English Language and Literature

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Punctuated Ethos: Addressing Trust, Credibility and Expertise in Times of Crisis
(University of Waterloo, 2025-09-19) Eckert, Carolyn
Trust, Communication, and Crisis: Rhetorical Lessons from COVID-19 Trust, the earning, sustaining, and loss of it, is at the center of public responses during a health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. This dissertation explores how trust functions not merely as a social or institutional ideal, but as a rhetorical construct negotiated through language, ethos, and public discourse. Drawing on rhetorical theories of ethos, from Aristotle’s character-based model to Hyde’s concept of ethos as dwelling, the project introduces the concept of “punctuated ethos” to analyze how rhetorical credibility is constructed, fractured, and recalibrated at key moments of crisis. Through a rhetorical analysis of Canadian responses to COVID-19, grounded in a corpus of local news media coverage, this study investigates how political and public health authorities communicated protective measures such as lockdowns and vaccination campaigns, and how acts of resistance, such as the Trinity Bible Chapel (2020-2021) defiance and the “Freedom Convoy” (2022) protest, contested institutional credibility and reshaped public narratives of trust. In early 2020, Canadian acceptance of public health measures was initially high. However, prolonged lockdowns, pandemic fatigue, and vaccine controversies fractured public trust, leading to increased polarization and protest. Emerging communication technologies further complicated trust-building by amplifying mis/disinformation and undermining traditional media authority. This dissertation applies a rhetorical approach to health risk communication frameworks (Leiss, 2004; Witte, 1992), alongside theoretical tools such as Huiling Ding’s epidemic rhetoric (2014), Stephen Katz and Carolyn Miller’s rhetorical model of risk communication (1996), and rhetorical analyses of appeals, topoi, and public argumentation (Fahnestock, 1998; Miller, 1989; Perelman, 1982; Sontag, 1978, Bitzer, 1968; Goodnight, 1982; Burke, 1969). These frameworks support an examination of how the public validates expertise (Mehlenbacher, 2022) and how trust becomes rhetorically shaped, disrupted, or re-established in moments of crisis. Chapter 2 offers a historical context for Canada’s public health communication, from the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic through SARS (2003) and H1N1 (2009), showing how trust was constructed, destabilized, and unevenly distributed across racialized and marginalized communities. Chapter 3 surveys relevant rhetorical, medical, and communication literatures, framing trust as a contingent rhetorical achievement rather than a stable condition. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 form the core case studies, analyzing pandemic rhetoric, vaccine rhetoric, and protest rhetoric, respectively, each applying grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to trace how communicators used strategies like fear, hope, and ethos to shape audience responses. These chapters also identify the shifting roles of local media as amplifier, skeptic, or translator of public health messages. The final chapter proposes a symbolic formulaic framework to model how emotional appeals, perceived efficacy, and media functions interact rhetorically to either sustain or fracture public trust. Key findings highlight the importance of localized, community-centered messaging, the strategic use of emotional appeals, and the need for credible, transparent communication. Public health communicators must anticipate rhetorical outcomes by aligning emotional resonance with timing (kairos), community values (topos), and credible ethos. Authorities, professionals and communicators must develop critical literacy practices to prepare for future crises, including audience analysis, myth debunking, and media testing. Policy considerations, such as regulating mis/disinformation and enhancing journalistic integrity, are essential to supporting effective communication frameworks. This research underscores that rhetoric is not an afterthought in crisis communication, it is the mechanism through which trust is built, challenged, or lost. Grounded in rhetorical theory and applied to contemporary media and health contexts, this dissertation offers actionable strategies for health professionals, communicators, educators, journalists, and policymakers to design resilient, trustworthy communication in times of crisis.
The Missing Picture: Iranian Women in the Media
(University of Waterloo, 2025-09-17) Jafari, Zahra
This dissertation examines and compares the representation of Iranian women in cinema and women’s journals before and after the Revolution of 1979. Research on women in Iranian cinema tends to focus on specific angles and narrow approaches. My study, however, intertwines viewpoints from a variety of sources, is informed by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, and applies theories from a range of academic disciplines. I challenge dominant media narratives that juxtapose the image of the “emancipated” pre-revolutionary Iranian woman with that of the “oppressed” post-revolutionary woman. My aim, in moving away from mainstream narratives, is to introduce a fresh perspective and to contribute new knowledge to the literature on gender and the media, particularly within an Iranian context. In my dissertation, which is composed of an introduction and four chapters, I analyze nine films from the pre-revolutionary era and investigate the visual and textual contents of pre-revolutionary women’s periodicals published over the span of five decades (1925 to 1978). These journals include Alam-e Nesvan (Women’s World), Peyk Sa’adat-e Nesvan (The Messenger of Women’s Prosperity), Jamiyat Nesvan Vatankhah Iran (Journal of the Society of Iranian Patriotic Women), and Zan-e Rooz (Woman of Today). Drawing on insights from Edward Said and Laura Mulvey, and using Linda Scott’s theory of visual rhetoric, I demonstrate that the cinema of this era, in congruence with women’s magazines, projected an image that emphasized the passivity, powerlessness, and sexual availability of Iranian women. For my post-revolutionary data analysis, I draw on Hélène Cixous’s theoretical framework to evaluate four female-directed war movies—Gilaneh (2005), Track 143 (2013), Vila Dwellers (2017), and Squad of Girls (2022)—and a female-produced historical drama, Khatoon (2022). Building on Cixous’s influential concept of écriture féminine, I then illustrate that these visualizations are prominent examples of subversive texts in their related genres, and, in essence, a practice in visual écriture féminine by female filmmakers because they defy the rules and codes of their categories to present an unseen picture of Iranian women. Further, I highlight the significance of these directors’ contributions to the Iranian film industry in subverting the norms and conventions of specific genres to re-imagine exclusionary and/or reductivist narratives about Iranian women.
