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Community Investment Cooperatives: Building resilience within communities
Full text linkThe United Nations declared 2025 the international year of the co-op. In an economy strife with wealth accumulation, and asset ownership concentrated within the top income bracket, cooperatives present a democratically governed and collectively owned alternative to the norm. Community Investment Cooperatives (CICs) are an example of such a mechanism, where people from a certain area can invest in local businesses, in exchange for a small financial and/or social and environmental return. Although this model is nascent in the wider, national community economic development landscape, it holds a lot of potential for significant change through collective action and ownership, especially in Ontario, where capital flight has been a persistent issue. This paper investigates potential barriers and enablers in the uptake of CICs among individuals in Ontario. To explore this more deeply, it looks closely at existing community-based, financial capital-building organizations both, at the national and the provincial level and what conditions have enabled their growth. Additionally, it explores barriers and enablers for existing CIC owners and potential leverage points across the province. Grassroots organizations like CICs do not have the adequate resources required to achieve scale because of deeply entrenched structural, cultural and legal barriers. They are subject to more scrutiny from all institutions and individuals because of the risks associated with allocating people’s money for stable returns. Despite these challenges, several possibilities exist for CICs in the form of community connections and partnerships within the system. Isolated efforts by individual actors in the system would be inadequate to truly empower and strengthen CICs or any community-based effort for that matter. The responsibility to create enabling conditions for these organizations lies with actors across a wide spectrum, ranging from individuals to policymakers, but those with more power need to be more proactive and supportive of these initiatives for them to scale up effectively
Among flowers and bones
Full text linkA journey with grief, Among flowers and bones is an exhibition and thesis paper exploring the subjects of death, memory and afterlife, based upon complicated personal grief and trauma stemming from mental illness and the ongoing opioid crisis. This journey is expressed through an incomplete collection of photography, found objects, video, autoethnography and poetry. Pondering questions of what does it mean to ‘be in-between’? I examine the relationships between grief and liminal spaces. Using an array of analogue and digital techniques such as collage, image transfer, 16mm film, and polaroids, I create dreamscapes that explore both presence and absence, preservation and decay, loss and longing. Fusing images and found objects I conjure altars, creating space to embody one’s grief and open up communication around topics of loss. Death guides my research from the Cemetery, and the liminal, to Hauntology, Spiritualism and death rituals. Through questioning our relationships to objects, to understanding how trauma effects our memory and bodies, I search for a way to live amongst the heaviness. Infusing my emotion in the processes of making through cathartic and repetitive mutations, with the belief that the act of creating is transformative and healing. I am finding ways to honour both the death and life, that surrounds us
The Elastic Self, A Loving Woman
Full text linkThe Elastic Self addresses a range of intransigent questions apropos of human sexuality in the digital age utilizing the Fembot, or sentient female sex-robot, as its core motif. Two mediums are employed to this purpose: the first is a poetic video-collage installation chiefly concerned with provocation and libidinal affect, projection mapped upon a textile sculpture — an “Eldritch pussy” — entitled A Loving Woman. The second a print manifesto-zine, more explicitly didactic, furnishing the installation exhibit with authorial context. Altogether, The Elastic Self is an autotheoretical and autoethnographic exploration of how desire is articulated into sex, what constitutes good sex, and what good sex is politically good for with a resolutely queer pro-perversion position. Collaging theory, film, and pornography with personal reflections in a process the VNS Matrix’s Bitch Mutant Manifesto calls “textual plunderphonics” (or patchwork referencing) it transgresses the cyberfeminist canon, broadening its scope to include texts on desire, deviancy, and decay. It proposes an imagined world where a fembot is placed in a dynamic with a fellow fembot instead of an owner, a hybridized system I call the Folkbot, where power imbalances are thus restored, where each party in a network is coded to prioritize the pleasure of the other.
Keywords: new media, installation art, trans-poetics, post-humanism, new materialism, cyberfeminism, queer theory, critical hedonism
Home // Making: A Curatorial Study of Representations of Home in Contemporary Italian Canadian Diasporic Art
Full text linkThis thesis will investigate the design of Italian diasporic homes in Toronto, considering how these residences reflect and negotiate cultural identity, heritage and adaptation. Asking, what can/do representations of Italian diasporic homes in Ontario tell us about collective and individual diasporic identities?
Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining interior design/architectural analysis, and cultural studies this research aims to offer insight into the ways in which Italian Canadian homeowners design their living spaces to preserve and reinterpret their cultural heritage in a new geographical context.
