The main goal of the thesis is to level counterarguments against Richard Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments for the scientificity of string theory. I will use the luminiferous aether as a parallel case study to show that if we were to accept Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments, an equally compelling case could have been made for the scientificity of Henri Poincaré’s aether theory—which has since been refuted. I also suggest that the lack of empirical corroboration of supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider undermines the (...) trustworthiness of his meta-inductive argument in particular and that Dawid may be guilty in this argument of committing the base rate fallacy as identified in the Bayesian probability theory on which he relies. Furthermore, I argue that since there is a substantive difference between how Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments are used in the canonical scientific method and how he proposes to use them in support of string theory’s scientificity, the former cannot justify the latter. Lastly, I object to taking string theory’s final theory claims seriously since certainty of string theory’s scientific validity is their truth condition, and empirically or extra-empirically, this is unobtainable. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on the ethical implications of implementing artificial intelligence in healthcare. Three approaches are considered regarding the role that artificial intelligence ought to play in healthcare: 1. the neo-luddite approach, which urges against the implementation of artificial intelligence in healthcare altogether; 2. The substitutive approach, which favours the goal of ultimately substituting artificial intelligence systems for human clinicians; and 3. The assistive approach, which favours the implementation of artificial intelligence systems in healthcare, but only as a tool to (...) assist, rather than replace, human clinicians. The dissertation begins by looking at what excellence in the practice of medicine entails and deriving some formal duties of clinician, before proceeding to assess the risks or threats that different approaches to the use of AI may pose to the practice. The first position evaluated is the neo-luddite approach. In evaluating this approach, some arguments in its favour are considered, including worries regarding biased algorithms, decreased communication with patients, confidentiality, the resurgence of paternalism, the potential for unethical design, overdependence on AI, and inscrutability. After responding to these concerns and rejecting the neo-luddite approach, the dissertation shifts its focus on to the assistive and substitutive approaches. Before evaluating these two approaches, the concepts of “assistance” and “substitution” are analyzed and definitions of assistive and substitutive technology are provided. With these definitions at hand, the remaining two approaches are assessed, beginning with the substitutive approach, which is then rejected for reasons related to both AI’s limited capacity to foster a strong patient-clinician relationship (due to its limited capacity for compassion, recognition, communication, creating trust, and respecting patient autonomy) and concerns on a more systemic level (including its likelihood to cause responsibility gaps and produce erroneous and biased decisions). The final part of the dissertation focuses on the assistive approach. Issues related to clinician-AI disagreement and the use of opaque decision support systems are addressed and recommendations for handling these issues (derived after a discussion of the epistemic role of assistive AI) are provided. The dissertation concludes with the recommendation that the assistive approach offers a superior outlook for the future of medicine. (shrink)

This project responds to the related problematic of neoliberal dehousing and the decline of the public realm. As citizens, our capacity for action and speech is curtailed by neoliberal rationality and the loss of public sites of/for educational exchange. Meanwhile, the commodification of housing and gutting of social assistance has created crisis levels of people living without housing in Canada. These are joint concerns as 1) neoliberal rationality has cemented the idea of the citizen as self-sufficient consumer, rather than collectively (...) responsible political actor, and 2) the phenomenon of dehousing is an attempt to remove from public discourse (and public space) the very citizens subjected to the violence of neoliberal policies. In addition, the very existence of a public realm for citizens to appear in together is being traded for sites of economic consumption and social conformity. This dissertation takes as its point of departure an event known as the Toronto Homeless Memorial. For almost 25 years, the Toronto Homeless Memorial has cultivated an environment that invites the public expression of grief for those who have died without housing. The monthly memorial event declares that this is not okay and demands that citizens act together to contest the ongoing violence of preventable death. Drawing on public pedagogy scholarship, political theory, and memory studies, this project asks, how does commemoration generate and reinvigorate the public realm? The account of the Toronto Homeless Memorial here is compiled through an analysis of comprehensive archival data, testimonies from past and present memorial volunteers, and ethnographic observation at the monthly memorial event. It is an attempt to map the historical context, conceptual vocabulary, and pedagogical practices of the Toronto Homeless Memorial. By doing so, this project offers insight into the relationship between commemorative pedagogy and “publicness,” the role of the archive in the public pedagogy of housing activists, and the aesthetic practices used to cultivate wonder, care, and action amidst conditions of trauma, mass privatization, and media spectacle in neoliberal times. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the normative foundation of critical social theory, arguing that a lack of recognition of epistemological subjectivity as the foundation of normativity has permitted various forms of objectivistic (metaphysical) thinking to dominate the field. Metaphysical thinking uncritically posits a reality grounded solely in the mind’s ‘intentional’ theoretical projections as a mind-independent object. By adhering to this mode of thought, critical social theory misconstrues social reality, which is primarily formed through the practices of real human subjects, as being metaphysically (...) constituted. Metaphysical thinking also falsely integrates transcendental subjectivity in the objective order of things and, thus, overlooks the essential need for transcendence as the foundation for normative practices. To liberate social theory from this alienation of the transcendental subject, this project begins with an analysis of metaphysical thought in general, drawing on Edmund Husserl’s method of transcendental phenomenology, and offers an expanded version of Kant’s critique of speculative reason. The scope of Kant’s critical investigation is confined to scholastic metaphysics, which limits its applicability in contemporary contexts. To overcome this limitation, this dissertation explores further transcendental elements at work in metaphysical thinking beyond those investigated by Kant and analyses two examples of contemporary metaphysical thinking, namely, the philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida. Transcendental phenomenology has been critiqued for purportedly advocating an ahistorical, disembodied, purely epistemological notion of subjectivity. This dissertation challenges such critiques by showing that commitment to transcendental-theoretical subjectivity allows for an analysis of material and historical subjectivity as part of a broader understanding of transcendental phenomenology. A phenomenology of material subjectivity then traces the origin of the fundamental concepts of social theory—such as alienation, justice, freedom, etc.—back to the economic structure of the lifeworld while asserting that a purely materialist and genetic analysis of these concepts fails to reveal their essentially normative nature. By maintaining a firm distinction between the transcendental and the material through epoche, transcendental phenomenology is capable of providing a normative ground for critique. This approach lays the groundwork for developing a phenomenologically clarified notion of teleological rationality on non-metaphysical grounds as an alternative to the instrumental rationality dominant in Western civilization. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concepts of cultural imposition and collective catharsis to examine how the colonized subject, like the incarcerated Black worker, undergoes a double process of dehumanization wherein they are perceived as both an invisible and hypervisible subject. I argue that the colonized subject is invisible insofar as they are subjected to various forms of dehumanization such as physiological and psychological abuse, lack of access to resources, and neglect. However, they are also perceived as hypervisible (...) because they are viewed as existing in excess as hypersexual, hyper deviant, and hyper criminal creatures and therefore deserving of the treatment they endure. Similarly, the incarcerated worker is viewed as invisible and hypervisible because they are viewed as unskilled and subhuman beings undeserving of adequate pay and protections but are also perceived as best suited to work in poor conditions doing less skilled, undervalued, low-paying work. By tracing how this relationship between race, racialization and labour is underpinned by whiteness both historically and in a contemporary sense, I demonstrate how the use of prison labour within a Canadian multicultural context must necessarily be read through a normalizing white gaze, under the guise of public safety and rehabilitation; here the prison functions as a disciplinary site wherein Black and racialized prisoners are constructed as inferior beings in need of heightened control through labour. In doing so, I argue that the use of prison labour in Canadian prisons is a form of colonial violence that reproduces inferior and superior colonial identities. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis is to lay the groundwork for an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image as works of film poetics. English-language commentators tend to treat the books primarily as philosophical works, and only secondarily as contributions to film theory. I argue that this interpretive strategy gets things exactly backwards. To understand both the philosophical and film-theoretical value of the Cinema books, we need to see them mainly as contributions to the (...) field of film poetics. My argument for this claim proceeds in three main steps. First, I explain what film poetics is and isolate the claims it's primarily in the business of making. Second, I situate Cinema 1 and 2 within this tradition and compare the books’ theoretical approach to the methodology developed in David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film. And finally, I gesture towards some of the implications that Cinema 1 and 2 have for philosophy, showing how the books extend and challenge Kant’s “aesthetic” inquiry in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

Major Research Paper (Master's), Critical Disability Studies, School of Health Policy and Management,Faculty of Health, York University.

This dissertation begins with the query: how can the exclusion of emotions, and the presence of a dichotomy of reason and emotion, be accounted for in political life? Using the social history method of political theory—a method premised upon the interdisciplinary and socially-embedded character of political ideas and theoretical works—I investigate the premises of the notion of the reason-emotion dichotomy through a historical, philosophical, and political examination of the passions/emotions and rationality within the framework of the divide between the private (...) realm and the political realm, or the public-private dichotomy. Working through Jürgen Habermas’s influential conceptualisation of the bourgeois public sphere, and placing it in dialogue with the history of the “countervailing passions” theory of early modern moral and political philosophy, I discovered a historical tendency by which the conception of reason is narrowed to comprise self-interested calculative behaviour, set against that which is irrational or passionate. A deep historical investigation into the origins of the concept of “emotions” reveals a second related tendency, by which what is deemed “emotion” is reduced through the broadening of the category to be divorced from and oppositional to the rational. My work demonstrated that these two tendencies are intertwined with the foundational public-private dichotomy of modern politics, by which the political is deemed wholly rational, and the irrational/passionate/emotional must remain outside of politics, in the private realm. These two dichotomies, of reason and emotion and the public and the private, are fundamental tenets of liberal political philosophy, thus posing an insurmountable challenge for contemporary political philosophy which seeks to include emotions in liberal politics. I demonstrate that the exclusion of the emotions, the crux of the reason-emotion dichotomy, is not based on a general exclusion of emotions in themselves, but is actually based upon the social exclusion which is a necessary determinant of liberal politics. My analysis of emotion in liberal politics, and critique of contemporary projects of political emotions, challenges dominant understandings of democracy and of inclusionary versus exclusionary political ideas, theories, structures, and institutions. (shrink)

This project seeks to dispel the belief that transhumanism (a movement advocating for human-enhancement through technology) is diametrically opposed to religion. Transhumanism, rather than being a non-religious or secular movement, is instead a survival of Christian religious ideology shorn of its explicit religious character and transformed into a less religiously-apparent secular-scientific guise, retaining both beneficial and dangerous religious structures that continue to persist in transhumanist discourse. Many of the foundational religious structures that are largely unrecognized by transhumanists that I discuss (...) include: the elimination of death, the sacredness of human life, the imposition of human-exceptionalism by understanding humanity as God-like, and finally, an unwavering faith in predetermined and unalterable messianic future events. Regardless of their presentation in a secular-scientific idiom, transhumanism’s retention of religious structures appropriates and continues the history of religious ideas deeply ingrained in Western culture, in what I call, following Jacques Derrida, transhumanism’s “religion without religion.” My argument employs a deconstructive logic of the X without X, or in this case, a “religion without religion,” to examine some of the ways religion may be extended by non-religious means, such as through the secular-scientific discourse of transhumanism. The value of thinking of transhumanism as a religion without religion, an approach lacking in current scholarship, is its ability to recognize the discursive histories of transhumanism’s religious past, while also recognizing the new, religious and non-religious possibilities of transhumanism’s future. My deconstructive perspective highlights the religious structures within transhumanism, showing how transhumanism unwittingly perpetuates dogmatic formulations of religious structures, like a determinate messianism, that may inflict incalculable harm to humanity and nonhuman beings alike. Recognizing these religious structures reveals how transhumanism can draw strength from the religious structures they too often ignore by being more self-critical and acknowledging the need for the non-knowledge of faith even in scientific pursuits, while also avoiding the dangers of religion, such as the over-confidence in technology to solve the problem of death. This project uncovers some of the harmful effects of the religious structures that survive in transhumanist discourse in the hopes that these dangers may be mitigated or avoided in the future. (shrink)

The dissertation addresses historical and contemporary legal literatures—generally literatures that have not succeeded in becoming convention (Peter Goodrich)—that assert or rely on the human body’s “jurisgenerativity” (Robert Cover) to evaluate and determine what should be lawfully done with the human dead or tissues. These literatures demonstrate the limits of doctrinal legal methods and conventional jurisprudence which ordinarily deploy concepts of property or personhood. Instead of property or personhood, these literatures require the jurisprudent to attune to the heteronomy of flesh, a (...) law engendered in the materiality of the body decomposing, cut into parts, or as fragments falling away from the individual. It requires the jurisprudent to reach past divisions of nomos and physis, playing with the normativity of corporeal forms. Drawing on concepts of critical legal theory including heteronomy (Stewart Motha, Jean-Luc Nancy); lawscape (Nicole Graham, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos); jurisgenesis and biogenesis (Robert Cover, Margaret Davies); antirrhesis and the antinomian (Peter Goodrich, Marty Slaughter); and office and technics of jurisdiction (Olivia Barr, Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Marc Trabsky), the author suggests how these literatures and their engagement with human corporeality can be re-read to foster alternate approaches to the laws of the dead and bodily matter. This leads the author to conclude the dissertation by gesturing to the possibility of a minor jurisprudence (Peter Goodrich, Shaun McVeigh, Panu Minkkinen) where the jurisprudent writes as flesh (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), inspired by re-readings of the failed literatures he covered, so to inhabit different modes of relating with corporeality. (shrink)