Figuring Forgiveness: Dramatistic Aspects of Forgiveness in an Anabaptist Context
(University of Waterloo, 2025-09-02) Gerber, Kyle
This dissertation is a knowledge-translation project of artistic creation: the composition and performance of three sermons which bring Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical method to the topic of forgiveness in an Anabaptist context. It faces the special challenge of explaining from the cognitive perspective of a Burkean rhetoric of motives why Anabaptists – particularly Amish and Mennonites – forgive. And it faces the challenge of explaining that to an Anabaptist congregation. I ask, “What is involved when we say we are forgiving, and why are we doing it?” Where other treatments of the topic have foregrounded sociological or historical perspectives, this project illuminates the suasive and formative qualities of forgiveness as a distinctly rhetorical act, and comes at the topic from a perspective situated as both rhetorician and pastor within the Anabaptist tradition. The sermons not only function to communicate the analytical and substantiating power of Burke’s rhetorical method, but also enact that power in homiletic performance. As instances of knowledge mobilization, the sermons translate and apply the theoretical valence of Burke’s dramatism to the practical and contextualized task of preaching. In particular, the sermons mobilize Burke’s concept of identification and his theories of form to illustrate the rhetorical dimensions of forgiveness in divine, social, and personal domains. As creative pieces within an expository framework reflecting the homiletical vein of the rhetorical tradition, the sermons also channel Burke’s voice as a literary critic and explore Anabaptist texts such as confessions of faith, martyrologies, hymnals, and devotional books as “equipment for living,” while at the same time directly offering Anabaptist literary equipment themselves in the performance of the sermons. The first sermon explores forgiveness as an act nested within a scene of divine drama, framed within an exposition of Romans 5:1-10. The second sermon prioritizes aspects of the Agent:Act ratio within an exposition of Matthew 18:21-35 to explore how interpersonal identification shapes attitudes toward receiving and extending forgiveness. The third sermon prioritizes the Act:Agent ratio within an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6, exploring the formative relationships between language, devotional practices and attitudes of forgiveness. These three sermons are framed by introductory and concluding chapters which provide the theoretical context and offer a scholarly and expanded consideration of how Burkean rhetorical theories relate to forgiveness in Anabaptist practice and literature. The texts of the sermons are provided in both bare and annotated forms; the annotated versions provide additional scholarly analysis, with footnotes addressing performative, perlocutionary elements while the endnotes address broader analytical and critical features. The opening and closing chapters theorize the project, framing its autoethnographic features and situating it within broader questions of my own identity as a Mennonite scholar, pastor, and preacher. Ultimately, this dissertation argues, through both the literary performances and the scholarly apparatus, that a full comprehension of forgiveness in an Anabaptist context means understanding its broader rhetorical dimensions, and that the application of a Burkean rhetoric of motives provides a more rounded appreciation of the symbolic forces that both form and are informed by Anabaptist values and beliefs about forgiveness.
