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Into the Forest: A Child and Family Therapist's Journey
Full text linkThis dissertation is an autoethnographic study of a personal journey of becoming a forest guide. Through a conceptual framework of ecopsychology and reflective analysis this journey is offered within the context of being a child and family therapist. Forest therapy is conceptualized as a pathway in working with children and youth. My relationship with the forest is the focus for making meaning from my lived experiences enlisting nature as a therapeutic partner in my child and family therapy practice. This dissertation goes beyond the practical uses of this therapeutic model and makes a contribution to theory, in particular at the interface between nature therapies and Western psychotherapy. This study offers valuable information to advance the use of forest therapy to promote well-being and in particular as a trauma-informed practice used by mental health practitioners
Changes in population-level alcohol sales after non-medical cannabis legalization in Canada
Full text linkPublished open access.Introduction
There is considerable interest in whether individuals substitute cannabis for alcohol, and in legalization’s potential to reduce or increase alcohol-attributable harms. This study aimed to determine whether non-medical cannabis legalization in Canada was associated with initial changes in population-level alcohol consumption.
Methods
This observational population-based study described changes in alcohol sales in Canada between 2004-2022. We calculated annual changes in the per capita volume of pure ethanol sold in Canada. We used an interrupted time series approach to examine immediate and gradual changes in per capita price-adjusted alcohol retailer sales value (CAD751 per year on alcoholic beverages containing 8.18 litres of ethanol. Annual ethanol sales volumes decreased by 0.06 (95% CI -0.08 to -0.04; P = .001) litres per capita annually for beer but increased by 0.05 (95% CI 0.04 to 0.07; P = .001) litres per capita annually for other beverages, leaving no significant trend for ethanol sales overall. Following non-medical legalization in October 2018 there were no immediate (-0.1%, 95% CI -1.3 to 1.1; P = .82) or gradual changes (-0.1% monthly, 95% CI -0.3 to 0.0; P = .12) in alcohol retailer sales.
Discussion and Conclusion
Canada’s non-medical cannabis legalization was not associated with significant changes in population-level alcohol sales. These findings do not support the idea that cannabis legalization may result in declining alcohol use and harms through the substitution of cannabis for alcohol
Lundy’s Lane Historical Society fonds, 1888-1962, n.d.
Full text linkThe Lundy’s Lane Historical Society was established in 1887. George A. Bull, the rector of All Saints Church in Niagara Falls, was the Society’s first president. Bull was concerned about the poor condition of Drummond Hill Cemetery and the absence of a memorial commemorating the Lundy’s Lane battlefield. The Society petitioned the government for a memorial and on July 25, 1895 a Soldier’s Monument was unveiled. The Society was also involved in collecting and preserving historic information. A lecture given by E. Cruikshank in 1888 for the Society was an important event because it was the first unbiased account of both sides of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. The Society became well-known for publishing high-quality historical writings and several local authors wrote for the Society, including William Kirby, James Morden, and Janet Carnochan.
Throughout the years the Society has observed the anniversary of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. The gatherings for the 100-year anniversary in 1914 and the 200-year anniversary from 2012-2014 were especially well-attended, attracting around 10,000 visitors. The Society continues to be active in the community. They host regular historical presentations and continue to commemorate the anniversary of the battle.Fonds consists of material about the Lundy’s Lane Historical Society and includes correspondence, programs, invitations, publication lists, and a petition. Two newspapers from the War of 1812 era were removed and added to the War of 1812 Newspaper Collection (RG 638)
Doping in Esports: A Content Analysis of Responses to Cuyler “Huke” Garland’s Disclosure of Adderall Use in Call of Duty
Full text linkEsports have grown significantly in North America over the past decade. Tournaments which
were once played for a couple thousand dollars to a few hundred viewers now have prize pools
worth a few million dollars and are watched around the world by millions of people (Greig,
2024). With an increase in popularity comes an increase in scrutiny. This became apparent when
Cuyler Garland, also known as Huke, released a video admitting to violating the Call of Duty
League’s (CDL) anti-doping policies by using Adderall to gain a competitive advantage. Many
First-Person Shooters (FPS), which is a type of Esport, include policies against cognitive
enhancing drugs such as Adderall due to its potential performance enhancing capabilities,
concern over players health and safety, and the potential for replication by spectators trying to
compete at a higher level which includes many youth players. As in traditional sports, the abuse
of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) can harm the legitimacy of the sport which Esports is
already fighting to get past. Using a content analysis approach, this study examines the reaction