Employing an auto-ethnographic perspective and non-linear notions of time, "Sculpting in Time" identifies erosions of meaning and agency under techno-capitalism and explores the implications of their disappearance for the democratic ideal. The theoretical framework of this research-creation dissertation problematizes linear conception of time and posits that the rethinking of time can be emancipatory; when time is seen instead as the unfolding of relations, with others and with oneself, sensitivities can be honed toward other ways of embodying the present and conceptualizing (...) notions of progress. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s Critiques of Metaphysics and Humanist-Political Critiques of Heidegger introduces the reader to the work and controversies of renowned German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The dissertation aims to situate the critique of Heidegger in his writings as well the impactful meaning of his original and widely acknowledged contribution to philosophy. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is of the linear-temporal-causality of metaphysical-doctrinal mindsets denoting an undynamic thinking of the spatial-temporal, all too narrowly conceiving the ontological question resulting in a templated use (...) of force which is violent nihilistic, abrupt, and impacts all spheres of life: philosophical-cultural-social-political. Heidegger took part in the political nihilism of his day. The thinking of the abrupt-end as well as the political crisis of his time also led Heidegger to radicalize the meaning of Unter-gang as thinking the tragic-ruin, nihilistic desolation, an apocalyptic end. Heidegger sought to think anew, ‘telos’ and ‘peras’ as casual-ends-and enclosed-limits, key-core terms that structure metaphysical thought. Heidegger names the event of appropriation: [Ereignis], in the realm of the immediate, as the eschatological utter-most-point-limit-edged-stand, a “step-back” [Schritt zurück], a new thinking of phronesis, an embodied intuitive thinking. As an original contribution, the dissertation offers a dynamic engagement with Heidegger through a new body-rhythm thinking hermeneutic-phenomenology with the following: Unter-scheidung (as separating or dissociating), a re-orientation of directionality by Wider-spruch (opposite in nature, direction in meaning), towards a Grund-mittle-punkt (ground negotiated, as a medium-middle-range-as point hold-footing), rethinking the subject in space-time. The dissertation offers an original perspective on Heidegger’s reading of the German Idealist poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister.” The dissertation reviews intertwinings of Heidegger and ancient East-Asian thinking: Heidegger’s one-stroke-folding-resonance with East-Asian calligraphy. The dissertation reviews thinkers who were influenced by Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical enclosures and the phenomenological meaning of otherness, outlining critiques of metaphysics and of Heidegger by a humanist-person-centered approach. The notable thinkers are Herbert Marcuse, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and Jacques Lacan. The work of these thinkers, the dissertation concludes, lead to the unthought terrain of peripheral thinking, a corporeal engagement, rethinking locality-temporality as situated-otherness, as a new praxis. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the salience of the question of ethical leadership for the radical activist left. It opens with a critique of horizontalism, an outlook that enjoys currency in activist and academic circles, and proceeds to make the case that hierarchies need not be authoritarian and can indeed be beneficial, both from democratic and ethical vantage points. I demonstrate that horizontalism is flawed by examining both its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of it. In making the case for the desirability (...) of leadership on the left, I draw on facets of Critical Theory, with an emphasis on the ideas of Erich Fromm. Engaging aspects of the famous Fromm-Marcuse debate, I argue that Fromm provides a more robust foundation for a theory of the transition from capitalism to socialism than does Marcuse. I then show that Fromm’s distinction between rational and irrational authority, in conjunction with his psychological ideal of productiveness, lays the groundwork for a theory of ethical leadership. While articulating a theory of ethical leadership, I take to task extant, mainstream theories of leadership for circumscribing the potentialities inherent to ethical leadership. I argue that ethical leadership can find its most authentic expression only in the domain of radical activism and politics. I then delve into the psychoanalytic problematic of identification, with an eye to demonstrating that certain interpretations of the process of identification encourage an understanding of authority that dovetails with the imperatives of ethical leadership. I conclude by providing two real life examples of ethical leadership, Errico Malatesta and Herbert Marcuse, and by discussing the possibility that charisma can be ethical. I contrast ethical charisma with authoritarian charisma and the manufactured celebrity charisma of the culture industry. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns ethical and epistemic assessment of the use of state power to defend against information threats and hostile activities, especially in digital information environments, an activity which has been described as the pursuit of cognitive security. I have three main aims. Firstly, to motivate scholarly interest in what I call the ethics of cognitive security - an interdisciplinary effort to provide coordinated empirical, theoretical, and ethical input into this exercise of power, specifically by democratic states. To the extent (...) that these are decide to develop offensive and defensive strategies for the conduct of information warfare, we can ask if there are empirical and ethical considerations that should inform this. I consider at length the literature on epistemic paternalism and the extent to which such efforts might be paternalist and thus objectionable or in need of special justification. Secondly, to articulate an ecological conception of our epistemic interdependence on the information environment that can help to describe the public interest in its responsible stewardship. This helps to generate less-securitized formulations of the aims and constraints of defensive operations that interface better with our ethical interests in the practice of cognitive security. I draw on the social epistemology literature, especially where it concerns testimony and epistemic dependence, and develop a conception of epistemic environmental dependence and trust. I connect this to environmental policy and philosophy scholarship that concerns the ethical relations that arise as a result of interdependencies, and the sorts of policy instruments that can be appropriate for protecting this kind of shared interest. Finally, I apply this conceptual framework to the specific cognitive security problem of hostile disinformation. Drawing on a conceptual analysis of epistemic pollution I argue that we should favour root cause analysis and remediation, even where it might seem to involve more substantial interference, rather than reactive efforts to filter and remove these, for reasons that include both empirical adequacy and respect for relevant ethical interests. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary thesis explores dance creation-as-research and phenomenological methods to articulate an embodied dialogue with the more-than-human world. Drawing on original phenomenological writing generated through embodied research, the work argues for dance practice as a salient tool for reimagining traditional forms of knowledge production and enacts the speculative possibilities of our communicative capacity between human and more-than-human bodies. The project imagines and articulates how we can bring relational, responsible thinking and sensing to our everyday movements while navigating the ruins of (...) the so-called Anthropocene. Using research-creation as a frame, this project posits that dance-based systems of improvisation have the potential to interrupt and inhibit our habitual modes of attention, expanding our capacity for interspecies dialogue and collaboration. The work engages with the fields of dance studies, research-creation, phenomenology and posthuman feminist theory, to create definitional anchors in dialogue with original, phenomenological writing. The research expresses a process of discovery through the lived body and articulates a practice that enlivens bodies and builds worlds, where thinking, practice, and theory can come alive inside everyday living. The research moves off the page and into the body, in the form of a site-adaptive soundwalk, as an embodied call to action for fleshy, earthly survival. (shrink)

One central commitment of comparative psychology is the prohibition against using folk-psychological concepts to explain nonhuman animal behavior, which requires us to disavow “the attribution of human qualities to other animals, usually with the implication it is done without sound justification” (Shettleworth 2010). Many scientists and philosophers believe attributing human folk-psychological concepts to nonhuman minds constitutes an egregious violation of the anti-anthropomorphism principle. Penn and Povinelli (2007) describe the practice as “insidious” and stemming from our “folk-psychological imagination.” Alternatively, others believe (...) the prohibition against folk psychology is misguided and unnecessary. Andrews (2020) suggests “folk psychology plays an essential role in comparative psychology as the starting point, but not the end point, of our research.” I adjudicate this debate by examining our use of folk psychological concepts in comparative psychological research. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I investigate the moral and social problems associated with ‘blackness’ in its historical and contemporary usage. Since ‘blackness’ now identifies continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) without major moral concerns, it seems ‘blackness’ has been normalized in society. From the 1960s, ‘blackness’ has become beautiful, socially uplifting and politically effective as a resistive socio-political and socio-economic device. This positive outlook apparently suggests that ‘blackness’ has been delinked from its historical problematics as the signifier of ugliness, evil, immorality, barbarism, (...) etc. My findings suggest this is not necessarily the case. Even today, ‘blackness’ continues to play an exclusionary and denigrating function. More than half a century after the end of official imperial colonialism and formal racial segregation in the Americas, CADA have accepted skin colour as opposed to cultures and geographies to be a global, unifying identity. Using archival sources and a multidisciplinary scholarly literature, from the classical antiquity (Ancient Rome and Greece) to the present, I interrogated how ‘blackness’, which was used by the slave and the colonial regimes to commodify, segregate, debase, and socially patronize CADA, finds positive, decolonial social currency in its contemporary normalization. Four theories have been helpful: Phenomenology, genealogy, postcolonial theory and Gramscian hegemony. Through phenomenology I interrogate what ‘blackness’ means. Through Foucault’s genealogy, I interrogate how ‘blackness’ changed overtime and how discourse was used to impose it. I use postcolonial theory to interrogate the colonial era under which ‘blackness’ was operationalized by the colonial and the slave regimes. Finally, Gramsci’s hegemony through consent helped me make sense of how ‘blackness’ is still relevant today. I wondered if there is a significant difference between ‘blackness’ as used by the colonial and the slave regimes and ‘blackness’ as used today. My findings show that ‘blackness’ still pays unintentional homages to colonial epistemes and epistemologies. I have called these homages colonial traps and bad faith. Colonial traps are hegemonies through consent. Bad faith is a willing and knowing abdication of personal responsibility. That ‘blackness’ is necessary for solidarity and resistive purposes against colour-based prejudices has been put to the test within this colonial entrapment context. CADA, who have convincingly shown over the last hundred years that they are capable of successfully challenging Eurocentric hegemonies, seem unable to wiggle out of colonial appellations. (shrink)

How can we understand Muslim women’s agency? Is it possible to see such agency through the rubric of feminist universalism rather than through the standpoint of religious difference? This project presents a critical examination of the creative capacity of Muslim women to contribute to feminist and political goals, not as women who are Muslims, but through their religious identities. My objective is to build a theoretical grounding for a feminist ethic espoused by Muslim women that is not based on difference. (...) Furthermore, I argue that this ethic can be politically engaged, and can articulate meaningful interventions for universal expressions of feminist struggle. As such, it is a critique of current literature on Muslim women’s agency which focuses on their particularity as the only site of legitimate knowledge production. I will argue that an exclusive focus on difference prevents these women from being understood as agentive through their religious identities and serves to isolate them from inclusion in larger feminist political discussions. As the title of this proposal shows, I rely on the concept of ‘left universalism’ as articulated by Sekyi-Otu. He presents a strong argument for the use of universalism as a tool in the hands of non-Western cultures to bring out organic and generative theoretical ideals that lead to progressive social and political change. Within poststructural and postcolonial studies, universalism has (rightfully) been deemed suspect in projects of Western cultural and political domination. However, Sekyi-Otu points out that condemning universalism as an imposition ultimately prevents non-Westerners from reclaiming parts of their tradition that overlap with Western values. Left universalism provides a theoretical methodology to better theorize religious women’s agency, ultimately highlighting universal aspects of feminist agency, such as multidimensionality and relationality. (shrink)

Complexity is among the most used yet rarely defined and often misunderstood terms in sustainability science. In this text, I argue that the conventionalization of the concept of complexity has resulted in the conflation of “thin” (i.e., reductionist) complexity and “thick” (i.e., perspectivist) complexity, and the resultant confusion surrounding these categories has created unnecessary tensions between sustainability science and environmental justice. Employing William E. Connolly’s ontopolitical-genealogical approach, I tease out implicit ontological commitments relating to complexity, holism, organicism, and environmental determinism, (...) in the intellectual history of systems theory, cybernetics, and theoretical ecology. I critique key interlocutors in the pluralism debate within ecological economics to illustrate how conventionalized complexity has created barriers to pluralistic engagement between ecological economics and political ecology. Following radical democratic theorists, I argue that the distinction between thick and thin complexity is essential to fostering “agonistic pluralism” between sustainability science and environmental justice while also serving as a defence against the misuse of systems concepts by anti-pluralists, authoritarians, and technocrats. I argue that totalizing, functionalist expressions of systems theory exacerbate political violence by displacing political discourse and serving as a pretext for ecofascism. As an alternative to functionalist organicism, I articulate a relational ontology of life, in the tradition of Robert Rosen and Terrance Deacon, that creates affordances for agency that is both creative and reflexive. I explore how such an ontology destabilizes politically conservative, neoliberal, anti-pluralist interpretations of thin complexity, and I argue that thick complexity, relational holism, and teleodynamism can serve as core concepts for a more robust discourse in ecological political economy that is concurrently attentive to the dual imperatives of biophysical limits and environmental justice. (shrink)

This book proposes an experiment: to unfold image and text together. Working in reverse, it begins with the painting processes of Francis Bacon (as analyzed by Gilles Deleuze), the metaphysics of philosopher Henri Bergson and the psychology of Carl Jung. The book attempts to build an in-between; to start with givens and fill in the space that blends them together into a smooth transition (intensity). Bringing ideas from philosophy, psychology and art together, and utilizing strategies that have practical application in (...) creative arts as part of its methodology, the paper reframes creative (or analogical) thought process as being a key component in intelligence. We suggest new avenues that need to be further explored in order to bring image-sensation into more meaningful contact with the discursive systems of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is written to accompany my MFA thesis exhibition, the work of holding and exiting, which took place April 10 - May 6, 2023 at shell projects, 13 Mansfield Avenue, Toronto, Canada. The exhibition consisted of lumen prints (a sort of photogram gone wrong), sculptures made from found and discarded materials, and elusive feelings that floated through the space. This paper, “Don’t Let’s Go: Preemptive Grief, A World, and Others” is in a symbiotic relationship with the work of holding (...) and exiting. The paper supplements, is informed by, and informs the work. Grieving the climate crisis can feel diffuse, confusing, and hopeless. The works explored this nebulous grieving through affective means. Artworks that are both abject and beautiful were assembled together in shell projects in a way that asked the viewer to be in intimate relation. The works and the paper search for a more-than-human collectivity. Many of the moments, theorists, and beings that have brought these works into fruition find themselves here in the space of this paper: a reflection, an experimentation, a hand reaching out to the audience; this paper cannot quite go it alone, enmeshed and yet different from the work in the gallery. (shrink)

What if myths grew from the earth, unfurling their petals like fists? What if they lived in the undergrowth, in tree hollows, in between the feathers of ravens' wings? My MFA thesis exhibition, Natural Fictions (April 17-21, 2023), was produced with these questions in mind. In this support paper, I explore the ways in which painting can be a pathway to enchantment. In particular, I focus on the enchanted gaze, and how this gaze both complicates and enriches our interactions with (...) the more-than-human world. (shrink)