A Decentering Other in the Academy: Disrupting the Ordinariness of Racism and English Native Speakerism in Canadian University Education, and in the Study and Teaching of Writing in Canadian Writing Classrooms
(University of Waterloo, 2025-08-26) Karki, Chitra
Abstract This study is a part of my decentering/decolonial journey—a journey intended to identify, unravel/unsettle, and challenge the nexus of politics and poetics of whiteness, white supremacy, racism, linguistic imperialism, and other forms of injustices in Canadian University education writ large, and in particular, in the study of writing and the teaching of writing in Canada. It has become increasingly evident that the discriminatory practices have negatively affected students, teachers, staff and other people of colour. Historically, this nexus has been under theorized, under-researched and under-addressed in Canadian writing studies and writing instructional practices because of the continuing legacy of colonial ideology, systemic racism, and white supremacist thinking among mainstream writing scholars. The works of majority of mainstream Canadian scholars reveal that there is a persistent tendency to perform and maintain silence, touristic gaze and lip-service when it comes to dealing with some of the central issues such as politics of whiteness, racism, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, linguistic imperialism, and their toxic effects on the racially and variously Othered people in the field. While mainstream Canadian writing studies scholars have widely discussed the marginalization of writing studies as a field and collectively advocated for its emerging disciplinary identity, they have not demonstrated the similar interest and willingness to address the problems of ordinariness of racism, linguistic imperialism, white supremacy, native speakerist ideology, and other discriminatory practices. These issues have historically underpinned the epistemic foundations of the field of writing studies and the institutions that house it. Instead, the mainstream scholars in the field have persistently demonstrated native-speakerist, and Eurocentric tendency to tell only single stories of whiteness that befit and benefit its own members. The onus, then, is left upon marginalized students, professors, researchers, and their white allies to theorize this nexus of intersecting discriminations through decentering practices. Studying and addressing the intersecting discriminations within Canadian university education in general and the teaching and learning of writing studies practices in Canada, necessitates an intersectional approach that incorporates, but is not limited to, stories of lived experiences of racism, CRT informed applied linguistic considerations, and critical historical analyses and/or historicization of the field from the Othered perspectives. The intersectional approach offers a unique perspective and strategy to fight the ongoing nexus of intersecting discriminations within the field of Canadian writing studies. In my effort to decenter whiteness, I have taken up Aja Martinez’s hybridizing approach/method to mesh my personal stories of racism with various discursive approaches such as postcolonial theory, CRT informed applied linguistic analysis, historical analysis, and other analytical measures. While this forging of our stories of lived experiences and hybridizing methods are crucial to fight racism, white supremacy, linguistic imperialism, and other discriminatory practices, these methods could face limitations and challenges especially when racial discriminations take more sophisticated and cryptic turns in the future as artificial intelligence of whiteness holds a firm grip in academia or elsewhere. To overcome both old and emerging challenges, nonetheless, our decentering efforts must be unrelenting.
Message Received: An Examination of Disabled Voice, Choice, and Understanding in Susan Glickman’s The Discovery of Flight and Lynn Coady’s Watching You Without Me
(University of Waterloo, 2025-08-21) Dobbelsteyn, Jenna
This thesis examines how disabled voice, agency, and understanding are represented in two Canadian novels: Susan Glickman’s The Discovery of Flight and Lynn Coady’s Watching You Without Me. Using a framework that I call the “Pendulum of Understanding,” I explore how characters with physical and intellectual disabilities are listened to (or not) by those around them, and how this affects their narrative presence and autonomy. Through close reading and the lens of disability studies theory, I argue that while both novels attempt to centre disabled characters, the type of disability significantly impacts how voice is facilitated and understood. Libby, a physically disabled character with access to assistive technology, is given narrative space and agency. Kelli, who has an intellectual disability, is often filtered through the assumptions of others. This comparison reveals a broader discomfort with voices that require a form of intellectual facilitation, and a tendency to either neglect or assume understanding. Ultimately, this project calls for a more nuanced, ethical approach to imagining disabled voices so that knowledge and humility are balanced to achieve appropriate understanding.
Failure in Disability Game Studies
(University of Waterloo, 2025-08-21) Femia, Giuseppe
disability, game studies, disability game studies, media studies, tabletop roleplaying game, game design, performance, disability performance media, reparative play, simming, neurodivergent, ethnography, research creation, queer failure
Patriarchy, Power and Protest: Women’s Agency in South Asian and African Literature
(University of Waterloo, 2025-08-20) Bano, Mahnoor
This dissertation explores the marginalization of women and their agency in the context of both literature reflecting the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and African novels, examining the evolution of patriarchal structures and the ways in which women navigate and challenge these systems. Through an analysis of key texts, including What the Body Remembers, Cracking India, The Joys of Motherhood, Things Fall Apart, and Woman at Point Zero, this study highlights the patriarchal manipulation of religion, tradition, and women's roles as wives and mothers to enforce patriarchal control. Despite the doubly marginalized position of women, these narratives reveal how women have created voices and "mini-narratives" that puncture the overarching patriarchal structures. The research also delves into contemporary examples of women's oppression, such as widow immolation, honor killings, and female genital mutilation, analyzing the patriarchal discourses that circulate in these accounts and contextualizing these within ongoing global patriarchal trends. Additionally, this dissertation examines the political implications of the Western representation of Muslim women, particularly through the discourse on the veil, and argues that the Western stance on such symbols mirrors patriarchal tactics of marginalization. The study asserts that, despite the silencing forces of patriarchy, women consistently carve out spaces for agency and resistance through storytelling, both in historical and modern contexts.
