English Language and Literature

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

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Decoding QAnon: Building an Adaptive Alternative Reality at the Crossroads of American Conspiracism, Cultic Commodification, and Schizogenic Hyperreality
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Martin, Chris
QAnon has grown beyond a single conspiracy theory to become a self-perpetuating conspiracist alternative reality, one whose impact on the American political and cultural landscape will long outlive the influence of its cryptic figurehead. As bizarre as the practices of QAnon and its decoding rituals may seem, this dissertation argues that QAnon is a reflection of the techno-cultural milieu of its creation, an emergent consequence of the intersection of three key techno-cultural trends: America’s deeply entrenched cultural tradition of conspiracist narrativization, the commodification of culture under neoliberalism, and the predatory affordances of corporate media platforms optimized for the attention economy. Drawing from an array of interdisciplinary research and discursive examples drawn directly from the QAnon community, this dissertation presents a framework that can explain QAnon’s viral success within the American techno-cultural context and offer insight into the ongoing renaissance in hyper-individualistic reactionary conspiracism that QAnon has catalyzed. Only by understanding how these three trends have mutually reinforced and influenced each other can we begin to understand QAnon’s uniquely protean narrative structure and decipher the symbolic map of cultural dysfunction it represents.
Ethotic Heuristics in Artificial Intelligence: A Rhetorical Framework for Guiding Responsible Data Design Praxis in Healthcare and Surveillance
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-20) Lubin, Kem-Laurin
This thesis investigates the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), human-centered design, and rhetoric across three interconnected essays. This dissertation centers on design heuristics as its primary analytic and unifying framework, drawing from traditions such as Data Feminism and rhetorical inquiry. It explores three interrelated domains: (1) AI-driven human-computer interaction (HCI) design; (2) the implications of AI-powered design for women’s health privacy, particularly in the post-Roe v. Wade U.S. context; and (3) critical discourse surrounding AI in surveillance technologies. Using a multi-method approach—including rhetorical analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), case studies, and stakeholder perspectives—this research interrogates how AI systems construct algorithmic ethopoeic representations that commodify user data. The first essay introduces a set of practical heuristics for HCI designers by integrating principles from Design Thinking, thereby fostering ethical dialogue, and strengthening human-centered approaches in the context of rapid AI development. The second essay employs rhetorical analysis to examine the construction of “algorithmic ethopoeia”—the process through which AI systems perform moral characterization through data practices, design choices, and institutional logics—within sensitive socio-technical domains. Algorithmic ethopoeia is a concept central to this dissertation and is defined in more detail on page 3 of this essay. By foregrounding this concept, the essay emphasizes the urgent need for robust protections surrounding personal data integrity and highlights how algorithmic systems actively participate in shaping judgments about identity, risk, and responsibility. This section, grounded in Data Feminism, empowers designers, activists, and policymakers to advocate for more secure and transparent AI applications, particularly in the domain of women’s health privacy. The final essay employs CDA to critique the discourse surrounding AI-driven surveillance, focusing on predictive policing and facial recognition technologies. Through the analysis of competing narratives and stakeholder perspectives, it reveals ethical dilemmas related to systemic biases and authoritarian practices, arguing for rigorous oversight and regulatory frameworks. Surveillance contextual heuristics are proposed to guide the responsible deployment of AI in public safety while safeguarding civil liberties. Collectively, these investigations underscore the imperative for ethical, context-sensitive, and rigorously informed design heuristics to guide the responsible integration of AI across diverse domains. They advance the discourse on user privacy, regulatory compliance, and human-centered innovation, while simultaneously promoting the development of design practices that are both ethically sound and equitable.
