cultural significance of "Black hairstyles" rather than the practice of hair braiding itself. Therefore, this thesis is guided by three research questions: 1) how is it that hair braiding, cornrows specifically, emerged as a cultural practice throughout the African diaspora when colonization was predicated on the complete erasure and devaluation of the African identities and their cultural/spiritual practices, 2) how can we understand hair braiding as an instance of Black technological innovation and 3) how does thinking about hair braiding as a form of transindividuation redefine what is considered technological? This thesis uses autoethnography and sensory ethnography as methodological frameworks to underline the role that sensory practices play in identity formation.
Open Access
A Genealogy of Consumer Surveillance: From the First Public Market to Eatons Department Store to Amazon
(2022-03-03) Nasirzadeh, Bahar; Elmer, Greg
Consumer surveillance has intensified over time and across differing forms of consumption space and spatial arrangement, which in turn raises the question of what explains the historical changes in the modalities of consumer surveillance. Contemporary surveillance literatures focus primarily on the current phenomenon with little consideration of the historical processes upon which the changes in the scope and intensity of the modalities of consumer surveillance were made possible. My study employs Foucauldian genealogical methodology as a system of inquiry to map the historical transformation in the modalities of consumer surveillance, by utilizing archival records, across three different consumption spaces in key stages of retail development: the first regulatory public market in the Town of York during the pre-industrial period, Eatons department store in the industrial economy, and Amazon that coincided with the rise of information economy. Conversely, contemporary theories of surveillance generally approach the intensification question by focusing on the surveillance-space axis or surveillance-consumption axis, and the spatiality of consumer surveillance is reduced to Foucauldian disciplinary panopticon. Utilizing Foucaults theories of power and governmentality and his intriguing account of the role of space in the exercise of power, my genealogical project examines the intersection of surveillance-space-consumption to understand the intensification of consumer surveillance over time across the three spaces under study. In my genealogical project, I identify five key moments pertaining to differing modalities of consumer surveillance: marketization of space, standardization of consuming bodies, statistification of consumers, virtualization of consumption, and AI inhabitation in consumer spaces. My genealogical project demonstrates that spatiality and spatialization are a recurring issue in differing modalities of consumer surveillance over time. Yet, the spatial techniques have changed and become more complex to augment the scope and intensity of monitoring and gaining of new knowledge about consumers and consumption, as part of long-standing efforts to manage the unpredictable dynamics of consumer behaviour by attaining control over all aspects of consumers life.
Open Access
Message in the Smoke: Spirit Acts of Transfer, Liminality, and Embodied Relationships in Contemporary Powwow
(2022-03-03) Meness, Jennifer Louise; Green, Ruth
My Anishinaabe inquiry explores the place of Spirit in powwow and provides a way to access, think, and reflect on Spirit in powwow. Through a beading methodology and a conceptual framework that centers Anishinaabe world view through the sound-based meaning of words in Anishinaabemowin, my dissertation examines the spiritual and philosophical connection in the language between smoke, dreams, prayer, dance, and the liminality of the powwow Arena. I situate the history and transformation of the contemporary powwow in relation to the Anishinaabe Jiinktamok ceremony and demonstrate how certain powwow dances like the Jingle Dress Dance originated through acts of transfer from a Spirit entity. Exploring the sound breakdown of the Anishinaabe word for Jingle, zhiibashka'igan, reveals the overlooked and often forgotten cultural philosophy that connects the Jingle Dress Dance to the Thunder Beings, explains the significance of the spiral of the Jingle cones, and specifically instructs how the sound and original dance combine to bring healing. Through story-gathering sessions recorded throughout the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Territory, powwow participants exemplified cultural embodiment and shared their personal, first-hand encounters with Spirits and Ancestors that directly guided or influenced their powwow Regalia and dance styles. By triangulating lived experience, Anishinaabe world view through the language, and the incomplete hints and fragments in existing literature, my inquiry shows that powwow is a gateway and liminal place where we meet Spirit, experience acts of transfer, and send messages and prayers through dance smoke. This dissertation uncovered a gap in contemporary cultural narratives as a result of language loss and gradual assimilation. This erosion of culture reveals the need for a call to action for the Anishinaabe community to embrace the responsibility of the Seventh Fire prophecy by reclaiming our world view through learning our language to restore the richness of our culture, philosophy, and original instructions from Creator. Moreover, the Anishinaabe community must continue to evaluate what we know and experience as contemporary powwow against the original Spirit and purpose for why we gather.