Confronting the Entity: The Implied Presence in Horror Cinema
(University of Waterloo, 2025-05-20) Domonchuk, Michael
This dissertation examines three horror films from the late 1970's: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and Peter Medak's The Changeling (1980). The examination illustrates the importance of cinematographically-rendered negative space surrounding the films' villainous entities; the term this dissertation will propose in this context is the implied presence. The implied presence is key to not only establishing a distinction between terror (dread) and horror (revulsion), but also subverting the notion of a linear and finite path from terror to horror. The implied presence (that which is not seen on screen but implied) creates the opportunity for the viewer to create and engage with a more personal and individual confrontation with the villainous entity before it occurs visually on screen; this challenges and transcends the idea of subjectivity and the role of the voyeur for the viewer. This argument makes a critical connection between technical filmmaking practices and viewer participatory autonomy in the filmic experience that will show a higher level of intellectual and emotional/psychological control over how one views a horror or suspense film. Michel Chion proposes the term "Audiovisual Contract" (Audio Vision, 1994) to explain how visual and sound in a film are separate cinematic elements temporarily working together, yet are accepted together by the viewer to be creating a sensory backdrop for a diegesis. In a similar way, the implied presence in both sound and image challenge the viewer to form a contract with the impending horror confrontation before it happens on-screen. This establishes the distinction between the notion of horror and the display of horror, which places the notion of horror more firmly in the psychological and emotional control of the viewer. In this way, the viewer becomes able to create an entity that is unique to each individual and not solely dictated by the screen. This creates the platform for a pedagogical angle to this dissertation: learning how to watch a horror film, to understand why viewers fear them, can extend the medium's teaching value, and open the door for a larger and more comprehensive approach to cross-disciplined film study. This dissertation proposes a methodology for this approach in its study of technical filmic elements and narrative strategies. The three films examined were chosen because they best exemplify the catalysts for modern cinematic practice and expression. They encourage viewers to consider carefully the diegetic world but also the outside world that created them.
Knowing Language: The Poetics of Epistemology in Jan Zwicky, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill
(University of Waterloo, 2025-05-16) Giannakopoulos, Christopher
This dissertation investigates the poetics of epistemology in the works of Jan Zwicky (1955-), Paul Muldoon (1951-), and Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016), three contemporary poets who engage epistemology by way of diverse interdisciplinary proxies. Principally, my dissertation shows that in Zwicky, Muldoon, and Hill, poetry is not representative as a knowledge-producing discourse but is instead meta-epistemological: as a cultural artefact of language that is exemplary for the way it self-reflexively expresses epistemological themes (thinking, thought, knowledge, etc.), poetry calls into question the stability of linguistic meaning by challenging the epistemological assumptions and rhetorical commonplaces of other discourses on knowing—especially philosophy (Zwicky), history (Muldoon), and theology (Hill)—discourses whose epistemological foundations are based on a language-as-knowledge-producing model. For Zwicky, the paradigm of “lyric philosophy” informs and is informed by the poem’s capacity as a phenomenological gestalt, where poetry’s knowing occurs in a matrix of linguistic resonances. Gestalt insight in Zwicky’s work relies for its rhetorical force on the lyric integration of linguistic elements rather than on language’s formal logical procedures. Muldoon’s framework for poetic knowing—and not-knowing, and un-knowing—is the result of an aesthetics of encyclopedic reference, etymological punning, and intertextual allusion deployed in the form of riddles. As a locus of facts, data, and information, knowing in Muldoon’s poetry is contingent on the play and ply of both the locally synchronic and the intertextually diachronic aspects of the language used to structure it. These riddling dynamics are indefinitely played out in Muldoon’s work, where reference and ambiguity as competing linguistic forces together constitute an interminable weaving and unweaving of epistemological multiplicities. In Hill’s work, knowing is disclosed negatively through a variety of apophatic tropes: combined with an aesthetics of theological sublimity as well as the ethical demand for responsible language, Hill’s poetry expresses knowing as an apophatic epistemological mystery. Poems accomplish this interdisciplinary thinking about knowing through their resistance to the rhetorics of representation, thematization, and closure, all of which are central features of epistemological discourses that work to reveal, establish, or reinforce truth claims. In Zwicky, Muldoon, and Hill, poetry complicates, problematizes, and resists the ontological simplifications implied by the language-as-knowledge-producing model of epistemological discourse. By exploring the paradigmatically gestalt, riddling, and apophatic qualities of poetry, this dissertation provides insight into the contingencies of linguistically-derived truth, offering a view of poetry not as an expression of knowledge but as “knowing language”.