There are multiple ways of framing the analysis of racism and racial discrimination as public problems. Crucial differences in scope, ideological positions and theoretical standpoints inform these frames. Despite the tensions and disagreements among these stances, they all embrace four epistemological features: they treat racism and racial discrimination as given realities, which have an independent existence from awareness or recognition; they assume anti-racism and anti-discrimination practices and theories as contestations to those given realities; they all conceive power in terms of (...) differentials in resources, access/opportunities, and capacities to impose a rule, interest or ensure privileges; and they understand subjectivity as relational identities deriving from the givenness of racism. While acknowledging these assumptions’ political and intellectual value and being fully aligned with the legitimacy of their purposes, this dissertation problematizes the theory of knowledge that makes them possible. It also proposes an alternative theory of knowledge and discusses the epistemic consequences of embracing a shift in how we understand and mobilize against racism. With the support of the theory of objective validity of the Marburg Neo-Kantian School, and Michel Foucault’s work on discourse, power, and subjectivity, I present three main arguments. First, I contend that racism and racial discrimination are not given but become epistemologically established through the discursive practices anti-racism mobilizations embrace. Second, I claim that anti-racist problematizations are not reactive but have constitutive power. This position implies complementing the idea of power as disparity with the idea of power as the possibility of objectifying reality. Finally, this dissertation argues that the subjectivities anti-racism talks about emerge in discourse and only become self-evident through discursive practices. The thesis is structured into four chapters. Chapter 1 critically interrogates the mainstream theory of knowledge of anti-racism politics and introduces the alternative approach I am suggesting. In the following chapters, the dissertation presents three cases that serve to illustrate my theory of knowledge: the First Universal Races Congress of 1911; the conceptual and theoretical transitions in international politics against racial discrimination between the late 1980s and the 1990s; and the emergence and consolidation of the Afrodescendants as subjectivity in the early 2000s. (shrink)

This paper explores, from the subjective positions of mother and figurative painter, the connections and incongruences between the practice of painting and the care practice of mothering. It considers the temporal de-calibration that occurs when engaged in the processes of both practices to shift the focus away from a timely, finished product. Through embodied and autotheoretical lenses, it argues for a reconfiguration of the gaze to look outward from mothering in order to emphasize practices of attunement. It contemplates how artwork (...) might make publicly visible the maintenance and emotional labour of being alongside an other, and posits that painting can be positioned as a form of documentation for the mostly invisible parts of mothering. It considers how engaging with paintings created from the perspective of those who practice care might trouble the boundaries between art and life, public and private, practice and product, and artist and mother. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I interpret Spinoza’s ontological argument to mean that the partiality of a part (mode) cannot be conceived except within the context of a whole (substance) in which it participates. Yet, insofar as a modified part (in-another) has a true idea of its own modified partiality, then that idea, and whatever follows from it, must be as irreducibly whole (in-itself) as the substantial whole in which it participates. This constitutes what I describe as the paradox of singularity in (...) Spinoza’s thought because it establishes an ontology in which singular things are singularized or differentiated through an intersection of causes that must be conceived either in-themselves, in-another, or both at once. Given Spinoza’s (in)famous concept of absolutely infinite substance, the role and function of individuality and individuation in his philosophy has been a popular subject of dispute in the 20th century secondary literature. Some authors have sought to portray Spinoza as a champion of an untethered individualism, whereas others have emphasized the collectivistic bonds that bind individuals together in cooperative endeavors. Most productively, recent scholars have presented Spinoza as a thinker of what they call transindividuality. Spinoza, however, never used the term transindividuality in his writings, but he did employ two interrelated concepts of singularity (res singulares) which I thus argue should be described instead as paradoxical singularity. Many of the proponents of Spinoza’s transindividualism, or what I call paradoxical singularity, have overlooked the way in which his views on individuality and collectivity follows from the paradoxical logic with which Spinoza claims to know of the necessary existence of God. For this reason, few have understood how or why Spinoza’s ontological argument facilitates the non-ancillary adequacy between religion and philosophy as equivalent expressions of this immanent certainty. I therefore demonstrate how Spinoza’s ontological argument offers a paradoxical logic with which to identify, relate, and interpret universality and particularity. I argue that Spinoza’s ontological argument for the necessary existence of God constitutes a theory of action, way of being, or an ethos in which philosophy and religion are functionally identical. Yet, given the paradox of singularity that it involves, participation in this ethos presupposes a power of interpretation from which and for which individuals of a compatible nature strive to persevere in their being together. (shrink)

This study explores the influence of negative mixed emotions on consumer purchase choices in the context of environmental degradation. Previous research has focused on attitudes and emotions affecting preferences and willingness to pay, but understanding the gap between willingness to pay and actual behavior is crucial. The study uses a discrete choice experiment to examine the direct effect of "mixed integral eco-emotions" on purchase choices. Participants make a discrete purchase decision between two products with different environmental attributes and prices. Results (...) show that eliciting mixed emotions, including sadness, anger, and guilt, significantly impacts pro-environmental purchases across various price points and product categories. The research also considers environmental attitudes, antecedents to emotions, risk attitudes, and construal level. This study emphasizes the importance of comprehending the intention-to-action gap and the role of mixed emotions in predicting pro-environmental consumer behavior, necessitating new models for understanding and explaining such behavior. (shrink)

This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration into how translation is defined, taught and practiced in translational medicine. Based on fieldwork at translational research centres–one in Saint John and one in San Francisco–I confront a central tension between ways of understanding what translation is and how it should be performed in biomedicine. For some, translational medicine is simply another approach to commercializing research. For others, it is a novel way to bring researchers, governments, private companies and local communities together to shape (...) a more democratic biomedical future. I argue that the latter perspective suffers from a lack of deep appreciation for the cultural, political and ethical complexities of translation. This is problematic because translational medicine implies the coming together of multiple languages, disciplines, bodies, technologies and institutions, and suggests a greater sensitivity to the unique and ever-shifting experiences of patients and their loved ones. Addressing these concerns, I put translational medicine in conversation with a variety of STS theories, and those from other disciplines that have long debated the messiness of translation. Experimenting with a deliberative approach to STS, I used participant observation, semi-structured interviews and online ethnography to actively debate what’s at stake in a translational approach to biomedicine. My unique role as STS scholar allowed me to challenge frameworks proposed for the near and distant future of translational medicine. Rather than an antagonistic posture, I worked, though often failed, to develop what Sarah Franklin (2013) calls “interliteracies,” or the “disciplined reading across disciplines” with my interlocutors. These interventions culminated with me combining STS and translational medicine in the design of a role-playing exercise for high school students at Princeton University. This exercise imagined a future where non-expert publics were more fully involved in determining what pieces of research can and should be translated. This dissertation contributes to increased calls for engaged approaches to STS that challenge and make decisions about how technoscience is practiced. By showing that translation is a shifting, non-linear and always unfinished process, this project opens space for STS to not simply say “it could be otherwise,” but actively be a part of making it otherwise. (shrink)

Ballads for Re-Membering is an examination of themes of consciousness such as time, space and emergence, set against the precarity of the climate crisis. Using an arts-and-Zen-practice-based methodology of research-creation, and a theoretical framework of New Materialism and Post-Humanism (“K(now)n Materialism”), this feminist response to the climate crisis manifests an otherwise-possible that is already right-here, taking cues from the emergent playful worlds of childhood studies and music, with interbeing as the net holding all. The dissertation is important because the climate (...) crisis is one of (if not the most) pressing and crucial challenges of the present, and we must keep finding ways to address it using our imaginations. Because my work uses a research-creation process, the methodology provides a unique opportunity to look at a complex set of issues in a nuanced and artistic way. The form also belies the function: These creative and academic outputs fold and knead together conceptual spaces; playful and engaging imaginings that slip through our habitual systematic thinking in linear time, space, and forward progress. In the form of three Ballads, I look at time, space, and emergence (Ballad 1), offer a critical analysis of the New Nature Movement, look at childhood and time, and music (Ballad 2), and perform an audio story called Finding Solace (Ballad 3). This young adult story takes the research to the speculative: What if there was a world (mostly) without humans, where Artificial Intelligence was so intelligent, it went on “living” without humanity? The key results of this work include making new forms of knowledge as ways of understanding our precarity; innovative research methods like song, story, and letters to my daughter; engaging and accessible research outcomes, and contributions to the field of New Materialism, Research-Creation, and artistic responses to climate change. It is my hope that this work encourages other researchers to explore interdisciplinary approaches, allows for engagement due to its accessibility, and contributes to a greater understanding of our interbeing. (shrink)

Historically-informed reflection on democracy reminds us of a curious fact: representative government, supposedly the modern form of democracy, was not originally envisioned as a technical solution to the difficulty of assembling the citizen body of an extensive nation state, but rather as a qualitatively different political form. The first thinkers to dedicate their attention to representative government in a systematic way were perfectly candid in contrasting this type of regime with democracy, which they viewed as an archaic form of politics (...) that was at worst anarchic and at best inappropriate to modern conditions. Much of twentieth century democratic theory has been staged as a dispute between the advocates of a normative model of participatory democracy and an empiricist research program that takes the identification of democracy with representative institutions for granted. This project does not attempt to relitigate this dispute, but rather to widen its stakes. Political representation is only one facet of the modern anti-democratic project. The fact that modern democratic institutions are composed of anti-democratic political forms raises a more extensive set of problems than an exclusive focus on representation would permit us to see. Behind the debate concerning participatory and representative democracy lies an older and more extensive field of conflict: the dispute between liberalism and democracy. Whether one considers the norm of popular sovereignty, the use of elections, or the practice of parliamentary government by discussion, a cursory historical investigation reveals that the political forms which today are considered inseparable from democracy originate in a struggle waged by hereditary aristocracies against monarchical power, or a struggle waged by the “natural aristocracy” of civil society against democracy itself. The following study has two stages. The first is a history of liberal thought written with an emphasis on this tradition’s responses to the threat of democracy. This history is divided into three moments, each of which outlines a distinct family of political reflection: juridical liberalism, empiricist liberalism, and parliamentarism. The second stage is an attempt to identify the contribution of each family of liberal reflection to the modern understanding of democracy. In the final chapters, this is extended to contemporary democratic theory, which is correctly understood as the inheritor of liberal, not democratic, political forms, and which renews many aspects of the liberal tradition’s critique of democracy despite its avowed acceptance of democracy. (shrink)

Autotheory is a term that has emerged in the zeitgeist of contemporary feminist cultural production to describe works of literature, art, and criticism that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective modes with philosophy and theory in experimental ways. While an emergent term, autotheorya merging of the autobiographical with the philosophical or theoreticalcan be traced through earlier feminist art, literature, theory, and activism. In this dissertation, I take up autotheory in relation to a selection of post-1960s textschoosing works that engage a (...) practice of autotheory in particularly performative waysto consider the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of this feminist practice across media. Moving between the disciplines of English literature, Art History, Curatorial Studies, and Performance Studies and grounding my transdisciplinary methodology in Mieke Bals notion of concept-based practices for interdisciplinary research, I historicize and theorize autotheory through close readings of three primary texts: Adrian Pipers Food for the Spirit (1971), Chris Krauss I Love Dick (1997), and Maggie Nelsons The Argonauts (2015). As I conduct extended readings of these three works, I gesture to related texts by other artists and writers to read the given work in relation to a larger movement or community of autotheoretical feminist and queer feminist impulses. My inquiry into autotheory involves reading works that have been described as autotheoretical (like The Argonauts) and recasting older works in light of this new term (like Food). I contextualize autotheory in a larger history of conceptualism, body art, performance, and art writing practices, and I focus on the period between the late 1960s and the present (late 2010s) as a pivotal time for thinking through autotheory as an aesthetic mode. I conclude that, for feminist artists and writers working in the wake of modernism, autotheory becomes a ripe mode of practice for processing, metabolizing, embodying, enacting, wracking, wrestling with, and reiterating or performing philosophy and theory from embodied, autobiographical, and otherwise subjectivized positionings; this is often done in ways that resonate with a politics of intersectionality and the move toward integrating art, life, theory, and practice. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the meaning of ethical responsibility as a fundamental feature of teacher identity. While there is a tendency to construct both responsibility and teacher identity in terms of instructional practice, agency, and competency, this research foregrounds understudied complexes of dependency, uncertainty, and failure. Drawing on continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, I frame teacher identity from the vantage of concepts of natality, hospitality, and relationality to illuminate a central conflict of responsibility that places the teacher in a tension between an (...) idealized conception of egoless passivity and the emotional situation of an ego-based affect of self-preservation and ego interests. Conflict and anxieties result, constituting the teacher’s emotional world. Through my investigation of this tension, I offer critique of the all-loving teacher figure by exposing how this idealization conceals the implication of education in discourses of aggression, exclusion, and social control. Literary portrayals of child/adult and student/teacher relationships in novels provide novel data to examine these tensions. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the legal and sociocultural linguistic implications of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v. Cuerrier (1998) where it was ruled that the nondisclosure of HIV-positive status could vitiate otherwise freely given consent, resulting in the sexual act being deemed aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault. Specifically, I am interested in how the logic of HIV nondisclosure law is deeply interwoven with heteronormative assumptions about sexuality and how consent is negotiated in practice. To interrogate the often-unstated (...) assumptions underlying the Court’s decision, I examine how the legal imperative to speak about one’s HIV status is resolved within gay sexual spaces (where consent is customarily negotiated wordlessly). My goal, in doing this, is to identify how these competing imperatives (i.e., the legal obligation to speak and a custom of staying silent) are resolved within cultural and linguistic practice. In this study, I use autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, and legal analysis to examine the legal and political implications of the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure. My findings suggest that existing approaches to HIV nondisclosure in criminal law are insufficiently attentive to how regulatory apparatuses, including social norms, shape the interpretation of sexual practices. This often results in courts confounding sexual diversity with sexual violence, which continues a long-held tradition of criminalizing sexual minorities. Guided by these insights, my legal analysis challenges the logic of HIV nondisclosure law more directly. Specifically, I argue that privileging putatively “rational” faculties, like autonomy, in the regulation of sexualities fails to adequately capture the complexities embodied in sex and negotiations of sexual consent. As an alternative, I offer a new model—what I call bodily subjectivity—to more fully capture the visceral harm enacted by acts of sexual assault. (shrink)