of key stakeholders across the Esports community regarding the incident, how the league
responded, the current policies, and what changes are recommended. Employing constructivist
epistemology and a qualitative research design, this study utilized stakeholder theory and
thematic analysis to analyze online data focusing on discourse surrounding Huke’s disclosure on
YouTube, Twitter, and Blogs. Overall, including the Huke’s original video, the data analyzed in
this study include a total of 17 (299.86min) YouTube videos, 91 tweets, 18 blog/news articles,
and 7 policies. This analysis of these data revealed that minimal policy and testing procedures
currently exist in FPS professional leagues. Furthermore, stakeholders identify various reasons
and pressures that players face to use PEDs including to enhance focus, pressure from peers and
coaches, coping with long hours of gaming, faster reaction times in the game, and to keep up
with other players who are using. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact prevalence of PED
use in FPS Esports, stakeholders reveal that the use is widespread and kept a secret. There are
mixed views within the FPS Esports community on just how effective certain PEDs are in
enhancing performance, but a seeming consensus on concerns for the health and well-being of
Esport players. Stakeholders have called for increased sanctions and testing, alongside more
educational awareness training on the potential health impacts of PED use
Letter from Louisa Lord with a description of Niagara Falls, July 17, 1842
Full text linkA letter written by Louisa Lord to her brother Charles H. Trask, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 17, 1842. The letter describes her travels through New York including New York City, Brooklyn, Albany, Saratoga Springs, Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Oswego, Niagara Falls and Buffalo. In the letter she describes several tourist destinations in Niagara Falls, Canada, including Lundy’s Lane battleground, Burning Spring, and Table Rock
Role of transposable elements in gene regulation
Full text linkTransposable elements (TEs) have versatile roles in regulating genes of the host genome. TEs, by harboring intrinsic regulatory sequences and by emerging de novo regulatory elements through post insertion mutation events, provide a repertoire of cis regulatory elements in the host genome. In this thesis, we addressed TEs’ role in evolution of gene regulation within the primate lineage focusing on human and chimpanzee. The thesis comprises of three studies, each presented as a separate data chapter. In the first study we addressed the tissue-specificity of TE-mediated gene regulation by separately analyzing three different categories of regulatory region annotations from the ENCODE project using humans as a representative species. We inferred potential TE-regulated genes in 14 cell lines belonging to 10 different tissue types. We revealed a differential pattern of potential TE-regulated genes across cell lines, with relevance to the tissue-specific functionalities. In the second study, we examined the role of TEs in evolving TADs between human and chimpanzee using HiC data of two matching pairs of cell types. Our results support a multi-facet participation of TEs in the evolution of TADs, including emergence of species-specific TADs and stabilizing conserved TADs by providing CTCF binding site turnover at anchors both via species specific TEs (SSTEs), and formation of species-specific TADs via differentially co-opted TEs. In the third study, we particularly examined SSTEs’ impact on the species-specific up and downregulated genes between human and chimpanzee. We compiled lists of cases of species specific up and downregulated genes (harboring SSTEs with active and repressive marks respectively) with function in species-specific biological differences. Overall, the work in this thesis extends our knowledge for TEs’ contribution to gene regulation, in particular, for tissue specificity and species specificity of gene regulation within the primate lineage. The results provide motivation for future research with directions including TE-mediated species-specific gene regulation due to differentially co-opted ancient TEs, TE occurrences at TAD anchors for non-CTCF boundary elements, and the specific mechanisms behind tissue-specific epigenetics of TEs that shapes tissue-specific gene expression
Woodruff family photographs and portraits, n.d.
Full text linkThe Woodruff Family came to Canada from the United States in 1795 and took an active role in the forming of their communities both in a civic and social manner. The Woodruffs played an active role in the battles fought in Upper Canada and they were an integral part of the Village of St. Davids. They were educated, business-minded and socially engaged, and accumulated much of their fortune through land dealings.The collection consists of a photo album, 5 glass photos, and 4 paintings.
The photo album contains 50 photographs. Most of the photos are portraits. There is a loose photo of a group of boys and men standing in front of a house in the front of the album. Some of the portraits are labelled with loose notes tucked in with the photos and include Great Aunt Helen; Will Boomer (Great Aunt Helen’s son); C.H. French[?]; Kate Gordon; Great Grandmother French and Uncle Ben Canby; and a cottage on great grandmother’s place in St. Catharines.
Glass photographs, n.d. Contains five glass photographs of Julia Cleveland, Marie Gurner[?], and S.D. Woodruff.