Open Access
Exploring Online Narratives of Inequitable Policing in Ontario: An Analysis of Tweets and Initial Web-Based News Articles in 2020
(2021-11-15) Blyth, Emily Rose; Nielsen, Emilia
Despite long standing narratives of policing as public protection in the colonial nation state of Canada, policing in this country constitutes an enduring and multifaceted health inequity for Indigenous, Black, and Mad populations. To create change it is vital to understand current conversations in our society around police interactions with the groups most harmed by these inequities and how these conversations inhibit or enable change. To this end, 2020 Ontario-based Tweets regarding interactions between these populations and police, and initial online news articles reporting on police use of lethal force against these population are analyzed. The articles are found to display baseline understandings of policing that reflect and promote the longstanding hegemonic narrative and, by minimizing harm done when police use lethal force, may inhibit change. The Tweets show counter-hegemonic understandings of policing as a source of injustice, but nonetheless are silent on racial issues when compared to Mad issues.
Open Access
Tech Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel: Decolonial Design Principles within Digital Technologies through the Development of the Indigenous Friends Platform
(2021-11-15) Mayoral Banos, Alejandro; Crow, Barbara A.
Digital technologies are not only colonial in their practices, but they are colonially created and designed. Despite the implementation of worldwide responses to counteract the effects of digital coloniality, there is still an absence of decolonial and Indigenous ways of doing digital technologies. The objective of this dissertation, therefore, is to formulate design principles of decoloniality within digital technologies through the story of the development of the Indigenous Friends Platform (IFP) in the context of Indigenous urban youth at York University in Tkaronto, Canada. The storytelling of the Indigenous Friends Platform describes how in the context of Indigenous youth in Tkaronto, the decolonial design of an Indigenous mobile application needed to be explored through a process of doing through thinking, thinking through doing. In that process of development and reflection, the mobile application was conceived as a technical being who has a Spirit and founded a tech-community: the Indigenous Friends Association. This technical being was developed in four stages that help to differentiate this space from other mainstream hegemonic digital applications and to sustain this technological solution in the long term. These four transdisciplinary stages frame the Tech Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel that consists of four design principles of decoloniality within digital technologies: (1) Waabinong (East) Digital Software Braid; (2) Zhaawanong (South) Embodiment of Indigeneity; (3) Epangishmok (West) Decolonial Infrastructure; and (4) Kiiwedinong (North) Indigenous Data Sovereignty. These four design principles foster the theoretical reflections of decoloniality and digital technologies through the differentiation of digital decoloniality and decolonial computing. Moreover, these principles provide digital activists and Indigenous communities several insights into how digital technologies can be decolonially implemented and reimagined at the community level.
Open Access
Representing Labour: Mass Medias Portrayal of Amazon Warehouse Workers during COVID-19
(2021-11-15) Fleming, Victoria Valentine; Heynen, Robert J.
Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic questions of labour have been brought to the forefront of local, national, and international conversations in relatively new ways marking a potential shift away from the dominant neoliberal consensus. A consensus normally concerned with issues concerning capital rather than issues concerning labour. This recent emphasis on labour has been reflected in the news media across the United States where questions regarding workers working conditions and workplace safety and health risks have been raised and discussed. Yet, the dominant media has often maintained an antagonistic and fraught relationship with labour since the inception of the labour movement in the United States. With the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the news industry since the 1960s, this antagonistic relationship between the dominant media and labour has only been intensified, leading to coverage of labour and issues pertaining to labour being further disregarded or marginalized by the dominant press in the United States. Focusing specifically on the coverage of Amazon warehouse workers' labour unrest under COVID-19, this thesis examines the re-inclusion of workers in American newspapers of record, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. By examining whether and how the framing of labour in these newspapers of record have shifted in the March 2020 to November 2020 period, this thesis explores how these newspapers of record reflect and refract a potential hegemonic rupture building throughout American society; and concludes that the dominant media's tendency to marginalize workers and budding labour movements suggests the need to de-marketize the news media in order to change how the dominant media frames labour.