Altering Bodies, Altering Minds: Examining Essentialism, Gendered Discrimination and Violence, Racism, and Colonialism through Speculative Fiction Tropes
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-16) Riley, Meghan
This dissertation examines the ways in which speculative fiction tropes simultaneously reinforce and challenge ideologies which uphold not only discourses about but also systems of domination, including racism, ethnocentrism, colonialism, and gendered violence. Further, the novum – the element within the text which distinguishes the world of the story from our own – and the resulting distance (Suvin 6) enables profound engagement with the lived experiences of being raced, gendered, and subordinated, while often resisting didacticism. However, it is that same distance which can lead to the repetition and circulation of insidious ideologies. I argue that it is these factors which make the genre of speculative fiction particularly generative as a postcolonialist, feminist literature, and for destabilizing students’ taking pervasive essentialist worldviews as a given so that they can critically engage with and critique the aforementioned ideologies in media. The analysis spans five chapters. The first chapter examines how the tropes of shapeshifting, cloning, transgenerational memory, and extreme longevity in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death operate to center embodied knowledge and alternate ways of knowing and producing, serving as a challenge to Western rationalism as well as patriarchal and colonialist ideologies. Chapter two demonstrates how the speculative fiction tropes of pheromones, advanced brain alterations, genetic modification, extrasensory abilities, and an alien breeding scheme in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Fledgling foreground the ethics of consent in rape culture, medical care, and colonialism. Chapter three focuses on the role tropes such as shapeshifting, extrasensory abilities, parthenogenesis, and a third sex play in critiquing essentialism, gendered discrimination, and violence, but ultimately failing to imagine a future in which men are able to act beyond their biology or in which caregiving is not exclusive to people who can give birth. The fourth chapter examines and critiques the tendency of speculative fiction film and television to deny racialized alien characters reproduction, and if reproduction occurs, to deny these characters a stable and healthy family life – a denial which mimics cultural genocide and other colonialist practices. Further, the persistence of “scientific” racism, the ubiquitous reproduction of white bodies through a range of speculative fiction tropes such as doubling through cloning and time travel, and the valorization of white parents and children that occurs through speculative tropes is made clear. In the fifth chapter, I apply my analysis of the above to my recommendations on teaching a course which addresses these ideologies in speculative fiction media and invites students to consider the ways in which aspects of their worldview have been influenced by embodiment, the social construction of race and gender, etc.
Unfettering the Voices of Palestinian Women: Counterstorytelling Against Dehumanization, Suppression, and Genocide
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-07) Gallant-Turner, Jordan
My thesis uses the opportunity and its platform to amplify the voices of Palestinian women while Palestine is enduring a holocaust by the settler-colonial regime known as ‘israel.’ I have chosen to read the life writing of four Palestinian women to provide a historical survey that contextualizes Palestine—whose people and voice has long been dehumanized and suppressed within western cultural and political spaces. These women, who include Fadwa Tuqan, Leila Khaled, Bisan Owda and Jenan Matari, participate in an overall objective towards counterstorytelling for the purpose of social justice for Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian women. I believe it is necessary to understand the circumstances and context of the Palestinian reality in order to recognize the depth of the propagandic nature of the dominant western narrative and locates the necessity of counterstorytelling which dismantles hegemonic narratives, highlights double standards, and strives for the liberation of Palestine. In the Introduction I include: my positionality while introducing background information to help situate the reader in discourse of Palestinian feminist liberation, the culture of resistance which has developed historically in Palestine, an introduction of my voices and offer a brief history of Palestinian women’s activism and popular resistance. In Chapter One I analyze and compare two Palestinian women’s autobiographies, Tuqan’s A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography and Khaled’s My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a revolutionary by Leila Khaled as told to George Hajjar which are read through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) and feminist lens. Tuqan’s autobiography provides an emotional and poetic description of conservative patriarchy as her foremost oppressor as she lived through the imperial British Mandate, the growing zionist threat/invasion, the Nakba and Naksa. Khaled’s autobiography is written much closer to counterstorytelling as she presents the suppressed history and brutality of imperialism and zionism against Palestinians. She completes her counterstory by using her personal narrative as a central structure from which to tell the collective story of Palestine. In Chapter Two I first illustrate how Palestine/Palestinians are being silenced through habitual media and social media censorship. After illustrating the pro-‘israel’ bias of western media/institutions/politics I present the voices of Bisan Owda and Jenan Matari as examples of digital counterstorytelling and analyze how they challenge the dominant western narrative. While Owda is literally surviving a genocide she manages to share her own personal stories as well as those in Gaza also trying to survive the holocaust. Matari, a storyteller from the diaspora, uses her platform to illustrate the vile depravity of ‘israeli’ society while simultaneously amplifying the voices of Palestinians in her homeland. In the conclusion I include the results of a survey on the concept of “auditioning for humanity,” addressing the October 9th “ceasefire,” and the need to remain vigilant by following the lead of Palestinians as they alone must determine when justice has been applied in a Free Palestine.