Colonial mindsets and structures in the Western world drive broken relationships between human beings and non-human nature. In 2019, Kyle Whyte identified a tension between the rapid societal transformation required in response to climate change and the considerably slower pace at which remediation of trust, inequity, and imbalances of power happen between people within the colonial construct. This thesis offers a diagnostic tool to begin grappling with the question of how to heal broken relationships with each other and with non-human (...) nature. Problematic assumptions in Western natural laws and environmental ethics undermine efforts to address worsening ecological crises in the Anthropocene – the geological time period defined by increasing instability of Earth system processes from human activity. Drawing on the ideas of scholars Charles W Mills, Serene Khader, Deborah McGregor, and John Borrows, I explore a philosophy of planetary healing - an interdisciplinary, multicultural approach to justice, health and well-being. (shrink)

The struggle of survivors to obtain justice after they have been sexually assaulted has been a much discussed topic in recent years. Significant attention and resources are being directed towards this issue, making academic research particularly valuable at this time. However, instead of asking how legal processes can theoretically be made better, as is the case in most of the literature on this topic, my focus has been on asking why survivors want to engage in a legal process at all. (...) What do they get from reporting their assaults and does what the legal system offers them respond to what survivors are looking for from justice? This project starts this conversation by asking survivors what they think justice should be in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Using feminist standpoint epistemology and grounded theory, I interviewed sixteen survivors and seven lawyers to explore what justice means for survivors in the aftermath of an assault. From the data, I identified four major themes including: harms and healing, accountability, punishment, and restorative justice. I found that survivors were not satisfied with the justice they could obtain under criminal law. They stated that it was difficult, financially and emotionally, to engage in criminal proceedings that were unlikely to resolve in a way that made them feel as if justice was done. While other forms of legal justice are also available, survivors often found these to be inaccessible as well, or they were unaware of the existence of these alternative options. The survivors I spoke with imagined an expansive ideal of justice. To most of the women I interviewed with, justice involved the prevention of future violence, something they did not think the legal system was currently equipped to deal with. They were curious, though conflicted, about restorative models, but appreciated their focus on attempting to reform offender behaviour. They also stressed the importance of being supported in their attempts to recover from sexual assault, highlighting that financial compensation was crucial for any survivor to heal. (shrink)

This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography and socio-philosophical analysis to answer the following questions: What is the current state of ADHD’s onto-epistemological status in contemporary discourse? Is an equivalent to critical autism studies possible for ADHD? Specifically, is it possible to refigure ADHD’s ontology as an affirmative difference rather than a deficit? Drawing from my own experiences living with ADHD, as well as anecdotal and ethnographic accounts from my engagement with ADHD self-advocacy communities, I put various critical social scientific theories “to (...) the test,” including Hacking’s looping effects, structuralist-functionalist’s medicalization and social control, Foucault’s and Rose’s theories of subjectification and governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, the fold and related antipsychiatry approaches (e.g., in mad studies literature), and historical materialist theories of the pathologies of late-stage capitalism. My findings indicate that there is something specific about ADHD’s symptoms that pushes back against the often-totalizing nature of these critical theories. I also draw from science and technology studies to conduct an ethnographic study of an ADHD clinic in Japan, to explore how this specificity of ADHD “travels” in cross-cultural contexts without being reduced to biology or culture. The results of my research indicate that the ontological legitimacy of ADHD (what qualifies it as existing, and what it means for it to exist) in contemporary discourse has little to do with its purported neurobiological or genetic underpinnings. Instead, popular ontological beliefs appear to “swing” between two poles of what I call the “dialectic of medicalization”: in one direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of identity (a disease entity, human kind, brain type, medical label, and so on); in the other direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of individual variation (neurobiological diversity, “human distress,” statistically-associated symptoms, genetic correlates, and so on). I show how this dialectic keeps ADHD in conceptual purgatory, helps to explain the history and current state of ADHD discourse, and contributes to ADHD misrecognition and harm. Borrowing from Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (1994), I call for a renewed ADHD self-advocacy that breaks free from this dialectic by reformulating ontologies of ADHD in terms of its “difference in itself.” My dissertation arrives at a position compatible with critical disability studies and critical autism studies, though in a way that speaks to the specificity of ADHD’s affirmative differences rather than reducing them to the generality of neurodiversity. (shrink)

In the following work I apply a grammatological method of analysis to the concomitant objects of a logic of sovereignty and migrant-rights politics. Drawing on the analytical tools of genealogy, etymology and pragmatics outlined by Jacques Derrida, I argue that a portable grammar of emplaced possibility generated by migrant-rights movements situated in cities (sanctuary politics in Toronto, Canada, the sans-papier in Paris, and Sheffield UK’s “Cities of Sanctuary” movement) give rise to novel and significant changes in political discourse, generating articulations (...) of a democracy of strangers, common right, solidarity beyond citizenship, and an unprecedented notion of freedom. Using this unorthodox method, I find that a history of Western logocentrism is constituted by an economy of translations not exclusive to its privileged subject or territorial boundary—especially involving circuits of meaning and tracing encounters with pre-Hellenic and Arabic cultures. In turn, the traditio or ‘official tradition’ of an interiorized ‘West’ passed down from Greece to Rome to the vernacular present is the product of a logic of sovereignty through which the repetition of questions that already imply internally homogeneous community against their ‘exteriors’ also generate assumptions around the author and authority of that community from Plato onward. From this vantage point, an international system of nation-states is understood to compulsively give rise to emergent technologies of border enforcement and extra-territorialization, detention, deportation and encampment. In departure from this logic, and signaling the possibilia of radically new institutional frameworks, attention to migrant-rights movements supports a distinct grammar of cosmopolitan democracy not yet captured by scholars, including a research project uncovering genealogies of cities as already plural and interdependent, etymologies of sanctuary, hospitality and civic refuge, and prefiguring institutions of welcome within a globalized world (in particular, parliaments of unrepresented subjects, universities as everyday critical sites of public engagement, and technological networks of vigilant anticipation of the arrival of newcomers). The amalgam of these theoretical and practical elements I refer to as the open city. (shrink)

This research explores the role of the body in empathy with the goal of developing a pedagogical tool using storytelling. The study engaged participants in a series of mindfulness training sessions to explore whether empathy, viewed as a mode of responsiveness – a state of being – rather than a mode of cognitive access, can be enacted through non-judgmental observation of internal and external bodily sensation while engaging with narrative, a practice which I am calling willfully embodied perception. Findings indicated (...) that a modest majority of participants did experience an increase in empathy and in empathy-motivated helping behaviour after completing the mindfulness sessions. If education systems can begin to view an empathic mode of engagement as an equally valuable alternative to an analytical mode of engagement, especially in the study of literature, I believe students will gain a more meaningful, holistic, and supported learning experience. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This thesis is a philosophical and performative investigation of the embodied practice of cyclical temporality used in Indian classical music and dance, called taala, including an argument against the ontological specificity of dance as ephemerality. Extending on cyclical phenomena in Indian thought, the temporal structure in Indian classical music and dance is both linear and cyclical, constructing a unique perception of time as a living entity. Through minimalist movement composition, choreographic exploration and the development of a dance work called Art (...) of Time, I worked to support the arguments of taala and its entity-driven definition of time. By challenging the interpretation of time flowing linearly in my choreography, my discussion aims to transcend normative framings of time, body, and presence as seen in Western scholarship and dance writing, specifically liberating dance from its diagnosed ephemerality. (shrink)

Alfred Wegeners The Origin of Continents and Oceans was published in 1915. Therein, Wegener deviated from prevailing fixist expectations and argued for the relative displacement of continents across geological time. This hypothesis of continental mobilism languished for decades but rapidly became authoritative toward the end of the 1960s due to remarkable predictive successes of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. In this work, I develop an account of the rapid ascendence of mobilism that is receptive to both the historical contingency and (...) epistemic authority of scientific knowledge. I do this by developing an analytic framework for the assessment of knowledge claims, wherein predictive relationships within a set of commitments can provide epistemic insight into those commitments. I identify fundamental models of prediction testing. In the simplest cases, these models consist of pairs of commitments that either discord or concord with one another. Discordance falsifies a set of commitments and requires problem solving. Alternatively, concordance may provide epistemic support to commitments therein. Scientific knowledge may form predictive networks which consist of sets of partially overlapping concordances. These predictive networks facilitate the isolation of falsification and constrain problem solving. Additionally, the formation of certain kinds of network structures may provide epistemic support to commitments therein, when predictive successes are made particularly remarkable by their networked context. These snapping together events can unite previously independent lines of research and may result in the sudden recognition that a growing network is on the right track. I argue that alternative problem solving efforts undertaken by fixists and mobilists contributed to the formation of alternative predictive networks. By the 1960s, the accumulation of constraints during problem solving increasingly required grand modifications to fixist networks. Alternatively, a series of snapping together events incorporating previously independent research in paleomagnetism, marine geology, and geochronology - supported mobilism in the second half of the 1960s. This resulted in the rapid ascendance of mobilism. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that a fundamental rethinking of how Antioppressive teacher education views white teacher candidate (TC) learning is necessary to diminish what has been called white resistance. Examining the inadequate models and methods deployed to transform TC thinking about difference and Otherness reveals how teacher educators (TE) adherence to traditional paradigms contributes to their refusal to learn and change. The addition of Psychoanalytic insights into subjectivity, thinking and learning, it is argued, can mitigate TC resistance while enhancing student engagement (...) and instructor pedagogy. These insights are then further refined to frame a transitional space (in a small group setting) wherein TC's cognitive and emotional struggles can be attended to ethically. The body of this work draws directly on TC's experience in the highly lauded Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program (UD). Using a variant of discourse analysis informed by cultural theory and psychosocially defined ambivalence, TC thinking and their learning processes are considered within the UD curriculum, TE pedagogy, course work, and small groups. One year after the initial study, interviews and focus groups with former preservice teachers augment the research data while providing timely reflections on how small group processing impacts social justice teacher education. An analysis of how the particularized learning dynamics in small groups are informed by considerable external and internal forces throughout teacher training follows. This applied research concludes that if a transitional space within small groups is developed with care, white resistance decreases, and overall engagement with equity pedagogy increases. Consequently, UD graduates are more likely to reverse the disappointing outcomes for racialized students that birthed anti-oppressive efforts in their inception. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis project brings together Indigenous theory and post-colonial feminism under a decolonial framework to highlight the significance of feminist moral epistemologies in establishing global hierarchical systems. I argue that when situated within the sexual matrices of coloniality, feminist moral regulation knowledge production in Canada institutionalizes hierarchical social ordering through the de-mediation of non-secular agency and sacred Indigenous self-consciousness. This dissertation warns feminist moral regulation scholars of the contamination of feminist knowledge produced about the sexual Other that remains colonized (...) within the methodological grids of the epistemic structures of secular-coloniality. It highlights how a focus on epistemology allows us to understand the role of feminisms contingent investments in imperial knowledge systems and the effects this has for structuring neocolonial governmentality and settler colonial domination, in the service of sexual empire. In it, I employ deconstruction and genealogical analytics to reveal how structures of empire are intertwined with discourses of sex and colonial law to trace how such intertwinements shape the production of subjectivities, liberal state-making projects, and colonial enterprises under the promise of sexual progress and political freedom. This framework allows me to explore the co-production of knowledge systems within neocolonial orders by focusing on philosophical debates about human rights, gender and racial (in)security, liberal secularism, transnational imperial feminist power. Central to the argument that I pursue in this dissertation is that in the wake of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, feminist knowledge about sex work and morality is not mediated by a singular site of annunciation via moral regulation theory. I argue, instead, that moral regulation feminist theorizations of sexual morality are also conditioned by the epistemic and methodological project of imperial feminist praxis. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the epistemological dimensions of moral regulation feminist knowledge production and excavates the modalities of power that drive this discipline and explores the epistemological regions from which it speaks. (shrink)

Reasons are essentially addressed to agents. Many contemporary efforts to illuminate this feature of reasons effectively reduce them to features of agents, e.g., to rationally-pruned desires, plans, or roles. Such reductive accounts neglect a second feature of reasons, namely, their capacity to transcend agential nature. They also neglect a feature of agents, namely, their orientation to normative entities as entities that transcend—and thus, that can guide and give shape to—agential nature. This dissertation offers a conception of the relation running from (...) reasons to agents that captures both the transcendent character of reasons and the transcended character of agents. -/- I synthesize two strains of thought about reasons. The first captures their formal dependence on agency, which is manifested in each reason’s being essentially a reason for some agent to do or think something. The second captures their substantive independence from agency, which is manifested in the fact that reasons needn’t answer to what agents are like. These two strains of thought can be united in a single conception, but only if the elaboration of the formal features of reasons isn’t taken to license the reduction of reasons to features of agents. In fact, unifying the two in a single conception requires that the relevant agential features be themselves depicted as formally dependent on features of reasons, so that the explanatory landscape for the philosophy of reasons and agents is properly represented in terms of the symmetric relations of a circle, rather than the asymmetric relations of reduction. -/- This refusal to reduce is best framed by primitivism about reasons, i.e., the view that characterizes the idea of reason as primitive. But such a primitivism must nevertheless supply the materials for an account of the practical thought by which agents can receive reasons as addressed to them. I seek to demonstrate how an idea can be primitive while at the same time supplying those materials, and thereby explaining the possibility of practical thought. (shrink)

The present thesis develops a pedagogy that responds to the finitude of the human, as approximated by its lived technological experiences. Prominent pedagogies that espouse rhizomic metaphysical conceptions are subjected to systematic doubt to determine whether they are consistent with these experiences. Then, these experiences are examined to discern the nature of sense-making from the lens of the individual, focusing heavily on the role of cognition. The author then furnishes an enactment of sense-making through the provision of a dialogue and (...) commentary on both sense-making and the dialogue itself. It is found that the lived technological experience suggests a shift in pedagogical development away from metaphysical suppositions that divorce themselves from the lived technological experience and toward navigational considerations which, it is argued, more accurately reflect the lived technological experience. A pedagogy of navigation is then furnished that attempts to adequately reflect the lived technological experience. (shrink)