Between Popular Cultural Authorship and Post-Scholarly Criticism: The Structural Analysis of the Digital Video Essay Form
(University of Waterloo, 2025-05-14) Shatalova, Elizaveta
This dissertation analyzes the digital video essay form on YouTube as a recent communicative and communal phenomenon, emphasizing the historical roles academic scholarship and popular cultural production have played in its emergence. On the one hand, by theorizing what I call ‘post-scholarly’ criticism, I explore and outline the potential influences of academic thought on the contemporary generation of former and current students, who produce video essays for public consumption on this platform. With some of them reaching over one million views, these video essays have become an immensely popular cultural critical genre on English-speaking YouTube, which often mobilizes concepts, contexts, and methods commonly associated with the humanities and liberal arts disciplines. By often expressing their left-leaning views in their analysis of popular cultural phenomena from artworks to digital aesthetics and discourse, today’s digital author-critics reproduce scholarly concerns that once famously marked the ‘radical’ cultural turn in the 1980s and onward. Specifically, video essayists often generate cultural criticism of mass-produced artworks / popular cultural trends and utilize the tools of critical theory to address systemic, institutional and political issues that they identify in contemporary corporate cultural industries as well as in digital cultural consumption and production. By examining this digital genre, I suggest that these critics rely on a loose scholarly episteme of intellectual fandom. Importantly, the move away from the professional academic domain encapsulated in the contemporary digital video essay form testifies to the structural process of deinstitutionalization taking place. In other words, I broadly argue that today’s digital post-scholarly critics publicly express a cultural and political trend towards deinstitutionalizing academic criticism and scholarship, which, in turn, calls for new articulations of the value of the humanities in academia today. On the other hand, my dissertation also argues that contemporary digital authorship must be considered as a part of the historical trajectory related to popular amateur creative practices and new attractional multimedia mode of thinking. It has long been stressed that historically creative cultural practices situated around recombining various mediums prefigured the contemporary digital popular production witnessed on social platforms today. However, I suggest that it is important to consider the idea of the post-literary public sphere that has emerged as a direct result of mass cultural production in the west. I conceptualize the broad, post-literary public sphere in terms of the distinctive popular creative practices and communicative forms it has produced, arguing that contemporary digital authorship is an important emerging mode of self-articulation in today’s global western cultural context. The conversational, personalized, and immediately situated digital public genre of the video essay attributes heightened importance to individual self-expression as the pathway to broader social, cultural, and political dialogue. Thus, today’s digital authorship reminds us of the salient historical value of publicly circulating literary forms — their potential for generating a civic public sphere. Ultimately, by theorizing the digital video essay form through the constellation of post-scholarly criticism and popular cultural authorship, this dissertation offers a dialectical perspective for studying new modes of digital communication.
Changing Education One Story at a Time
(University of Waterloo, 2025-05-01) Samboo, Stephanie
Higher education, traditionally founded on white epistemologies and philosophies, promotes Standard Language Ideology resulting in a linguistic hierarchy in which white English is the benchmark expected in the classroom while other varieties of English occupy a lower position in this hierarchy. The language we speak shapes how we perceive and navigate through the world since “language is a carrier of culture” (Ngugi wa Tiong’o). As such, enforcing a Standard Language Ideology mutes and undervalues the socio-cultural and linguistic traditions of Peoples of Colour and pushes them to the margins. According to Paulo Freire, the aim of education is to free people, not enslave them. The raison d'etre driving my dissertation is to foreground rather than elide the lived experiences of BIPOC speakers and writers of World Englishes, to critique mainstream writing pedagogies that participate in that elision, and to theorise a translingual and code-meshing pedagogy that provides safe and open spaces for the identities, languages, epistemologies, and discourses of BIPOC to prevail in North American writing classrooms and writing centres. I do this by demonstrating my own indoctrination into whiteness and its effects on me as student, writing teacher and writing program administrator. I also trace my journey of decolonising of self which encompasses my ongoing efforts to foreground and amplify voices of People of Colour in education especially in first year composition demonstrating a commitment to adopting a trans- epistemic and translingual philosophy of education. I conclude with a call to all peoples of colour to start telling our complex stories to counter the single story being told in education and offer some suggestions for future opportunities and research inspired by this dissertation.