Open Access
From Piracy Panic to Platform Praise (and Back Again): Digitization's Impact on Making, Moving, and Monetizing Music in Canada
(2021-11-15) Kribs, Kaitlyn Ashleigh; Campbell, Miranda
When Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing platform, launched in 1999, the music industry declared a crisis — but this isn't new. For decades, the music industry has feared the presence and popularity of new technologies for the distribution of music commodities, especially ones that circumvent their copyright restricted system, but these technologies have never actually led to the industry's demise. Quite the contrary, in fact. The music industry, despite wide circulation of piracy panic narratives in the early aughts (and before), has never been meaningfully disrupted, and its power structure remains intact today. Why, then, in 2017, after the global music industries were reporting an economic upswing from streaming, did major recording industry associations begin issuing reports proclaiming that, in the streaming era, music industries, and by extension musicians, are experiencing a value gap, or low remuneration? To answer this question, this dissertation employs a critical political economy of communication and culture alongside a cultural industries approach to assess the extent to which the availability of digital tools — for distribution, microfunding, and social media — has changed or reshaped the music industry, and in turn musician labour, in Canada. Although discourses about digitization's impact on music have heretofore characterized it as disruptive, that disruption has be interpreted as either productive or restrictive. On the one hand, the industry proclaims that digitization enables piracy, which hurts musicians, so it must be stopped in order for the production and distribution of music to continue; on the other hand, digital optimists argue that musicians no longer need labels, and that discussions about the destruction of the industry are merely indicative of its potential for rebirth as a musician-friendly marketplace, where fan/artist connections are direct and disintermediated. Through evidence drawn from discourse analyses of policy documents, popular press articles, and in-depth interviews with Canadian musicians, this dissertation asserts that neither perspective is correct, and instead demonstrates how digitization has culminated in a simultaneous reduction in recording-based revenue for musicians, an increase in the key responsibilities required for a musical career, and the preservation of a powerful industry hierarchy of economic power.
Open Access
Rethinking Presence as a Thinking Body: Intra-Active Relationality and Animate Form
(2021-11-15) Couillard, Paul Rene; Tschofen, Monique
This dissertation investigates presence as a guarantee or promise for enabling shared meaningfulness. Prompted by Jacques Derrida's argument that the last two millennia of Western philosophy constitute a metaphysics of presence, this careful working-through rethinks presence as a transversal concept from a multidisciplinary perspective. Following Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's contention that philosophy, science, and art constitute three distinct ways of thinking, the study integrates insights from phenomenology, neuroscience and performance art to untangle the human tendency to treat body and consciousness as distinct and mutually alien entities. Consciousness and thought are explored as phenomena that encompass percept, affect, and concept as expressions of a thinking body's animate form. When we understand our being as thinking bodies, presence no longer poses the problem of representing materiality to an immaterial consciousness. Redefined as the enacting and enacted agency of intra-active relationality, presence is refigured as the facilitator of a mutual intelligibility among entities and agencies that are co-determined through their knotted involvement. The concept of relationality replaces the conundrum of metaphoricity. Three philosophers who guided Derrida's early inquiries—Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas—are revisited by reading some of their key ideas against three notional instantiations of presence—self, world, and other—as manifested in works by three contemporary performance artists. Marilyn Arsem's Meridian, Adina Bar-On's Disposition, and Elvira Santamara's Everyday life words in progress are approached as instances of enacted philosophy, framed as practice in the flesh of theory. Three additional interlocutors provide essential concepts for this rethinking of presence: Maxine Sheets-Johnston, whose careful explorations of how we think through movement extend Husserl's phenomenological insights and challenge the artificial divide between materiality and immateriality; Karen Barad, whose agential realist ontology provides a model for the reimagining of presence as the enacting and enacted agency of intra-active relationality; and Hannah Arendt, whose schema of the vita activa is employed as an apparatus for considering the notions of self, world and others. Twelve emergent propositions offer a new framework for approaching the agencies we as thinking bodies bring to our own and the world's becoming.