This dissertation integrates philosophical concepts from Deleuze and Guattaris Becoming-animal and Bubers I-Thou Encounters to create a conceptual metaphor that I call A Becoming Encounter. Through an arts-based methodology, the production and examination of several art objects (my own and others), and the ways in which they relate to the lived experience of animals, (using Lefebvre and content analysis), a theoretical framework is developed aimed at informing future representation and shaping future relationships with nonhuman animals and environments. Toward A Becoming (...) Encounter is a step toward an anti-anthropocentric ethics of representation and a way of being. (shrink)

Tabletop roleplaying games (or TRPGs in short form) have often been objects of analytical confusion. Scholars such as Andrew Ross have made conclusions about them on the basis of the same methodological techniques typically used to analyze prose media. These conclusions fail to account for the content of what Noah Wardrip-Fruin has called expressive processes. Ludologists following the discipline first developed by Espen J. Aarseth have created a series of tools that can be used to avoid the pitfalls of analysing (...) such objects as if they were identical to other forms of prose media, but in the process, that discipline has often willfully discounted ludic objects as having any form of narrativity. As a result, the full breadth of philosophical context that accompanies a literary genres migration from prose media to the medium of the TRPG has often been rendered analytically invisible. This dissertation addresses the question of exactly what content migrates from prose media to the medium of the TRPG by applying multidisciplinary approaches developed across English literature programs and the discipline of ludology to a close analysis of a specific case study: the migration of the cyberpunk genre into the medium of Cyberpunk, the tabletop roleplaying game. I conclude that, on the basis of this case study, what migrates is not merely a surface aesthetic, but a selection of philosophical and ethical assemblages that must be rendered visible if a meaningful form of media literacy involving such objects is to exist. (shrink)

The figure of the rampage school shooter continues to present a challenge to educational thought and research. This dissertation examines discursive representations of unacknowledged shame, violence and forgiveness in young adult fiction written about rampage school shootings. I frame my thinking of concepts and analysis through Hannah Arendt's discussion of shame, violence, and forgiveness. To explore these concepts, I will engage with literary pedagogy, to examine the potential for fostering dialogue with students to think about the combined role of the (...) emotional and social realms of the school shooter and finally how young adult fiction about rampage school shooting can be used to initiate classroom discussions. (shrink)

In the pursuit of speed and efficiency, contemporary visual communication eradicates the essence of the individual in favour of certainty. Mass production and the rational thought processes that steer Western Culture have caused much of the human relationship with the physical world to deteriorate. This graphic design research employs craft processes and theories of the discipline to explore the irregularities engendered by the human hand. It does so by merging production methods involving both analogue and digital operations. The unique vagaries (...) of handcraft inform aesthetic experience by enriching communication culture with the haptic qualities of the individual. By combining strategies of risk and certainty, handcraft procedures complement the work of mechanical production and serves as a potential cultural instrument. Together these production methods culminate in a richer means of communication that reveals an ontological relationship between form and representation, one which affirms and counters the alienation of a modern world. (shrink)

Through his lifes work Cedric J. Robinson had developed a historiographic and theoretical critique of Marxism that exposed it as reductive, Eurocentric, and built upon idealistic positions that did not reflect the concrete conditions of reality itself. However, his critical intervention has been largely ignored and where it has been addressed, it was dismissed as having engaged in a misreading or reductive engagement with Marxism which is otherwise signified as a much more dynamic and reflexive philosophy. The basic intention of (...) this dissertation then has been to defend one aspect of Robinsons critique of Marxism his characterization of it as Eurocentric through both drawing on Robinsons work itself and through supporting his conclusions by way of my own intervention into debates concerning Marxs Eurocentricity and the limitations that thus spring from this characterization. This supportive aspect has been carried out through two sections: 1.) through a contextualization of Marxian philosophy in its appropriation of the Eurocentric Hegelian philosophical and historical system, and 2.) through critical engagements with contemporary literature that seeks to disprove the claim that Marxism is in fact Eurocentric. The combined sections of this dissertation go beyond the intended defense of Robinsons criticisms of Marxian philosophy and carry implications for past and ongoing debates concerning the efficacy of Marxism as a theory of liberation for those people and populations that fall outside of its otherwise restrictive parameters. This dissertation encourages the reader to conclude with the sense that: Robinson was indeed right. Marxism really is inherently antagonistic to both an anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. And I would like to read more of what he had to say. (shrink)

This dissertation explores a phenomenological account of empathy and narrative-based medicine. Its objective is to offer a sustained critical discussion of the benefits of a phenomenological account of empathy and narrative-based medicine for understanding the experiences of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia, improving therapeutic relationships, minimizing the stigma of mental illness, and supporting people with schizophrenia in their recovery. Part one of this dissertation critically examines the nature of empathy and highlights the challenges that impede our ability to understand the experiences (...) of persons with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia has historically been viewed as a condition which defies empathic understanding. This view, endorsed by Karl Jaspers, has been influential in shaping current depictions of schizophrenia in Anglo-American medical literature and informing how clinicians interact with those who are diagnosed with this condition. The dissertation makes the argument that Jaspers' approach is limited and sets the theoretical basis for a more robust account of empathy in the conceptualization of relations with persons with schizophrenia. Part two of this dissertation defends a phenomenological account of empathy, developed by Edith Stein, and presents it as an alternative to simulation theories of empathy. Simulation theories of empathy involve using one's own cognitive resources to replicate the experiences and mental states of others by imagining being in their situation. But one problem with this approach is that it runs the risk of co-opting their experiences and substituting our own, which is morally problematic. In response, Stein's theory offers a solution by recognizing that empathy involves appreciating someones experiences as it is for them and thus it avoids the assimilation of the experiences of others. Part three of this dissertation explores applications of Stein's theory of empathy and examines narrative-based medicine as a model of therapy. The narratives of persons with schizophrenia offer crucial insight into their lived experience of illness. By engaging with the lived experiences and narratives of others, caregivers can learn improved ways of understanding and supporting people diagnosed with schizophrenia as they restore a sense of self that has been harmed due to the effects of stigma that portray mental illness negatively. (shrink)

This thesis attempts to demonstrate that the international legal impasse surrounding Palestine is animated by incommensurable visions of legality. It argues that in portraying the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a struggle for state sovereignty, international law subjects the indigenous worldview to a violent and perpetual erasure. The thesis employs Aaron Mills' theoretical framework to argue for an incommensurability between Palestine's indigenous conception of legality and the dominant conception of legality underlying international law. Further, the thesis offers a reading of (...) Ghassan Kanafani's novel The Other Thing to explore the consequences and normative implications of an impasse characterized by incommensurability. The key finding is that cultural artefacts are important sites of the Palestinian legal memory and are capable of uncovering Palestine's silenced vision of legality. Finally, the paper concludes that acknowledging incommensurability paves a way towards a more holistic legal imagination that contains the seeds of transcending the impasse in indigenous Palestine. (shrink)

Reconciliation between non-Indigenous/settler peoples and Indigenous peoples has become a central tenet of Canadian education. In this dissertation I examine the ways a settler-colonizer's capacity to dream a vision of reconciliation into being is fractured. The ways schooling is stuck between, the potential for education to labour a decolonial future and the crisis of responsibility that ensues when education continues to be informed by settler ideologies that reinforce white supremacy and the superiority of Euro-western knowledge, come into focus. In the (...) first two chapters I address colonial inheritances regarding the epistemic violence embedded within normative structures of contemporary society as barriers to relationality. Specifically, shame in schooling and the way settlers engage with positionality shapes and reflects how stolen land and relationality are understood. Decolonization offers some consolation, but how can a non-Indigenous settler person unsettle colonial ways of knowing, being, thinking, and doing while operating within these systems? From there I build an argument that Indigenous Futurisms is a catalyst for new ways of questioning and practicing decolonizing work, driving Indigenous resurgence and re-imagining reconciliation as a generative and relational praxis. In the last two chapters I bring into dialogue Indigenous Futurist artwork to show how these artists' socio-political interventions foreclose colonial ideology and machinations of future without conflating the ongoing dispossession and colonial violence while creating a sense of hope and possibilities for otherwise futures. Zombie counter-narratives presented by contemporary painter, Bunky Echo-Hawk and filmmakers, Lisa Jackson and Jeff Barnaby, reframe Indigenous inheritance as the medicine needed in the post-apocalyptic world. Multidisciplinary artists, Nicholas Galanin, Steven Paul Judd, and Andy Everson reimagine Star Wars with space NDNs highlighting the connective tissue of Indigenous living presence in past-present-future timelines. In conclusion, I suggest that if there is to be any hope of developing a decolonizing practice and an ethical space of engagement, non-Indigenous/settler peoples must step into the void working to un-learn, within educational institutions and beyond. (shrink)

This dissertation conducts a philosophical political inquiry into ways in which the pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism infiltrates and impedes public education and thus generates a ruptured fantasy of education. My project seeks to critically expose an exhausted depressive sensibility, promoted and perpetuated through the logic of neoliberalism, which gives way to what Byung-Chul Han terms the burnt-out-soul. Late critical theorist Lauren Berlants cruel optimism offers a conceptual framework through which I critically consider the double bind induced through attachments to (...) education. I particularly focus on the pernicious effects that result when education forges optimistic attachments, via the pervasiveness of critical pedagogy, to enact social transformation in our increasingly menacing times. Cruel optimism in education, I argue, is not only instituted through neoliberal rationality but also through mechanisms of neoliberalism, which exacerbate the pre-existing structural and systemic violence historically normalized in education. Tracking the trappings of an optimistic relation to education from an interdisciplinary perspective I wonder what it takes for educators to counter this wearing down of our souls that engenders a sense of hopelessness, and which impedes the educational. Drawing on theorists both within and outside of education, and on my more than twenty-five years of experience as a high school educator, I consider the following questions: What happens when it is our optimism that provokes the cruelty of despair? What are the depressive repercussions of the soul at work? How do critical educators survive as they attempt to disrupt, fight, and hope for possibilities within public education while existing in a constant state of exhaustion and despair as they manage and negotiate educations compromised conditions? Ultimately, I seek to think through how the educational can appear only in brief, fleeting moments given educations present conditions. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, I offer my concept of thinking with images. Thinking with images, I argue, provokes pedagogical moments of interruption that give students time and space to attend to what they see, thus affording them the chance to think differently about the violence they live in these wretched times when the past not yet past impacts them daily. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the way fat womens experiences in and relationships to their bodies are shaped by the affective environment of Big Beautiful Woman social events. Data from the researchers autoethnographic explorations of BBW bashes and 12 interviews with fat women who attend BBW social events is analyzed using a theoretical framework that engages with feminist understandings of how power produces and exerts control over marginalized bodies, how violence is justified and enacted against marginalized communities/individuals, societal forces that influence the (...) various ways fat women experience embodiment, and affective structures that work at a bodily level to shape our understanding of our world. In her work examining fat activism, Charlotte Cooper identifies BBW subcultures as one of several major sites for fat activism in the West. Additionally, BBW subculture has yet to be examined academically in any depth for its contributions to fat activist and body liberation efforts. This dissertation addresses that gap in both activist-oriented and academic research. Furthermore, the stories held within this dissertation reflect voices of fat women about their experiences as fat women, furthering significant efforts within fat studies to prioritize the creation of knowledge about fat people by fat people. Participants shared BBW community experiences ranging from objectification by fat admirers, navigating diet culture in size-acceptance spaces and unabashedly exploring fat sexuality; however, a key finding of this research illustrates the centrality of fat community in fat womens efforts to build resilience against the ongoing trauma of fatphobia. (shrink)

This dissertation places literature and myth at the suture of two of Simone Weil's most important concepts: decreation and metaxu. Decreation, or the decanting of subjectivity to become one with God, has become a fixture in Weil scholarship. Yet, the link between decreation and metaxu, the bridges that collapse self and other, has yet to be theorized. This study brings metaxu to the forefront of Weil studies to emphasize its role within the domains of community and culture, thereby signalling its (...) unseen potential to harmonize the political and mystical strains of her thought. I counter decreation's salvific consolation with metaxu's radical materialism and its privileging of hybridity, relationality, and metamorphosis. Weil's writing combines a critique of capitalism with a frequent entanglement of Greek and Christian myth. A discussion of metaxu is brought to bear on literary revisions of classical myths from the 1980s and 1990s, an important peak in capitalism's global dominance. I investigate revisions of myths of transcendence, but also transcendence as a key myth challenged by late twentieth-century literature. In Chapter 1, I outline the importance of metaxu to Weil's writings on mysticism and locate its roots in Platonic philosophy, Greek Tragedy, and the myth of Prometheusthe subject of her most important poem. In Chapter 2, I analyze metaxu's relationship to specific iterations of violence and sacrality in Weil's The Iliad: or the poem of Force and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which I interpret as an Americanized retelling of Homer's epic. In Chapter 3, I locate metaxu's connection to art and neoliberal globalism through Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Chapter 4 applies metaxu to issues of metamorphosis and hybridity through Octavia Butler's Dawn. Butler deconstructs notions of mysticism, eroticism, otherness, and species that are to be read against the patriarchal aesthetics of Homer, McCarthy, and Rushdie. By reading these texts together, a subversive and disruptive potential for metaxu will be revealed, one that heralds an important re-reading of Weil's oeuvre, as well as an ability to reshape the intersection of literature, myth, and mysticism. (shrink)

Nearly four decades ago, Saul Kripke articulated a semantic version of scepticism, according to which no finite goings-on, either mental or behavioural, can establish what someone means by an expression. The semantic sceptic reveals, among other things, the hopelessness of a deeply temptingand widely madeassumption, to the effect that we must be able to articulate what it is for a subject to use expressions meaningfully without presupposing meaning. According to a strain of thinking that is influential in contemporary philosophy, this (...) suggests that there is no general story to be told about what it is for expressions to be used meaningfully This dissertation seeks to contribute to the project of undermining the dichotomy between reductionism and quietist non-reductionism about meaning. It does this in the first instance by examining, and ultimately rejecting, a range of views offered in response to the challenge. Then, it proceeds to extract from the later writings of Donald Davidson a version of semantic non-reductionism that provides an answer to the challenge of the semantic sceptic. At the core of his view is the idea that we cannot shed light on what it is for expressions to be used meaningfully without shedding light on the special sort of active engagement characteristic of the simultaneous interaction of two subjects with each other and their shared world. Meaningfulness is grounded in such triangular transactions. This dissertation also illuminates the connections between the philosophical conceptions of two thinkers who have made an enormous contribution to the project, central to analytic philosophy, of making philosophical sense of meaning. Davidson seems never to have been genuinely gripped by Kripkes challenge, and Kripke seems never to have engaged in any substantive way with Davidsons views on triangulation. And yet, Kripkes challenge about meaning and Davidsons overall conception of meaning can each be seen as lending support to the other. Furthermore, what Davidsons writings show is that endorsing semantic non-reductionism need not be the desperate move that Kripke takes it to be, for it does not force us to give up on the distinctively philosophical search for generality. (shrink)