English Identity After Britain: Restructuring Englishness in the 20th Century
(University of Waterloo, 2025-02-03) Cameron, Christopher; Savarese, John
This dissertation explores how writers in early 20th-century Britain grappled with nationalism, particularly its relationship to English national identity. I analyze how authors during this pivotal moment in British history attempt to disentangle or redefine concepts of patriotism, nationalism, and national identity. I explore the tensions between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism and how authors navigated this divide. Grounded in critical nationalism studies drawing on the work of theorists like Benedict Anderson, Michel Foucault, Craig Calhoun, and Stuart Hall, I conduct close readings of both fiction and non-fiction, focusing on how writers engage with ideas of Englishness. Chapter One considers how George Orwell attempted to harness national identification for left-wing politics—with particular attention to his attempt to distinguish between “patriotism” and “nationalism”—and examines the difficulties of such an approach. In chapter two, I explore how Virginia Woolf rejected both patriotism and nationalism, in favour of a cosmopolitan project that retained national identity while also promoting a “global citizen” ethos. In chapter three, I discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s focus on creating a national myth for England, separating Englishness from the larger imperial category of “Britishness.” This chapter also explores Tolkien’s use of fantasy to enact what he called a “recovery” for national identity, looking backward in the style of Romantic Nationalism but using it progressively. Lastly, chapter four turns to Scottish and Irish case studies via the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and James Joyce, in order to provide a point of comparison for the English writers’ projects and the complex relation between their versions of “Englishness” and anticolonial nationalisms from elsewhere in the home empire. I argue that while the English authors studied might not have been entirely successful in articulating an English national identity separate from imperial Britishness, their efforts demonstrate a potential for a progressive use of national identity. These writers were aware of nations as rhetorical constructs. They sought to use this understanding to cultivate an ethics of care at home rather than a defensive or expansionist attitude abroad. The work of these authors demonstrates how literature can shape, critique, and reimagine national identity. Completely separating national identity from its problematic aspects may not always be possible or desirable. While acknowledging that risk, this study shows that national identity can potentially be mobilized for progressive purposes and to foster an ethics of care.
“If you weren’t operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?”: Surveillance in Twenty-first Century Speculative Fiction
(University of Waterloo, 2025-01-16) Tharamarajah, Allyson Lim; Love, Heather
This thesis explores speculative fiction as a tool for examining the ethical, societal, and legal implications of surveillance and data-driven technologies. By analyzing The Circle by Dave Eggers, Followers by Megan Angelo, Going Zero by Anthony McCarten, and The Warehouse by Rob Hart, I investigate how speculative fiction imagines possible futures shaped by current technological and societal trends. This thesis draws on frameworks such as Shoshana Zuboff’s “psychic numbing” in the context of surveillance capitalism, Neil Postman’s idea of the Technopoly, and theories of datafication from Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias to examine themes of surveillance, power imbalances, and the erosion of individual autonomy. I will also incorporate Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concepts of visuality and countervisuality to explore how figures of authority maintain power by regulating visibility, and how resistance emerges through attempts to reclaim what he terms “the right to look.” The first chapter focuses on the digital panopticon, examining how pervasive surveillance in The Circle and Followers demonstrates the commodification of the human experience and the narrowing of individual agency in data-driven surveillance societies. The second chapter shifts to the question of power and exploitation as I look at how corporations in Going Zero and The Warehouse leverage surveillance technologies to consolidate control, perpetuate inequality, and undermine democratic principles. Through these narratives, I examine ways in which speculative fiction serves as both a critique of unchecked technological advancements and a tool for envisioning alternative futures, as well as paths to resistance.
Relationality and Ecosystem: On the Narrativity of Generative Systems in Literature and Video Games
(University of Waterloo, 2024-10-21) Carpenter, Justin; Hirschkop, Ken
This dissertation is an examination of the aesthetic relationship between generative art theory and narrative theory in literature and video games. More specifically, it observes the narratological implications of the imposition of a generative system—a set of rules or algorithms which in some fashion contribute to the completion of an artwork—within the context of narrative works. This approach to textuality, commonly seen in computational contexts, is part of a longer history which outlines the relationship between authorship, audience interpretation and/or agency, and systematic emergence. I argue that the imposition of a generative system frames the various layers of narrative in such texts, rendering the relationship between intra-and-extratextual situations—or, put differently, between what is being read/played and the situation in which it is being read/played—as part of the same narrativized rhetorical situation, rendering the text into a spatialized ecosystem in which continued reading or playing becomes a continuation of the text’s diegesis. Thus, the narrativity of these generative systems must be observed as a process of conception, production, expression, and reception which is informed by this narrativized tension between authors, agents, and emergent systems. To better examine this ecosystemic conception of narrative artworks, I interrogate the narrativity of generative systems. This begins with an examination of contemporary conceptions of generative theory. I then proceed to outline a longer-form, composite history of generative approaches in art contexts, up to and including the emergence of the computer as the ideal generative artmaking tool. Following these theoretical accounts of generative art theory, I perform close readings of three texts: Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch; Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water; and Hello Games’s video game No Man’s Sky. Each of these texts are useful examples of the narrativity of generative systems, namely because each of these texts relies upon narrative ‘generators’—figurative and structural devices which produce narrativized ‘situations’ for the reader while simultaneously impacting the diegesis—such as metalepsis (the transgression of narrative levels, which produces new narrative levels) and mise en abyme (the reflexive doubling of the narrative whole within some smaller part of the diegesis). By examining each of these texts as an unfolding process which concerns both the diegetic and the meta-diegetic levels of a narrative simultaneously, I suggest the especially ‘relational’ capacity of a narratology built upon the ecosystemic model described in the first chapters, arguing that this model is a reasonable approach to account for the kinds of interactive and emergent texts which are becoming increasingly common in the digital era.
Interdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Engineering and Responsible Innovation
(University of Waterloo, 2024-08-14) Orchard, Alexi; O'Gorman, Marcel; Boger, Jennifer
Since the early 2000s, North American engineering and technology regulatory associations have mandated that accredited engineering programs in higher education must fulfill teaching outcomes including ethics, equity, and the impact of engineering on society and the environment. Though this mandate propelled more research and pedagogical innovation in engineering ethics education (EEE) over the last two decades, some engineering programs have been slow to acknowledge and incorporate perspectives from outside of the engineering field, such as those situated in the humanities and social science (HSS) disciplines. There is an awareness that HSS knowledge and interdisciplinary expertise is well-positioned to enhance the teaching and research of engineering ethics and related topics, such as equity, diversity, inclusion, and social and environmental justice and, as this dissertation will show, there are multiple beneficial ways that this can happen. This dissertation examines and demonstrates multiple models for interdisciplinary ethics pedagogy that integrates HSS-based methods and approaches into the engineering curriculum, including workshops and cross-disciplinary curricular interventions. Specifically, this work focuses on how critical design – an arts- and humanities-based research-creation method that emphasizes critical thinking and reflection on the social, psychological, and ecological impacts of technology (Dunne & Raby, 2013) – can be a creative and effective approach to enhancing EEE. This work also incorporates methods and principles informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), such as responsible innovation (Stilgoe et al., 2013), value sensitive design (Friedman & Hendry, 2019), design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020), and data feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020), arguing that they are promising approaches for this purpose as well. A significant contribution of this research is the development of curricular materials using these approaches. Considering the negative and harmful impacts stemming from the tech industry over the last several years, it is crucial for engineering students to learn and participate in more rigorous ethical deliberation as part of the engineering design workflow. This dissertation argues that by engaging in more interdisciplinary ethics pedagogy, the EEE curriculum will be better prepared to support the ethical development of future engineers.
Subjectivity Under the Smartphone: A Rhetorical Examination of Digital Communications Technologies
(University of Waterloo, 2024-07-25) Lodoen, Shannon; McMurry, Andrew
This dissertation examines how the ubiquitous presence of the smartphone is reshaping what it means to be a subject, and how people experience their subjectivity, in a digitally mediated society. I explore this question by analyzing the smartphone as a persuasive agent on both a micro (individual) and macro (societal) level. In positioning the smartphone as a persuasive agent, I move beyond traditional rhetorical analyses in or of digital environments to a multimodal analysis of the rhetorical nature of the smartphone itself. My analysis combines two empirical approaches for studying digital rhetoric—captology and procedural rhetoric—into what I call a captocedural rhetorical approach. The dual approach I employ considers both the intentions of phone designers and actual usage patterns for users, with a focus on the affordances of the smartphone that encourage and enable these particular usage patterns to emerge. With this approach, I identify three aspects of the smartphone’s address that make it so persuasive and pervasive: it is constant, it is customizable, and it alters the perceived consequentiality of the actions, interactions, and procedures conducted through and with these devices. Each of these three elements can be examined on both an individual level (looking at the smartphone’s captological features) and a broader level (which considers the processes and procedures that the smartphone either necessitates or facilitates). In both cases, it is clear that the smartphone is becoming more integral in daily life more quickly than any previous communications technology; as such, it is important to assess how and why this device differs from previous technologies in terms of its affordances and effects. By scrutinizing the smartphone’s impact on users’ behaviours, beliefs, and values, I aim to bring it back to the forefront of thought and discern some of the key consequences of its “taken-for-grantedness” (Ling).
Mosaics of Resistance: Political Identity Expression in Palestinian Youth Subcultures
(University of Waterloo, 2024-07-03) El-Amyouni, Elianne; El-Amyouni, Elianne
This thesis examines contemporary transnational Palestinian hip-hop as part of a continuum of politically informed and informing cultural expression, emphasizing the increasing heterogeneity of ideals and visions for Palestinian national liberation in response to a series of expulsions, defeats, and treatises. It traces the relationship between politics and the poem-song from the late 18th century to the present, and there is a focus on the noticeable shifts in the geopolitical landscape at pivotal moments throughout the 20th century—the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, and most importantly, the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords—to reveal how the Palestinian situation has become what it is today, and what role the poem-song has played and continues to play in that evolution both within the historic homeland and without. Its focus is on contemporary Palestinian hip-hop and delves into a semiotic analysis of specific songs written and performed by contemporary Palestinian rappers and hip-hop artists from around the world to delineate a possible shared vision of or affiliation with Palestine. What we find in our analysis is a mosaic of opinions, identifications, and preoccupations that sometimes converge with one another and demonstrate a continuity with pre-Oslo resistance culture, while at other times diverge completely into their own new territory.