Fade to White: Constructions of Racial Subjectivity in (Digital) Photography
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-23) Kim, Jin Sol
This dissertation draws on scholarship from Critical Discourse Studies, Digital Media Studies, Critical Race/Black/Postcolonial Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Visual Culture and Photography Studies to demonstrate how photography is a primary medium for producing racial discourse. The aims of my research are twofold. I analyze how photographs operate as discourse by identifying the specific frames of racial subjectivity that were formed during Western modernity. I also examine how the particular camera technologies and dominant visualization practices of select historical moments have affected the production of racial knowledge using analogue and digital photography. In Chapter One, I trace the early establishment of vision and epistemology, and more formally ocularcentrism, in Western culture. I outline this history to locate photography’s authority in producing visual racial discourse in Europe and America. I argue that photography, while an ostensible tool of objective representation, worked closely with the White European and American imagination to construct a racially coded image of ideal modern subjectivity. Building on Allan Sekula’s theory of bourgeois portrait photography and criminal mugshot photography as two poles of representation, I locate these dichotomous frames in three key photographic moments in Western history from the mid-19th to 20th centuries: colonial photography, eugenics photography, and lynching photography. In Chapter Two, I focus on productions of countervisual photographs from the same period as Chapter One. I specifically analyze exemplary photographs that depict unconventional images of Blackness, such as those linked to Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as representations of Blackness from American World War II propaganda posters and the Civil Rights movement. Building on Evelyn Higginbotham’s theory of respectability politics, I consider the interplay of these images with prevailing visual frames of White respectability and racialized deviancy. I argue that because these photographs replicate established codes and conventions of modern subjectivity, they struggle to introduce representations of racial heterogeneity into mainstream discourse. I propose that a shift is needed in photography’s accessibility and viewership to unlock its counter-discursive potential. The third chapter in this dissertation explores a genealogy of digital photography to situate shifts in photographic practice from analogue to digital photography. I assess how the development of increasingly mobile and networked photographic tools—that is, the integration of digital cameras with smartphones—led to the rise of social media photography as a new vernacular that allows personal photos, including previously unseen marginalized representations, to be seen by mainstream publics. Expanding on the works of Black Studies scholar Saidiya V. Hartman and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, I identify photographs from the Black hashtag movements #IfTheyGunnedMeDown on Twitter and #BlackoutDay on Tumblr as examples of countervisual racial discourse using digital photography. In contrast, Chapter Four considers how White visuality has become coded into the algorithmic logic of social media, especially with the rise of augmented reality beauty (ARB) filters from 2015 to 2025. ARB filters are pre-set photographic templates that use a combination of camera and computer vision technologies to edit and ostensibly beautify a user’s digital image in real-time. Using feminist media theorist Anne Balsamo’s methodology of hermeneutic reverse engineering and Amanda K. Greene’s notion of glitchy vision, I identify how race is intertwined with and positioned within ARB filtering technologies and practices. I analyze 15 ARB filters from across Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok to identify their specific areas of “augmentation.” I argue that ARB filters disguise their reproductions of Whiteness as a neoliberal tool of self-optimization, and thus produce forms of visual racial discourse that extend modernity’s racial ideologies into the algorithmic age. I end this dissertation with a reflection on work that remains to be done in examining photographs as racial discourse, especially as we navigate social media environments that are increasingly algorithmic in nature. I invite future discussions that will engage culturally informed uses of digital photography and its role in constructing racial subjectivity and ideology online.
Revivifying, Repurposing, Reimagining: From Commodification to Kinship in 21st-Century De-Extinction and Xenotransplantation Narratives
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-19) Sanderson, Jerika
De-extinction and xenotransplantation represent two key 21st-century biotechnological developments, both of which aim to use genetic engineering to address ecological and medical crises. This dissertation investigates the representation of de-extinction and xenotransplantation by scientific corporations, in the media, and in fiction. In particular, I draw on critical posthumanist theory to investigate how techno-optimistic and transhumanist rhetoric has influenced de-extinction and xenotransplantation narratives; how narratives respond to key issues in bioethics and environmental ethics; the implications that these narratives suggest for how biotechnology is shaping human and nonhuman identity; and the way that they explore possibilities for multispecies care, kinship, and entanglement. My analysis in Part I shows that de-extinction is frequently framed in terms of the biomedical and human health benefits that it can offer. While this biomedical framing is reflected in the Jurassic World films (2015, 2018, 2022) and the novels Ghost Species (2020) and The Neanderthal’s Aunt (2014), these narratives focus on the risks arising from the exploitation and commodification of genetic material. In my analysis of xenotransplantation narratives in Part II, I observed that pigs are frequently framed as an abundant supply of organs that can solve the organ shortage crisis. In contrast, the novel Pig-Heart Boy (1997) and the film We Ate the Children Last (2011) focus on the bioethical risks faced by the first patients to undergo xenotransplantation, such as their vulnerability and the risk of discrimination, while the novels Oryx and Crake (2003) and Chromosome 6 (1998) counter the frame of abundance by depicting the potential for detrimental environmental, political, and economic impacts. Lastly, my analysis in Part III of the short story “The Birdsong Fossil” (2021) and the novel Pighearted (2021) reveals that these narratives prioritize care, kinship, and entanglement, providing possibilities for reimagining the animals created by biotechnology beyond the hype of charismatic megafauna and the spare parts metaphor in de-extinction and xenotransplantation discourse. By drawing on multispecies environmental ethics and posthumanist bioethics, I conclude that these narratives can allow us to envision more ethical applications of biotechnology, which can thereby shape the future of de-extinction and xenotransplantation.