This study focuses on failure in contemporary American literature. It reads literary texts that foreground failure as responses to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism, proposing that these texts disclose ethical alternatives to everyday life. The literary texts at the core of this study -- be they novels, plays, poems, or short stories -- share a commitment to the future, one in which social interdependence as well as responsibility for the wellbeing of others would supplant the egoistic desires abetted (...) by neoliberalism. In each text, failures such as performing badly, implacable unhappiness, and family dysfunction open onto better social arrangements. This study turns to Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy to flesh out its central argument. Levinas understands the self as fundamentally co-implicated with the Other, and it is this constitutive openness to alterity to which the study's literary texts orient readers and/or audiences. (shrink)

Most theories of quantum mechanics do not offer clear yes/no empirical answers to all questions that seem at face value. The Many-Worlds Interpretation, originated by Hugh Everett in the late 1950s, is unique for its unambiguous envisioning of reality: our universe is one of the numerous parallel universes that frantically branch off from each other nanoseconds by nanoseconds. In many of these worlds, there exist exact replicas of you and me, all evolving independently. My thesis exhibition, entitled Wholly Quantum, articulates (...) this controversial theory in a visual way. Through a hybrid of electronics, lights, and sculptures, the exhibition recasts reality within an utterly surreal framework and investigates the battle between a single reality versus a multitude of realities, what we perceive versus what reality is. This paper, as one of the two components of my thesis, carries out my research and creative experiments on the phenomena of reality and perception. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson has maintained an enduring legacy in the register of early American political thought. As a prolific writer and elected official, his public declarations and private letters helped to inspire revolutionary action against the British monarchy and shape the socio-political landscape of a young nation. While his placement in the American collective memory and scholarship has remained steadfast, a crucial dimension of his thinking remains unexplored. In this dissertation, I present a heterodox reading of Jefferson in order to showcase (...) his radical understanding of politics. Although Jeffersons political worldview is strikingly complex, marked by affinities with liberal, classical republican, Scottish, and Christian modes of thought, this interpretation reveals the radical democratic nature of his project. Primarily, this dissertation expands the possibilities of Jeffersons thought as explored by Hannah Arendt and other thinkers, such as Richard K. Matthews and Michael Hardt. Drawing from these explicitly radical readings, I further dialogue with Jeffersons thought through extensive archival research, which led me to engage in the theoretical and historical sources of inspiration that form and underscore his thinking. In so doing, I offer a new reading of Jeffersons view on politics, suggesting that there contains an underlying objective, setting, and method to his unsystematic, yet innovative prescriptions concerning democracy. Taken together, these three features of his thought point to a vision of democracy that is made possible through a widening of the circle of political citizenship; a form of politics defined by the active and ethical participation of all, enacted upon public spaces and sustained through training, deliberation, and action. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relationship between subjectivity, normativity, and politics in Emmanuel Levinas and Karl Marx. At first sight, Levinas depiction of a singular and unique relation to othersa bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic or political contextappears not only at odds with the basic philosophical and political insights of Marx but the whole of the Continental tradition. This much is evident from the numerous political critiques and appropriations of Levinas, which condemn him on the grounds (...) that his epistemology, ontology and ethics are needlessly naive, insular, individualistic, and pseudo-theological. Against such readings I argue that if we are to retain the normative kernel of his thought while overcoming such politically limited interpretations we must radicalize and theoretically deepen this impulse to deworld the other. This interpretation opens Levinas thought to a new field of new possibilities which are explored through Marx and related thinkers, such as Fichte, Hegel, Hediegger, and others. I claim that a dialogue with Marx is particularly instructive because it can push Levinas beyond his limited conception of politics and alienation, while, at the same time, provide a better foundation for normative and political questions that were under- or poorly-theorized by Marx. Together, Levinas and Marx can further an understanding of subjectivity and politics that comprehends the importance of mediation, history, collectivity and universality without ceding the profound rootlessness of subjectivity, which, at every moment, retains the asymmetrical structure of the one-for-the-other. (shrink)

This dissertation is organized as sets of related essays that explore the concept of Sankofa as a method to revisit, resurge and reclaim Nkrumah's ideology to better understand the structures that continue to create disablement in Ghana. Disability studies as a field has come to acknowledge that the majority of disabled individuals live in the global south, however, the field does not yet account for how Europe underdeveloped Africa, how it continues to do so, and the impact it has on (...) Her children. African Indigenous studies scholars such as Nana George Dei, charges new scholars to revisit the past in order to design the future of Africa for Africans. Heeding this call, I returned to the revolutionary anti-colonial ideologies of Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon in order to center their approaches within the discourse of disability. Applying their ideologies, this dissertation draws particularly on Nkrumahism as a framework to engage and critique western biomedical approaches to disability and disablement. I argue for a Nkrumahist resurgence that views disability and disablement from a cultural-social-political-economic perspective, and examine their pre- and post-colonial historiographic contexts which allow for a critical engagement and a space to write Akan spirituality into critical disability studies. Through creative theorization this dissertation creates a Door of Return to Indigenizing African/Ghanaian ways of knowing and rewriting the histories which includes ancestors who were silenced due to several complex relationships; therefore, this dissertation partially concludes that, it is not our culture to stigmatize against persons with disabilities particularly those who are classified as insane; instead they should be viewed as being one with the spirit world, interpreting messages from ancestors which in itself is a gift that the Akans hold with pride. It also concluded the main argument of this dissertation that institutionalization of the Indigenes due to their African spirituality led to an increase in formalized confinement of Indigenous bodies. To further interrogate this inconclusiveness from the European archive, I propose further research that will allow the Indigenes themselves to speak on how, why and if those considered insane/mad and not able were banished or erased during pre-colonial Ghana. (shrink)

Drawing Canadian and Swedish national imaginaries into comparative dialogue, this dissertation considers how ideals of liberal, anti-racism paradoxically persist alongside white supremacist investments in the sanctity and authenticity of a white citizenry as well as the terror of Black and Muslim subjects. A sense of fear, threat and vulnerability are examined as useful bad feelings nurtured for the ends of white nation-making; while, the contingencies for assimilation reveal how ideals of racial tolerance can simultaneously be retained. Engaging with tropes of (...) rescue-ability this dissertation proposes that the Muslim woman who performs witnessable acts of assimilation and possession can allay the terror of Islam that she otherwise represents. A death by honour-killing however is what signifies her most triumphant assimilatory act and greatest prospect for national and human belongings. White liberal solidarities solidify through a collective mourning and horror over her brutal death and thus fear of violent, unassimilable Muslims can persists. Contemplating the refusal of Black humanity, the unremarkableness of Black death, the dread of Black reproduction, and the fetishization of Black womens pain this dissertation questions whether assimilatory futures and mournable human life are equally available to Black Muslim women. Analyzing case studies from Canadian and Swedish media, I argue that Black Muslim women must figuratively kill their Black and Muslim selves for the possibility of being re-born into the grievability of Canadian or Swedish whiteness. Even so, the narratives of Afro-Swedish Muslim women reveals how one might trespass on the dictates of assimilation by refusing to wholly surrender the antagonist parts of the self. Women become slippery subjects who are unpredictable in their acculturation. Public humiliation, however, is wielded as a painful pedagogy to discipline she who troubles the matrices of assimilation. Finally, by analyzing representations of the Black Muslim female figure in Canadian performance and visual art, this dissertation explores what it might mean to release desires for national and human belonging by choosing to embody the alien or the monster. In this way, women are visually displayed as releasing the demands of assimilation as they willfully inhabit the non-human. (shrink)

This project explores the perceived effect of mindfulness bibliotherapy and discuss the possible underlying reasons behind those effects on college students. We used audiobook version of Zen Mind Beginner's written by Shunryu Suzuki in order to simplify the bibliotherapy process and decrease the burden of participation. In this research students were provided with the bibliotherapy content and were instructed to study the material within seven days. Fourteen to twenty one days after finishing the book, a semi- structured interviews were conducted (...) with five participants who were in the fourth and final year of their education as undergraduate students. The objective of this Thematic analysis of the data highlighted four main effects that enabled the participation to deal with stress and anxiety. (shrink)

This work offers a critical reinterpretation of South Korean "economic development" from the perspectives of Marxian form critique and Jason Moore's world-ecology. Against the "production in general" view of economic life that dominates the extant debates, it analyzes the rise, spread, and deepening of capitalism's historically specific social forms in twentieth-century Korea: commodity, wage-labor, value, and capital. Eschewing the binary language of development and underdevelopment, we adopt Marx's non-stagist distinctions regarding the relative degree of labor's subsumption under capital: hybrid, formal, (...) and real. Examining the Korean experience across three dialectically interrelated scales – regional, global, and "national" – we outline the historical-geographical contingency surrounding South Koreas emergence by c.1980 as a regime of real subsumption, one of the only non-Western societies ever to do so. Crucial to this was the generalization of commodification and proletarianization that betokened deep structural changes in Korea's class structure, but also a host of often-mentioned issues such as land reform, foreign aid, the developmental state, and a "heaven sent" position within the US-led Cold War order. Despite agreeing on the importance of these latter factors, however, the conclusions we draw from them differ radically from those of the extant analyses. For although regimes of real subsumption are the most materially, socially, and technologically dynamic, they are also the most socio-ecologically unsustainable and alienating due to the dualistic tensions inherent to capital's "fully developed" forms, in particular the temporal grounding of value. US protestations about the generalizability of these relations aside, moreover, these regimes have always been in the extreme minority and, crucially, have depended on less developed societies for their success. Historically, this has been achieved through widening the net of capitalist value relations; however, four decades of neoliberalization has all but eliminated any further large-scale "frontier strategies" of this sort. Due to its relatively dense population vis-a-vis its geographical size, contemporary South Korea faces stark challenges that render it anything but a model of "sustainable development," but rather signal the growing anachronism of value as the basis for regulating the future of nature-society relations in the "developed world" and beyond. (shrink)

This dissertation responds to two recent developments in the landscape of Canadian constitutional litigation. First, the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has invited a wave of strategic constitutional challenges directed at systemic social reform, including many cases aligned with progressive social justice goals. Second, the focus of Charter litigation has shifted from legal interpretation and argument to the consideration of extensive evidence pertaining to social and legislative facts. The recent successes of a number of strategic Charter (...) challenges to legislation brought on behalf of marginalized communities and involving voluminous evidentiary records suggests that the above developments hold considerable promise for progressive social movements. And yet, critical scholars and activists have persistently questioned the potential of constitutional litigation, and law generally, to effect progressive social change, pointing to a tension between the pursuit of positive legal outcomes and the broader transformation of social power relations. Using a case study of Bedford v Canada, along with interviews of constitutional litigators and judges, this project explores an under-theorized facet of the above-noted tension by asking about the epistemological implications of the wide-ranging fact-finding processes that have come to characterize progressive constitutional challenges to legislation, especially under section 7 of the Charter. This inquiry is premised on the contention that the realization of social justice depends, at least in part, on the realization of what I call "epistemological justice", defined as the just treatment of knowledge in legal processes. Drawing on the work of feminist epistemologists and other critical thinkers, the account of epistemological justice that I develop in this project centers on a commitment to fully hearing and giving due weight to the experiential knowledge of marginalized people who are directly affected by a given law or policy in decision-making processes. My analysis then asks whether the progressive promise of strategic Charter litigation is borne out at the level of epistemological justice in this sense. Ultimately, my findings suggest that there is reason to doubt this proposition, and thus further reason to doubt the value of strategic Charter litigation as a tool for social justice. (shrink)

This dissertation demonstrates several theses in relation to key components of Marxs philosophy that conventional interpretations either misrepresent or overlook. The chief thesis concerns his idea of revolutionary subjectivity which is demonstrably inconsistent and undertheorized. The main areas of Marxs work that are explored to elucidate this idea are his ontology and method, philosophical anthropology, idea of communist society, and theory of history. Insight into these and other aspects of his work can be derived through analysis of a tradition of (...) social philosophy which has its origins in ancient Hellenic thought. Marxs strongest inspiration from this period came from the philosophy of Aristotle, whose work profoundly influenced his understanding of human development and his idea of free life-activity and relations. A key component of this tradition is the ontological idea that reason governs the world. Marx sublated the form that it took in Hegels philosophy. Inspired by Hegels idea that reason is at work in human history through a process of estrangement, Marx claimed that the capitalist mode of production is instrumental in the development of the productive forces and the integral development of the revolutionary working class. According to Marx the creation of revolutionary subjectivity takes place through estrangement and revolutionary practice. On his premises, such developmentally self-transformative life-activity is indispensable for the development of the capacities required for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and reorganization of social life. And yet he also claimed that the life-activity of working people in capitalist society has a tendency to ruin them physically and mentally. An accurate representation of this problem at the heart of Marxs idea of revolutionary subjectivityand thus of this idea itselfrequires an emphasis on his sensitivity to the subjective-mental dimension of human life and the development of individual ethical capacities in particular. This dissertation concludes by rearticulating elements of Marxs thought about estrangement and human subjectivity with Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis so as to establish a fruitful starting point for sublating Marxs social philosophy. (shrink)