Open Access
Negating Neutrality: The Marco Civil Da Internet, Informational Capitalism, and Contesting Digital Rights at the Periphery
(2021-11-15) Hoskins, Guy Thurston; Elmer, Greg
This dissertation critically examines the development of one of the worlds first civil rights frameworks for Internet users, the Marco Civil da Internet, created in Brazil 2009-2014. This bill of digital rights was the object of international acclaim as it purported to represent a robust set of protections for citizen users in the face of state and corporate abuses of power. One of the central arguments advanced in this dissertation is that for the Marco Civil to serve as an effective safeguard for citizen users it must confront the exploitations and inequities of the greatest concentration of power wielded on and through the Internet: that of informational capitalism. Chronicling how and why the Marco Civil failed in this regard and examining the implications of its emergence in a society at the periphery of the global system of informational capitalism - is the principal contribution represented by this study. In order to present this critique of the Marco Civil, this dissertation marries together a discourse and political-economic analysis to chart the symbolic and material dimensions of power present within informational capitalism, that in turn shaped the formation of this bill of digital rights. The conceptual and theoretical foundation of this dissertation is comprised of: an analytical framework for informational capitalism that accounts for its logics, mechanics and its global political-economy; a genealogy of digital rights that analyses how the dominant paradigm has been established in a manner conducive to the workings of informational capitalism; a history of communication technologies and policy in Brazil and their relationship to Brazils status within the global capitalist system. The case study chapters examining how the Marco Civil was created are based on semi-structured elite interviews with representatives of the principal economic, civic and government stakeholders, document analysis of all iterations of the bill and the records of public consultation, and discourse analysis of the key discursive interventions including blog posts, speeches and editorials. This dissertation presents the concluding argument that in order for digital rights to provide a meaningful check on the exploitations of informational capitalism they must be premised on collectivist, public and structural principles and must be sensitive to socio-cultural and political-economic particularities as opposed to a homogenizing approach.
Open Access
Escorts Online: Effects of Policy on Sex Work through Digital Spaces
(2021-11-15) Edelhauser, Diana Monica; MacLennan, Anne
In April 2018, the Trump Administration approved two acts that frame sex work as human trafficking. Subsequently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized popular adult personals site, Backpage.com, used by Canadian and American sex workers. This led to the increase in censorship of online spaces, which sex workers require to safely conduct their independent business through advertising, processing secure transactions, and maintaining safe communication with clients and the sex work community. My work aims to understand how these changes have explicitly impacted sex workers as they advertise and communicate their services, working predominantly as escorts in Canada and the United States. Governmental documents and laws like Bill C-36/PCEPA and SESTA/FOSTA, which claim to save exploited populations, may harm autonomous citizens making a living through stigmatized labour by seizing their resources and forcing them to use outdated, unsafe methods of business and communication. Most, if not all, of these regulations are developed without the input of sex workers or relevant empirical evidence. Through interviews with current sex workers in Southern Ontario and an overview of ads, a deeper understanding of the communication practices of consensual sex work, its fight for decriminalization, and the importance of the Internet is reached.
Open Access
Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Abject Female Monstrosity in Roleplaying Games
(2021-11-15) Stang, Sarah Marie; Jenson, Jennifer
Monstrous creatures have always been featured in fantasy games, both tabletop and digital, as enemies for the player to fight. Many of these monsters are overtly or symbolically coded as female and portrayed in ways that reinforce harmful, misogynistic ideologies. While gender representation has long been a crucial area of inquiry in game studies, few scholars have focused on the ways in which monstrosity is interwoven with issues of representation in games. With the understanding that gender representations in games can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect with representations of sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, and age, this dissertation examines the ways that several mainstream AAA video games remediate harmful tropes of female monstrosity derived from or inspired by monsters found in mythology, folklore, fairy tales, literature, and popular culture. Utilizing a close reading methodology employing visual and textual analysis, a thorough critical examination of female monstrosity in several games was conducted focusing on visual design, narrative role, developer commentary, and player reception. Specifically, this dissertation analyzes monsters such as the succubus, siren, broodmother, banshee, harpy, hag, and crone in games which were chosen because they are considered exemplars of the roleplaying game genre, are commercially successful, and have received extensive critical acclaim. Through an application of key theoretical concepts related to female transgression, non-normativity, and monstrosity, such as the abject, the monstrous-feminine, the femme fatale, and the grotesque, this dissertation demonstrates how mainstream games promote misogynistic beliefs via the design of female monsters and how this practice relates to the sexism that is deeply entrenched in mythology, popular culture, the game industry, and gaming culture. The conclusion from this work is that mainstream games re-entrench harmful beliefs about womens bodies and behaviours through their portrayal of female monsters and provide a symbolic enactment of gender-based violence and persecution by positioning the player as a (usually) heterosexual white male hero who must slay transgressive monstrous women in order to restore normative patriarchal order and win the game.