Toronto has seen significant contributions to its urban fabric from the Italian diaspora. Like other immigrant communities in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the Italian diaspora has developed a unique design identity, especially pertaining to how they reside. By focusing on interior design elements and spatial arrangements of Italian diasporic homes, this research seeks to understand how homes serve as sites of cultural expression and preservation
Futures of East Asian Queer Identity in Virtual Reality
Full text linkBy leveraging auto-ethnographic methods, this project positions the researcher’s personal experience as an East Asian queer person to highlight the struggles faced by East Asian queer immigrants in Toronto, especially in the context of masculinity and gender expression. The project employs foresight methods to outline emerging trends of embodied experience in the metaverse. The project includes a virtual reality (VR) experience that highlights my personal and cultural issues surrounding body image, racial stereotypes, and avatar embodiment. This project also collects feedback from audiences of the VR experience to provide recommendations on how to achieve a more inclusive future in the coming era of the metaverse
Like mother, like burr
Full text linkArising out of a need to document personal memory and narrative, and, more so, to reimagine my pasts, to reconcile with them, this thesis seeks to identify and use the cathartic affordances of games, contextualizing the embedded practices as means of imbuing newfound agency, and of self-preservation. The creative component of the thesis involves the making of autofictional game sketches of my mother-daughter relationship, acknowledging such a relationship as the crux of one’s crucial identify formation (and destruction) - and the recalling, remaking, and replaying of such a relationship as the heart of crafting one’s personal catharsis. The research and practice, latticing game studies with fields of literature, film, linguistics, engage in a cyclical process of informing one another through game-making and game-playing. The process adheres to Kara Stone’s approach of Reparative Game Design, one centering on the maker, the making, and the acceptance of uncertainties, gaps and questions in the pursuit of healing and in the pursuit of knowledge. This thesis aims to offer approaches that a game maker could partake in to truly create a game of one’s own - seeing it as agency, as confession, as half-truth, as survival; as it accompanies one through the disquiets of the past and present, in fact and in fiction
Fibers of Drought
Full text linkEnvironmental damage is a critical problem, especially in regions such as Baluchistan in Iran, where clean water scarcity poses a critical problem for people's lives and health. I am an Iranian Canadian interdisciplinary textile artist born and raised in Tehran. A lesson I learned from studying microbiology and observing microorganisms through a microscope is that scientific realities exist beyond our apparent perception. However, their impact on humans and non-humans cannot be ignored.
My thesis idea is derived from my studio practices focusing on various fibres:
How can my textile art practice address environmental challenges related to water scarcity in the Sistan and Baluchistan regions of Iran through methods and fibre mediums used in my practice, while simultaneously raising awareness and advocating for the preservation of natural resources and cultural heritage?
As a result, my textile art installations reflect both physical manifestations and hidden causes of drought and water scarcity. Human interference and mismanagement of natural resources have been detrimental to the Iranian people, including myself
Building Futures: Exploring Futures of Urban Real Estate Development
No full textThis project seeks to uncover how the urban real estate development industry might transform, and how to best shape its change to better benefit people and communities. The investigation considers Canadian cities, with a focus on Toronto. The project first uncovers the system of urban real estate development by examining how these cities grew over the past century. An analysis of the system’s actors is performed, with deeper inquiry into the business models of organizations that build space. To explore how the future of the industry might unfold, four future scenarios were created using the system analysis and findings from a horizon scan. A holistic assessment framework was created to evaluate the scenarios. From the results, common themes were identified, along with risks, opportunities and final recommendations. These findings highlight how different capital structures and organizational models can influence urban residents, as well as the potential implications of new technology, changes in capital structures, and innovations in architecture and construction
Reconceptualizing Self-Advocacy and Accessibility Labour in Post-Secondary Education for Blind and Partially Sighted Learners: A Participatory Framework
Full text linkThe prevailing institutional expectation that blind and partially sighted students in post-secondary education will need to repeatedly self-advocate to obtain equitable and timely access to course learning materials is fatiguing, stressful, and othering. The time and resources that students devote to self-advocacy represents unrecognized labour that is not typically expected of non-disabled peers. This unrecompensed accessibility labour and its consequences are central to the rationale for the participatory framework proposed in this paper, recognizing that equitable access depends, in part, on mitigating the requirement that students engage in accessibility labour to realize their right to an inclusive post-secondary education. Dyads of blind and partially sighted accessibility professionals and course instructors will work through an iterative process to upgrade instructors’ workflows for creating and curating accessible learning materials. An anticipated outcome of this facilitation process is that learning materials assigned by participating instructors will meet an increasing proportion of students’ access requirements, and as a result, progressively mitigate the accessibility labour required to gain equitable access to course content
The Dialogue Between Image and Sound: An Exploration of Music-Inspired Digital Art Creation Using Algorithmic Generators
Full text linkThis study aims to provide both a theoretical and practical approach to developing Persian music visualizations capable of eliciting emotional responses from audiences. In today's era of increasing digitalization, music visualization has emerged as a prominent phenomenon.
Numerous theoretical inquiries have confirmed that the integration of artistic visual elements with musical performances can evoke strong emotional reactions compared to auditory experiences alone. However, it is crucial to recognize that the exploration of harmonious and purposeful integration between visual and auditory elements within the realms of artistic practices and cultural aesthetics is still in its nascent stages. This scholarly investigation seeks to address these gaps and explore methodologies that facilitate the establishment of a coherent and meaningful dialogue between Persian visual imagery and Persian musical compositions