My dissertation is called Politically Engaged Wild Animals; in it, I suggest that wild animals live in a politicized world, which gives their behaviour unintended political meanings—if humans will listen appropriately. To arrive at this conclusion, I start with Dinesh Wadiwel's biopower critique according to which any proposals to conserve wilderness or protect wild animals, which relies on human representatives, suffer from a particular sort of risk, namely that of transforming the current overt domination into a neoliberal form of continued (...) human supremacy. I find this critique has traction against proposals like Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's suggestion of Wild Animal Sovereignty. However, it has less traction against Anishinaabe legal traditions, which prioritize respect for wild animals and the ecosystems we share with them. In these legal systems, wild animals are not under the jurisdiction of human societies; they are in independent communities that are part of a shared interspecies world. Thinking of wild animal communities as independently entitled to share the land, water, and air with humans can highlight the interspecies political meanings of conflict between human society and wild animal communities. I suggest we can listen to the behaviour patterns of wild animal communities to reveal unintended political meaning. Further, researchers are already developing ways to better communicate with wild animals so we all might safely share contested spaces. The moral-political implications of these research projects are typically left in anthropocentric terms. In my view we should reframe this communication as a way of respecting the relationships we already have with wild animal communities. If we can communicate with them, negotiating mutually beneficial boundaries, then we ought to take this communication as a form of political participation. Wild animal communities are speaking for themselves, on land they share with humans, in a politicized world. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to re-interpret the concept of relations as such and examines their actualization in relation to the relations of states. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines past interpretations of the concept of relations and provides a different understanding of the concept. It argues that relations should not be perceived solely as that which occurs either as an extension of things or as between things, rather that relations are such phenomena that can also (...) actualize as autonomous existents alongside of other existents that constitute reality. Furthermore, it argues that to adequately understand relations as such one must study conditions such as de-relationism, arelationism, and not-relating, conditions that are not necessarily the binary opposites of relations but forms of realities that coexist with relations as such. It further aims to develop a relational way, a method per se, that can best be utilized in the relatal analysis of relations, in the ways in which relations exist, and in the ways in which relations relate and un-relate. In the second part, the dissertation primarily focuses on certain broad categories of the relations of states and of the world. For instance, it examines the concept of the world, the current state of the relations of the world, the concepts of relations of states, inter-state relations, as well as categories such as the state of incompleteness, uncertainty, and relations that are oriented towards the future. (shrink)

Notions of identification and resemblance have been central to the onto-epistemologies of Anglo Environmental Ethics in the 20th and 21st centuries. In order to dismantle Western conceptions of the human as separate from the material world the case needed to be made for the likeness of humans and nature; "nature is us" (Crutzen and Schäwgerl 2011). This dissertation builds on such efforts while also proposing a change of course, one that moves away from sameness and toward otherness. To contend with (...) and address the deeply unsettling and unprecedented conditions of Anthropocenic life we need an environmental ethics of immanent otherness. To conceive such an ethics, I turn to feminist post-structuralist Hélène Cixous. Cixous remains under-represented within eco-theoretical readings of post-structuralism, despite expanding interest in her contemporaries. Too material for social constructivism, and too textual for new materialism, Cixouss singular approach to materiality and immanence have remained decidedly overlooked. (Re)reading Cixous from within the literature of new materialism and environmental (post)humanities, we discover an onto/eco-poethics of immanent otherness that not only conceives poetic textuality within materiality, but otherness as constitutive of a seething, lively immanent world. In following Cixous, we surrender enduring enchantments with environmental ethics of unity, certainty and purity and discover how the poetry and jouissance of immanent otherness can help us to better navigate these strange, contaminated and incoherent times. (shrink)

The Condition-of-England Question - a series of discussions that involve commentary on the state of relations between disparate groups and classed subjects - contains a nexus of competing and overlapping discourses, as well as an attention to feelings such as anger and to the comnumication of feeling that comprises sympathy. It evolves through the interrogative methodologies of moral philosophy, Romantic idealism, political radicalism, and the cultural assumptions that guide literary production and consumption. Condition-of-England novels, such as Elizabeth Gaskell' s Mmy (...) Barton and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, demonstrate the Carlylean premise that moral and social improvements within the body politic require a mediated reaction to the escalating discontent that characterized the nation in the period surrounding the reform acts. In this dissertation I analyze how authors and political leaders are impelled to address social and political problems through the representation of feeling and its communication. This dissertation affirms that anger, existing as a potentially corrective call for attention and action, is elemental for the formation of collective identities based on class or political beliefs. As such, it remains pertinent to Victorian debates of political reform and representation. In literary culture, anger and sympathy are conceptualized as narrative forces by which to address the declining spiritual and material conditions of England; they become considerations in the organization of plot lines or episodes, and they exist, whether named or not, in descriptions of literary protagonists, political leaders, and philosophers. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes social history, philosophy, theories of emotion, close readings, and rhetorical analysis, I examine the epistemology of feeling and its relation to social and political critique by comparing the philosophical and practical continuities between discourses of the sentiments and passions in the eighteenth century with discourses of feeling in the mid-nineteenth century. This includes extending my scope not only to include novels, but also philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and serialized fiction. My focus does not lie with envisioning anger as something adversative to sympathy, as much philosophical and sociological critique has implied, but in whether antisocial feelings such as anger have acknowledged social benefits. If sympathy is not any one feeling, but the interpersonal communication of feeling, then the changing discourses of sympathy in the nineteenth century imply a rethinking of the social functions of all emotion, including anger. (shrink)

This study weaves Cold War Epistemology, critical multiculturalism, racial capitalism, and critical refugee studies to theorize how the Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity is related to Canadas national identity formation. Adopting a critical ethnography methodology and discourse analysis, this study asks: What are the conditions of community conflicts within the Vietnamese community and how are those conflicts related to the processes of Canadian national identity formation? The production and contestation of Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity in the making of Canadian national identity is traced (...) through three major sites of analysis. This first site is the debate on the Memorial to Victims of Communism as captured in the media. The second site is the parliamentary and community commemoration of the Fall of Saigon on April 30th, 1975 which includes debates on the Journey to Freedom Day Act and local community events. The final site is a Toronto community agency conflict of identity. This study reveals the logic of racial capitalist democracy underlying Canadian national identity as free, humanitarian, democratic, and peace-making. This is constructed through the production of Vietnamese Canadian subjectivity as a particular model minority and model refugee framed within Cold War neoliberal and multicultural discourse with significant consequences to the wellbeing of the community. (shrink)

Emergence is a feature-length coming-of-age and science-fiction screenplay set between 2044 and 2059 in Canada and a settlement on Mars. The story follows Nate Ein, a prodigy in computational neuroscience, who loses his mother at a young age. He embarks on a single-minded techno-mythological quest to save his mother from death, and grant immortality to all. His quest forces him into a world of political intrigue and manipulations that leads to him being given the burden of choice for the future (...) of humanity. Nate must confront the trauma that has consumed him, as well as the ramifications of his choices. Emergence deconstructs the tropes of the Heros Journey, and explores the issues of unchecked corporate capitalism, technological development, and artificial intelligence, and themes such as grief, growth, trust, choice, power, and balance. Emergence is meant to provoke collective decision-making on the future of our species. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

For many men who have sex with men, the risks, treatment, and prevention of HIV are central and unavoidable aspects of their experiences of sex and romance. This constant vigilance around HIV complicates their lives in medical as well as interpersonal and socio-political ways. Pre-exposure prophylaxis is a relatively new method of HIV prevention that is already revolutionizing the lives of MSM by lessening the need for this ongoing vigilance. However, the wide-ranging effects of PrEP on MSM are as of (...) yet unclear. Therefore, the ethics of using PrEP among MSM is a timely issue that demands philosophical engagement. As MSM in North America face decisions of whether or not to use PrEP and the consequences of those decisions, philosophy has an important role to play in helping us think more clearly about the situation today by moving away from a strictly medical conception of the ethics of PrEP. In my first chapter, I motivate my investigation into the social and political dimensions of the ethics of PrEP by providing a critical history of HIV and HIV prevention. In my second chapter, I challenge the prevalent risk assessment approach to the ethics of PrEP, arguing that it has a distorting effect, overblowing some risks while overlooking others. The second half of my dissertation demonstrates how a relational approach, focused on the conditions for trust and solidarity, better reveals the ethical terrain facing MSM with decisions about PrEP. In my third chapter, I examine the role of trust in sexual and romantic relationships between MSM as well as relationships between MSM and healthcare providers. In my final chapter, I argue that PrEP complicates relationships of solidarity within gay communities, focusing in particular on intergenerational differences in perspectives on HIV and HIV prevention. Overall, my dissertation helps move us towards a more socially and politically informed conception of the ethics of PrEP, which helps us understand how MSM can live ethically within communities whose sexual and romantic lives continue to be medicalized, both internally by members of gay communities and externally by a broader culture and public health establishment. (shrink)

BirthDay is a 28-minute experimental narrative film set in Toronto, following one day in the life of three immigrants: an Afghani woman, a Serbian man, and a Syrian boy who lives with his grandmother. Their lives are interconnected through montage, giving the illusion that they are one family. Toronto becomes a space that seems to embrace the characters, while at the same time separating them through the hardships of immigration.

Existential nihilism is a worldview characterized by a rejection of the existence of meaning in life and a belief in the futility of trying to ameliorate this absence. Despite the rich philosophical and cultural history of existential nihilism, its impact on mental health and society remains largely unknown due to a gap in the measurement literature. To address this gap, an 8-item scale measuring the proposed construct was developed and tested in accordance with psychometric theory and scale development guidelines. Two (...) identical studies were conducted within an undergraduate sample and a community sample to evaluate the scales item quality, reliability, internal structure, convergent validity, concurrent validity, divergent validity, and incremental validity. Evaluation of the Existential Nihilism Scale provided evidence of strong psychometric properties. This measure promises to contribute to research examining the impact of existential nihilism on mental health, wellbeing, and social outcomes. (shrink)

David Hume's early philosophy appeals to fiction and artifice to explain several important features in our cognitive and social activity. In this dissertation, I develop a typology of Humean fictions and artifices to clarify and render his account consistent. In so doing, I identify a special class of fictions I divide into natural fictions and natural artifices. I argue that this special class of fictions represents a significant break with prior English-speaking philosophers, such as Francis Bacon and John Locke, in (...) so far as these fictions and artifices of the imagination are recognized as natural, irresistible, and pragmatically useful in human cognition and social activity. That fictions and artifices are naturally generated by the imagination in epistemic and moral contexts, I argue, is a watershed discovery in the history of philosophy. Indeed, it is a philosophical conclusion that poses serious, perhaps fatal, problems for philosophers who espouse thoroughgoing realist positions. More broadly, Hume's pursuit of applying the experimental method to the moral subject reveals that human nature is mightily governed by the imagination, and that fictions and artifices are ubiquitous across the domains of science, morality, theology, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. For that reason, I suggest Hume ought to be recognized as a central figure in the history of philosophical fictionalism. Specifically, via a comparative analysis of Hume and Hans Vaihinger, I make the case that Hume functions as a vital link between Hobbes, Berkeley, and Kant in the development of early modern fictionalism. (shrink)

What does anyone know after a trial, after a witness gives testimony, or even after seeking the counsel of a lawyer? Hopefully, the answer to these questions has something to do with the truth. Legal systems claim to have truth-seeking functions. Lawyers have specific roles in the procedures by which legal systems seek the truth and these roles are informed by the norms of legal practice. Yet, lawyers' relationship to truth and knowledge remains underexplored in the philosophy of lawyering. I (...) argue that the philosophy of lawyering needs to develop the epistemic branch of inquiry. The epistemic study of the legal profession offers both enrichment of this applied field of philosophy itself and the opportunity for the philosophy of lawyering to link up with a nexus of emerging scholarship about cognition in legal systems and legal services especially metacognition in legal pedagogy and behavioural legal ethics. Advancing an epistemic approach to the philosophy of lawyering, I study the way in which the lawyer is involved in the adversarial systems truth-seeking function. My theory of lawyering is informed by recent scholarship in social epistemology and virtue epistemology. I propose a normative epistemology of lawyering, meaning specifically that my approach speaks to the professional character development of the lawyer. In the adversarial system of adjudication, lawyers can support the truth-seeking function of the system by developing the intellectual virtues of an epistemic partisan. I put my proposal to the test against Monroe Freedmans Client Perjury Trilemma, reaching new conclusions about the responses to the famous problem. Ultimately, I call for a commitment to professional character formation in service of the legal systems search for truth. (shrink)

The dissertation defends a novel account of joint agency, one that accommodates the neglected phenomenon of spontaneous joint action. The goals of the dissertation are to reveal the importance of spontaneous joint action, to show why these actions are problematic for many accounts of joint agency, and to produce a satisfactory theory of them. Chapter 1 argues that being capable of explaining spontaneous joint actions is in fact a requirement on a satisfactory theory of joint agency and this poses a (...) challenge to meeting the other requirement on such a theory, the togetherness requirement. Spontaneous joint actions are those performed by co-agents who have not interacted in ways that bind them together. The challenge, then, is to adequately explain how co-agents are joined together without binding interaction. Chapter 2 reviews the literature and argues that extant theories do not meet the challenge of spontaneity because they cannot satisfy both requirements together. Chapter 3 develops the reasons account of joint action, which appeals to normative group reasons, in order to meet the challenge. Grasping a group reason forces agents to occupy the co-agential point of view because the group reason indicates who is to act and what they ought to do together. If two agents grasp their group reason, they are already bound together such that were they to act on the reason, they would act together spontaneously. Chapter 4 investigates which theory of normative reasons is consistent with spontaneity. Both motivating reasons and internalism about normative reasons are found lacking. Instead, it is argued that realism about normative reasons provides the best account of normative group reasons because the objective nature of real reasons eliminates the need for binding interaction, and it can more easily accommodate the inherent publicity of group reasons. Finally, Chapter 5 argues for realism about normative reasons, the existence of group reasons, and the unrestricted publicity of normative reasons. It does this by showing how these are all consequences of Davidsons triangulation argument. (shrink)

As modernity began to rapidly change and influence European culture, many nineteenth and twentieth-century writers and intellectuals struggled to identify themselves with this modern paradoxical context. As a result, the modern stranger was conjured up out of the uncanny depths of secularized modernity. Although a subject whose makeup is continually shifting, the modern stranger still exists as a strong allegory for secularized modernity, particularly because of its unsolidified and liminal characteristics. Along with its doppelgnger the monster, the stranger reflects not (...) only uncanny otherness but the horrors and anxiety of realizing the potential imperfections and weaknesses of the individual, society, and their utopian imaginings. My project investigates the paradoxical, utopian and negative-utopian makeup of the modern stranger as an outcome of secularizing and modernizing changes in what is typically regarded as Western, predominately European, Judeo-Christian culture and history, beginning with the advent of modernity. By examining the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that I argue has characterized modernity itself, the study showcases the transformation of the stranger from something external into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age. (shrink)