Open Access
The Trouble with Knowing: Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media
(2021-07-06) Jankowski, Steven John; MacLennan, Anne
Encyclopedias are interfaces between knowing and the unknown. They are devices that negotiate the middle ground between incompatible knowledge systems while also performing as dream machines that explore the political outlines of an enlightened society. Building upon the insights from critical feminist theory, media archaeology, and science and technology studies, the dissertation investigates how utopian and impossible desires of encyclopedic media have left a wake of unresolvable epistemological crises. In a 2011 survey of editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, it was reported that 87 per cent of Wikipedians identified as men. This statistic flew in the face of Wikipedias utopian promise that it was an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Despite the early optimism and efforts to reduce this disparity, Wikipedias parent organization acknowledged its inability to significantly make Wikipedia more equitable. This matter of concern raised two questions: What kinds of knowing subjects is Wikipedia designed to cultivate and what does this conflict over who is included and excluded within Wikipedia tell us about the utopian dreams that are woven into encyclopedic media? This dissertation argues that answering these troubling questions requires an examination of the details of the present, but also the impossible desires that Wikipedia inherited from its predecessors. The analysis of these issues begins with a genealogy of encyclopedias, encyclopedists, encyclopedic aesthetics, and encyclopedisms. It is followed by an archeology of the twentieth century deployment of consensus as an encyclopedic and political program. The third part examines how Wikipedia translated the imaginary ideal of consensus into a cultural technique. Finally, the dissertation mobilizes these analyses to contextualize how consensus was used to limit the dissenting activities of Wikipedia's Gender Gap Task Force. The dissertation demonstrates that the desire and design of encircling knowledge through consensus cultivated Wikipedias gender gap. In this context, if encyclopedic knowledge is to remain politically and culturally significant in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to tell a new story about encyclopedic media. It must be one where an attention to utopian imaginaries, practices, and techniques not only addresses how knowledge is communicated but also enables a sensitivity to the question of who can know.
Open Access
Punk, Obamacare, and a Jesuit: Branding the Iconic Ideals of Vivienne Westwood, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis
(2021-07-06) Moir, Aidan Marie; MacLennan, Anne
Practices of branding, promotion, and persona have become dominant influences structuring identity formation in popular culture. Creating an iconic brand identity is now an essential practice required for politicians, celebrities, global leaders, and other public figures to establish their image within a competitive media landscape shaped by consumer society. This dissertation analyzes the construction and circulation of Vivienne Westwood, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis as iconic brand identities in contemporary media and consumer culture. The content analysis and close textual analysis of select media coverage and other relevant material on key moments, events, and cultural texts associated with each figure deconstructs the media representation of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis. The brand identities of Westwood, Pope Francis, and Obama ultimately exhibit a unique form of iconic symbolic power, and exploring the complex dynamics shaping their public image demonstrates how they have achieved and maintained positions of authority. Although Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis initially were each positioned as outsiders to the institutions of fashion, politics, and religion that they now represent, the media played a key role in mainstreaming their image for public consumption. Their iconic brand identities symbolize the influence of consumption in shaping how issues of public good circulate within public discourse, particularly in regard to the economy, health care, social inequality, and the environment. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are also texts used to promote the institutions they represent, and it is this aspect of their public image that illuminates the inherent contradictions between individual and institution underlying their brand identities. Interrogating the iconic identities of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis reveals how it is the labour and strategy behind the brand that creates meaning in consumer culture. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are important figures for analysis because their iconic brand identities transcend the foundations of fashion, politics, and religion, and more significantly, demonstrate how branding as a promotional strategy is not unique to any particular realm or institution but a technique utilized by public figures regardless of the celebrity or elite status associated with their position.