The four paintings are framed portraits of Margaret C. Woodruff (1794-1882); William Woodruff (1793-1860); Margaret Shaw (1834-1916); and Thomas Shaw (1817-1884). Margaret and William Woodruff were great-grandparents of Margaret Julia Woodruff. Margaret and Thomas Shaw were the grandparents of Percy Carruthers Band. Two of the paintings are stored in the Archives room and two are located in drawers in an oversize black cabinet
Silence as Voice: Silence, the Body and the Decoloniality of Quiet in Raduan Nassar and Sara Gallardo’s novels of the country.
Full text linkThis dissertation, Silence as Voice: Silence, the Body and the Decoloniality of Quiet in Raduan Nassar and Sara Gallardo’s Novels of the Country, investigates silence as a literary form and an embodied mode of agency in Latin American literature. Focusing on Raduan Nassar’s Ancient Tillage and Sara Gallardo’s Enero, the study explores how silence functions not as absence or erasure, but as a generative and affirmative force that reconfigures subjectivity, narrative structure, and the politics of representation. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks—including poststructuralism, material feminism, critical posthumanism, and decolonial theory—this research reconceptualizes silence as an affordance of voice and a site of epistemic disobedience.
Through close readings of literary silence, the dissertation develops a theory of reading as listening, proposing that silence demands a sonic sensibility that attends to the unsaid, the peripheral, and the inaudible. It argues that silence, when embodied by precarious and peripheral subjects, challenges hegemonic narrative voices and disrupts the logics of intelligibility and coherence. The study introduces the concept of the “decoloniality of quiet” as a listening posture to articulate how silence resists colonial and patriarchal frameworks, enabling alternative forms of agency, relationality, and becoming.
By situating silence at the intersection of voice, body, and space, this dissertation contributes to a rethinking of literary form and subjectivity in Latin American literature. It affirms silence as a critical and aesthetic strategy that not only reveals the mechanisms of erasure and effacement but also opens pathways for resistance, transformation, and the reimagining of literary and political agency
The Figures of Crisis: The Reflections of the 2008 Financial Crisis as Ideological Discourse of Capitalism
Full text linkIn this dissertation, the reflections on the 2008 financial crisis by Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke are read as literary texts with formal features that perform an ideological function. Their memoirs of the financial crisis contain a set of figures and formal elements that create the narrative of crisis which acts as an apology for the current financial system and capitalist economy in general. The analysis shows how the crisis discourse deflects criticism directed at the three principal decision-makers by deploying the strategies of exceptional individualization of their characters, and by naturalization of historical processes and relations of capitalist production. In order to frame the reflections as ideological narratives, the analysis draws from Fredric Jameson’s understanding of literature and cultural texts as socially symbolic acts that can be deciphered in terms of their ideological position in the conflict between different class interests. The representations of crisis and the financial structure are read as an attempt to project a map of the unconscious of the capitalist system - of the unrepresentable global economy. That the totality of social relations cannot be individually experienced as an empirical object or process has been theorized as one of the conspicuous phenomena of modernity. The examination of crisis reflections locates and describes their formal moments that further obscure the global reality of financial relations and produce illusions of its natural permanence and regeneration. Figures like the firefighter, the lender of the last resort, the outsider, the expert, and others, form a discourse of crisis that evacuates genuine critical reflection on the system that constantly produces crises. To politicize and historicize this mythic discourse is to try to attend to its logic of representation and point out its aesthetic attraction and conceptual incoherence
Prior to the Podcast: Preparing for Your Episode
Full text linkEffective podcasts are engaging, authentic, creative, entertaining and convey information to the audience using terms and descriptions that they can relate to. Many of these aspects can be controlled by the guest, host or both. This worksheet is a guide to effectively communicate science through a podcast, whether you will be in the role of a guest or as a host. Although these roles may seem similar, different types of preparation are required.
This worksheet is from a series of 4 worksheets on the topic of science communication: 1. Introduction to Science Communication: Pre-worksheet; 2. Writing in Plain Language: Getting Started; 3. Creating a Graphical Abstract: 10 Steps to Start; and 4. Prior to the Podcast: Preparing for Your Episode. These worksheets are intended for individuals interested in building their science communication skills to effectively communicate science to the public as well as other knowledge users. The worksheets were developed within the Validation, Prototyping and Manufacturing Institute (VPMI) at Brock University (https://brocku.ca/vpmi/) to support the sharing of scientific findings.Created with funding through a Science Communication Skills Grant (pilot) from NSERC, “Mobilizing science from the lab to the community” to Wendy E. Ward, Brock University