This thesis involves the development of a methodology that when assessed hermeneutically, provides an existential yet accessible framework that informs and deepens the practice of improvised contemporary movement forms. This theoretical methodologys construction also initiates a unique aesthetic theory that can be used for solidifying an improvisational creative process. The unveiling of concealed convergences eventually resonates with dancing bodies as the becoming of the unseen through a phenomenological grounding that performers using improvised movement structures have ostensibly disregarded as being the (...) forgotten trance in dance. Through the interpolation of topics and concepts exclusive to the fields of political theory, aesthetics, philosophy and hermeneutics, selected segments from works by prominent thinkers from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel through Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty are deconstructed to inform the eventual reasoning of how an emancipated dancing experience might come to exist. (shrink)

The current body of literature regarding dance history in Canada is informative and expanding, focusing predominantly on professional schools, dancers, choreographers and companies. There is much yet to be said, however, regarding individual dance educators, their instructional practices and influence on the subject of Canadian dance evolution and culture. This research investigates one mid-twentieth century, Toronto dance teacher, Gladys Forrester, expanding the body of knowledge specific to her career and contributions within the context of Toronto dance history. Through archival and (...) oral language research methodology Gladys Forresters professional dance and teaching praxis comes to light. This study describes issues and lays bare existing specific phenomena in order to gain greater insight into historical events. The goal to understand Gladys Forresters dance practice and pedagogical philosophy enables an exploration of the Toronto dance culture of her time, clarifying her legacy and influence on todays dance community. In addition, research aims to represent the human experience of the subject in such a way that readers or viewers are drawn into the interpretive process of making meaning based on their own reading and reality. The exploration of materials provides insight into the life and work of a forgotten voice and presence in history. Approximately 30 interviews designed to identify Forresters particular profile and contribution reveal information categorized within the frames of: the Christian Science religion and the psychology of flow, and teaching pedagogy and philosophy. Results of the information analysis provide a variety of findings that survey Forresters unique approach, the quality of her teaching and her role in the dance community. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns two epistemologically puzzling phenomena. The first phenomenon is the authority that each of us has over our minds. Roughly, to have authority is to be owed a special sort of deference when self-ascribing your current mental states. The second phenomenon is our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. Roughly, self-knowledge is privileged insofar as one knows ones mental states in a way that is highly epistemically secure relative to other varieties of contingent empirical knowledge. Roughly, one has peculiar self-knowledge (...) insofar as one acquires it in a way that is available only to oneself. In Chapter One I consider several more detailed specifications of the authority of self-ascriptions. Some specifications emphasize the relative indubitability of our self-ascriptions, while others focus on their presumptive truth. In Chapter Two I defend a Neo-Expressivist explanation of authority. According to Neo-Expressivism, self-ascriptions are authoritative insofar as they are acts that put ones mental states on display for others, whether or not these mental states are also known by the self-ascriber with privilege and peculiarity. However, I do not dispute that we often have privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. This raises the question of what such knowledge does explain, if not the authority of our self-ascriptions. In Chapter Three I examine several extant answers to this question, focusing on privileged and peculiar self-knowledge of the propositional attitudes. Each answer meets with objections. In Chapter Four I develop a Social Agentialist account of the explanatory indispensability of privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. I argue that such knowledge enables at least three forms of social-epistemic agency: interpersonal reasoning, complex group action, and linguistic interpretation. Next, I argue that, even though privileged and peculiar self-knowledge does not explain the authority of our self-ascriptions, it is importantly related to our authority. In Chapter Five I consider possible sources of our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge, focusing again on propositional-attitudinal self-knowledge. I eventually defend a Constitutivist view. This is the view that, for agents who meet certain background conditions, self-knowledge is privileged and peculiar because it is metaphysically built into the attitudes self-known. (shrink)

This paper will analyze the integration of biotechnologies in conservation strategies, law enforcement, anti-trafficking efforts, and wildlife tourism through an investigation of Thailand’s elephant trekking industry. The conditions of Asian elephants in Thailand is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most challenging conservation cases, existing at the nexus of pressing animal welfare, labor, national development, and ecological considerations. My paper will call upon a social-historical approach to analyze how biotechnologies as tools of valuation in the complex space of elephant (...) trekking have been historically assembled through colonial-capitalist expansion in Thailand. I will argue that the invocation of biotechnology as an “objective” force in this case effaces issues of social inequality, and in doing so isolates the issues of the trekking industry from larger struggles for social and environmental justice. My objective is to highlight the urgent need to address instances of environmental degradation as connected and at times dependent, upon the exploitation of working-class people. (shrink)

The following dissertation investigates the connection between the division of labour, political subjection and the psychology of authority in Adam Smiths body of work to further his analysis of commercial societies. By shedding light on this connection, I endeavour to examine what Smith under-theorizes: how power relations are organized in commercial societies to account for their historical specificity. Although this dissertation focuses on what remains under-theorized in Smiths account of commercial societies, it proceeds through an internal critique of his system (...) of thought. In other words, I use what Smith says about commercial societies as a springboard to say something new about them on his terms. In so doing, I aim to show that there are still unexplored avenues to Smiths conceptual framing of commercial societies that provide relevant insights on how societies organize power in the age of manufacturing and the free-market. Although recent scholarship is amenable to reading Smith as a multidisciplinary thinker, his reflections on the division of labour, political subjection and the psychology of authority are still treated separately within his political theory. Typically, Smiths account of the division of labour in Wealth of Nations is used to discuss his economic theory. It seldom connects to his politics and where it does, the discussion is usually limited to Smiths ideas on government expenditure as a mitigating force against the worst moral and economic excesses of commercial societies. This has fuelled the widespread and false impression that Smiths politics rarely go beyond the role of the State in economic affairs. For its part, Smiths principles of government in Lectures on Jurisprudence are usually referenced to challenge this false impression by emphasizing his engagement with the latest political debates of his time. This separates Smiths politics from his economics even further by emphasizing their distinction and thus, discourages any exploration of how the negative social effects of the division of labour prepare political subjection in commercial societies. The same can be said for Smiths psychological account of authority in Theory of Moral Sentiments: while it is sometimes broached alongside his principles of government, its relationship to the organization of labour in commercial societies is never fully developed. By bringing these themes together, I intend to engage in a more comprehensive discussion of Smiths politics to better account for the organization and distribution of power in commercial societies. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates and supports arguments intended to justify claims that social diversity in scientific research communities not only promotes justice but is good for knowledge. One such claim that I focus on is that increasing the social location diversity of research communities increases that communitys capacity for critically evaluating knowledge claims. I investigate existing arguments defending this position and point out a common weaknessthey inadequately detail how social diversity in research communities can be epistemically beneficial, and end up implicitly (...) invoking an untenable identity essentialism. I aim to support the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim by providing a solution to this weakness. In chapters one and two I describe arguments defending the epistemic benefits of social diversity claim, explaining where current accounts run out, and suggesting how they could be enhanced. I argue that appeals to increase social diversity in research communities for the sake of epistemic benefits are also implicitly appeals for the inclusion of researchers who occupy critical standpoints on knowledge production, and claim that the resources of feminist standpoint theory are vital. In chapter three I expand my discussion to consider other aspects of subjectivity in knowledge productive practices, and argue that feminist standpoint theory, as well as discussions of the epistemic value of social diversity, do not yet adequately account for the positive epistemic role that advocacy, care, affect, and emotion can play in knowledge making projects. I explore this claim both theoretically and in an extended analysis of the development of Insite, a safe-injection facility in Vancouver. I use the STS idiom of co-production to analyze the entanglement of the activist coalition to establish Insite and long-term health science research programs in the region. In chapter four I apply my findings to the work of an international collaboration, known as Gendered Innovations, attempting to use various policy initiatives to address the under-representation of women and girls in the sciences. I argue that lack of attention, in key works of this collaboration, to the significance of social location in generating epistemic advantage, limits the transformative epistemic potential of their proposed policy initiatives. (shrink)

Low Femme, Low Theory: An Ethno-Archive of Femme Internet Culture is a collection of four papers detailing the findings from my dissertation research, a six-month online ethnography of femme internet culture. In the first paper, I develop an understanding of femme memes as particular audiovisual content found online that appropriate and mobilize public symbols to address the devaluation of femininity. I examine three genres of femme memes, and use the frameworks of low theory and bedroom culture to argue that femme (...) memes are a way of doing femme theory, or a way of making sense out of femmes lived experiences and femmes feelings. In the second paper, I develop an understanding of softness as a contemporary femme aesthetic and poetic that employs hyperfeminine symbols, emotionality, vulnerability, and emphasizes collaboration and interdependence. I use the framework of vulnerability and emotions to argue that softness counters the individualist, masculinist modes of thinking that were introduced by and dominate white, Western thought and continue to permeate existing forms of theory, including existing femme theory and scholarship. I argue that a soft femme politic makes femme more capacious and inclusive. In the third paper, I develop an understanding of selfies as a practice in vulnerability, a practice that is strategically mobilized by femmes to shape femme identity, create femme connections and communities, and make political claims about femme lives. I draw from feminist readings of selfies as well as perspectives on art therapy to make a case that selfies serve both a political representational and communicative function. In the fourth paper, I develop an understanding of femmeships as femme friendships that are both political alliances and communities of care. I draw from scholarship on description as method and from queer cultural theorists to make a case for the importance of describing femme internet culture, in particular the ordinary, everyday interactions or relationships that are its foundation. (shrink)

SuperLattice documents the creation of a hybrid structure that combines human perception with computational methods of processing information. Through SuperLattice I showcase the malleability of data and highlight the creative and narrative choices that are implicit in the recording and presentation of information. The artistic work accompanying SuperLattice is designed to manipulate data and detail how narrative structure and didactic text have the power to transform the meaning of data. To an extent SuperLattice is inspired by Angela Carters novel The (...) Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, with the exhibition taking the form of a futuristic Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. Through projected light, mechanical devices, ephemeral and historic objects I intend to reveal the simultaneous reality and unreality of data, asking questions about how this data constructs our perception of the world around us and how this perception is affected by the errors, biases and glitches that alter information. (shrink)

This dissertation reframes socialist theory through the concept of power. The goal of this reconceptualization is to overcome the main limits of Marxism on issues of usefulness for activists, of accessibility for ordinary people, of the integration of feminist and anti-racist perspectives, and on its relationship to democracy. By building upon the implicit theory of power within the works of contemporary Marxists, such as Ellen Meiksins Wood, Alex Callinicos and G.E.M. De Ste. Croix, this dissertation proposes a new set of (...) concepts that seeks to overcome these limits. By reframing Marxism through a theory of power, we can deepen our criticism of modern societies: the problem is not limited to exploitation, but more broadly tied to inequalities of social power. It allows an understanding of each phenomenon in their specificities, and linking them back to their commonalities, their effect on power inequalities. From there it also unlocks a more precise way of defining the social alternative around the principle of radical democracy. This theory of power can provide tools to analyze inequalities of power in small organization, just as well as the societal scale. Since this theory of power slightly decenters Marxism from the traditional materialist definitions, this dissertation also looks at the question of consciousness and the role of ideas. It proposes to think these questions with the principles of the primacy of practice and the centrality of trust. (shrink)

In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin solved the fundamental problem of film design by showing filmmakers how to select and order the parts of a movie to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of it. He did so by unwittingly bringing Kant's transcendental constraint of apperceptive unity to bear upon it, confirming with unprecedented elegance and power that respect for the constraints of the self-conscious perceptual integrity of observers is the primal (...) precondition of authentic art. Within this address, I summarise Pudovkin's achievement and its Kantian context, condensing the story told within Parts 1-3 of the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection. (shrink)

A thesis by Donato Totaro [M.F.A., 1990] on the affinities between the philosophical conjectures of Henri Bergson and the movies and remarks on filmmaking of Andrei Tarkovsky.

In 1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin, a not-so-young Russian of thirty-two making his first movie of feature length, articulated within a brief manual for filmmakers how to solve the fundamental problem of film design by describing how to select and order the parts of a movie to ensure that viewers can perceive coherently and with least effort the events that they encounter by means of them. How did he do it? How, indeed, could anyone have done it, much less an inexperienced filmmaker, (...) accomplishing a feat of a kind unprecedented within commentaries by others upon any other art? To answer those questions is to comprehend not only the rudiments of how filmmakers make movies but the distinctive nature of the art of filmmaking itself. Within the lectures on 'Pudovkin's Precept...' available within the Evan Wm. Cameron Collection, I address those questions in order and with increasing refinement, unpacking in Part 3 how Pudovkin was able to do what he did only by unwittingly bringing Kant's transcendental constraint of apperceptive unity to bear upon the making of movies, confirming that respect for the constraints of the self-conscious perceptual integrity of observers is the primal precondition of achievement within every art. (shrink)

A review of Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, xviii & 564 pages, $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper, published on pages 492-494 of Philosophy & Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2.

A simple solution to Hume's problem of induction, pragmatically construed.

A brief introduction to Kant's Third Critique as presented in November 1986 at the request of Professor Seth Feldman to the undergraduate students enrolled within his 'Introduction to Fine Arts' course of the Fine Arts Cultural Studies programme, required at the time of all first-year students entering the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto, Ontario.

Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by (...) rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition. (shrink)

In 1787 Immanuel Kant published a second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. Within a new preface he reaffirmed an identity that his critics had failed to comprehend: we and God encounter things differently rather than different things. A century later Louis Lumière, by the first public screening of a movie, exemplified a comparable identity that a good many nonfilmmakers have ever since failed to comprehend: we see differently by means of movies the same things that stood before the (...) camera as the film was exposed rather than different things. I sketch within this essay the consequences of those identities for logic and filmmaking, foremost among them that identity claims, carefully construed, are irrefutable, disposing of impotent counterarguments. (shrink)