Hesitant Belonging: Understanding Generational Traumas of Forced Migration in Black and Palestinian Diaspora Contemporary Transnational Fiction
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-17) El Mekaui, Lara; Smyth, Heather; Dolmage, Jay
This dissertation explores the concept of "hesitant belonging" within the context of Black and Palestinian Diaspora Contemporary Transnational Fiction. The study investigates how forced migration, identity formation, and the related affects of uncertainty and ambivalence shape the experiences of diasporic individuals. By analyzing four literary case studies, the work highlights how hesitancy, as a space of uncertainty and stagnation, a response to past trauma and ongoing violence, and a tool for refusal and resistance, influences the sense of belonging in migrant bodies navigating different locales. The broader goal of the dissertation is to elucidate the role of hesitation in understanding complex and difficult forms of belonging, as well as its intersection with diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, affect theory, and trauma studies.
The Intimate Fandoms of Men’s Hockey Real Person Fanfiction
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-15) Vist, Mari Elise; Morrison, Aimée
Using queer phenomenology, rhetorical genre theory, and fanfiction written about National Hockey League (NHL) athletes, this dissertation develops the concept of intimate publics of fandom: small, reciprocal and protective groups of fans who write to and for each other to assuage desires otherwise unmet by public fandom. Historically, fan scholars convincingly argued for the literary and social value of the political and interpretive work of slash fandoms that write fanfiction where two otherwise straight male characters are reimagined in a queer relationship. In this way, slash is seen as a powerful, subversive fandom that poaches material from texts that uphold oppressive norms. However, most of the slash studied has been based on fictional characters, because Real Person Fanfiction (RPF) or RPF slash is frequently seen as immoral and shameful by both fans and fan scholars. Even though RPF slash is common in many fandoms, such as boy band fandom (e.g. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson from One Direction), or actors who are popular slash pairings (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman who play Sherlock and Watson in BBC’s Sherlock), RPF slash has not received the same scholarly attention as slash based on fictional characters. In this dissertation, I argue that this gap exists in part because of fan studies’ attachment to the metaphor of poaching to empower slash-fans as subversive interpreters, which would make RPF slash an infringement on a real person’s autonomy. Understanding that some fandoms function as intimate publics, however, makes it possible to see some RPF slash not as a subversive interpretation, but as a shelter from public fandom. To develop the framework of intimate publics of fandom, I use my experience as a hockey fan as the case for this dissertation. Through Men’s Hockey RPF, I find queer joy and community that is absent to me in the traditional, public spaces of hockey fandom. I trace this journey through 5 chapters, each addressing a different facet of intimate publics of fandom. Chapter 1 develops squatting as an alternative metaphor to poaching and argues that, where poaching comes from the antagonistic mode of suspicious reading common in literary studies, squatting comes from reparative modes of reading which do not require a hostile relationship between reader and text. Chapter 2 uses feminist literary theories and rhetorical genre theory to define intimate fandoms through hockey’s public fandom in Canada. Building on those first two chapters, the next three chapters offer close readings of my own intimate fandoms to test the usefulness of the framework. Chapter 3 demonstrates that understanding Hockey RPF slash as an intimate fandom allows us to see how fans use Hockey RPF as a shelter from the relation of cruel optimism to the NHL. Chapter 4 argues that the framework of intimate fandoms makes it more possible to see the ways in which even fanfiction that seems subversive may still uphold other norms, such as the white supremacy of hockey. Chapter 5 tests the limits of intimate fandoms by reading fanfiction that makes erotic monsters out of NHL athletes to argue that intimate fandoms help us better understand the desires that create ‘creepy’ slash. I close the dissertation with a short conclusion that reflects on the end of my attachment to hockey, and how the framework of intimate publics allows me to trace the shift in desires that move me into new intimate fandoms.
Representational Queerness Within Marvel’s Loki: Liminality through Identity, Genre, and Medium
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-02) Smith, Jay; Wiens, Brianna
Loki, a prominent Norse god and more recently prominent Marvel character, is entwined with an understanding of liminal queerness. Part of the broader notion of liminal queerness is its relationship to questions of identity and the self. This paper explores two divergent texts, 2014-2015’s Loki: Agent of Asgard and 2021’s Loki streaming series, that take that concept in different directions, creating a broader understanding of liminal queerness and its place in narrative spaces. The broader natures of the respective texts’ narrative, medium, and genre elements all frame and modify discussions of liminality and queerness around a given text. This modulation around the theme between two texts helps build a more complete image of how liminal queerness is entwined with Loki and what that means for liminally queer identities in broader structures.

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