Immersion, Roleplaying, Narrative Design: Concepts for Understanding Videogame Narrative
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-10) Franiczek, Aleksander
Single-player videogames have been at the forefront of public and academic conversations about the supposed novelty of digital, interactive narratives for the past 30 years. This perceived novelty, together with the digital medium’s capacity for remediating the aesthetics of prior popular media such as novels, film, performance, and of course games, has spurred conflicting discussions about its ontological and teleological nature. Whether one listens to game scholars, developers, or players, there is no single answer that encapsulates the wide range of disciplinary perspectives and personal fixations that make videogames interesting and meaningful. This project therefore synthesizes a range of research across disciplines to address a longstanding yet still insufficiently explored area of videogame inquiry: their historical creation, function, and consumption as a form of narrative. This dissertation examines how narrative meaning in single-player videogames emerges in the interaction between the material, rhetorical, and formal properties of the game as well as the imaginative engagement and individual experience of a given player. In other words, it delves into how narrative has been conceived and discussed around games, how players cultivate and interpret their gameplay as a narrative experience, and how developers leverage the multimodal potential of videogames towards narrative-driven expression. It does so through a synthesis of research around three interrelated key terms: immersion, role-playing, and narrative design. The terms immersion and roleplaying help explore how a player’s involvement in the role of a digital avatar—established through the identity and affordances presented by the game’s design and the player’s creative engagement with those fixed elements—can offer a means for subject formation, self-reflection, and critical interpretation. This involves exploring these concepts’ relations between narrative (Murray), digital technology (Coleman), and the self (Gee). The project then examines how this critical engagement textually stems from the player’s experience of a game’s narrative design: a game design concept and development practice related to the coherent integration of a game’s processes, its representational content, and the thematic and subjective meanings players uncover through the narrative event of gameplay (Berger). This framework can help develop greater literacy of the unique ways in which a videogame’s textual meaning is co-constructed between a game’s procedurality, representations, creators, and players. These topics are supported by case studies of games—predominantly role-playing games, or RPGs—that leverage the expressiveness of the medium towards innovations in digital, interactive storytelling. By situating these discussions of videogame narrative with texts that tackle videogames’ unique media aesthetics (Calleja), indebtedness to prior media (Saler), black-boxed creation process (Švelch), genre in cross-cultural creative contexts (Hutchinson and Pelletier-Gagnon), historical marginalization and entanglements with queer (Ruberg) and femme (Chess) folks, and other relevant topics, this dissertation analyzes the ways that single-player videogames can offer narrative experiences that combine the aesthetic and technical in ways that recontextualize the self’s involvement in fictional engagement.
Resource Rhetoric in Three Canadian Novels, 1919-1945
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-02) Uher, Valerie
In this dissertation, I propose the term resource rhetoric to describe the cultural logic that renders extractivism an interminable part of Canadian identity. As Canada solidified its settler-colonial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an attendant formalization of infrastructures promoting the extractivist ambitions of the state. Within those infrastructures a resource discourse—of natural resources and human resource management—was born. In Resource Rhetoric in Three Canadian Novels, 1919-1945, I examine three novels that articulate a cultural dimension to Canada’s broad attempt to adapt workers to a confluence of precarious working conditions in the first half of the twentieth century. I analyze the downplaying of class formation in these novels and link it to their use of resource rhetoric—tropes and figures that assert the primacy of the extractivist state over and against the primacy of the working-class collective. My thesis develops by first establishing the 1919-1945 period as one marked by an unease about whether workers could truly become the “human resources” Canada’s extractivist economy needed. I explore how this uncertainty is manifested in Douglas Durkin’s 1923 novel The Magpie, an economic novel set during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. I then demonstrate that during the interwar period, a worker’s success in embodying the ideal Canadian “human resource” identity was measured against a racial hierarchy emerging from eugenic ideology. In my analysis of Irene Baird’s 1938 novel Waste Heritage, I consider how the “rank and sort” logic of eugenics is used to calibrate moral rectitude in the novel’s portrayal of labour strife among Canada’s Depression-era unemployed. In the second part of my thesis, I consider how human resource discourse expanded to include social reproductive labour in the period just prior to the establishment of Canada’s welfare state. I argue that Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 novel The Tin Flute makes the home a terrain for potential class struggle against the exploitation of women’s work, while at the same time positioning this work as vital for the Canadian state to function. The rhetorical framing of workers in these novels consistently emphasizes their lack of agency and cooperation; foregrounds their interchangeability, and stresses workers’ inability to overcome their circumstances because of these factors. They articulate a deep-seated clash between the imperative that workers act as assets to Canada’s resource state, and the imperative that they might improve their lives through class formation and solidarity. While these novels are generally aligned with the resource discourse of the era, they demonstrate one fundamental failure of extractivist ideologies and resource logic: a person can never truly be a “dematerialized asset,” or a “universal Canadian worker subject.” My main claim in this thesis is that these novels show that to be a human resource is an unattainable goal.
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.

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