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Review of “Defence & Discovery: Canada’s Military Space Program, 1945–74” by Andrew Godefroy
No full textReview of Defence & Discovery: Canada’s Military Space Program, 1945–74 by Andrew Godefro
Review of “A Bridge of Ships: Canadian Shipbuilding During the Second World War” by James Pritchard
No full textReview of A Bridge of Ships: Canadian Shipbuilding During the Second World War by James Pritchar
Review of “The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War” by Rachel Duffett
No full textReview of The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War by Rachel Duffet
Review of An Army of Never-Ending Strength: Reinforcing the Canadians in Northwest Europe, 1944-45 by Arthur W. Gullachsen
No full textReview of An Army of Never-Ending Strength: Reinforcing the Canadians in Northwest Europe, 1944-45 by Arthur W. Gullachse
Exploring Parent-Child Reminiscing Style and Internal-State Talk When Discussing Positive and Negative Shared Events
No full textConversations between parents and children about past events play a critical role in children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Parents scaffold their children in learning to recount details of their autobiographical memories by creating a space to reflect on internal states, specifically emotions and cognitions. Parents with an ‘elaborative’ reminiscing style are responsive to children’s utterances and ask open-ended questions (e.g., What do you remember about...?). Parents who are less ‘elaborative’ typically ask narrow questions like Did you like it?” that do not encourage conversation. Children whose parents use an elaborative reminiscing style have children who produce the most detailed narratives. While these conclusions are mainly based on conversations of positive events, the present study aimed to examine how children’s internal-state talk (IST) differs when reminiscing about positive and negative events, as well as how children’s internal-state talk is influenced by parents’ reminiscing style. Memories of negative events are qualitatively different to memories of positive events with the former focusing on what happened and the latter focusing on the meaning of the event. Thirty parent-child dyads (ages 3-6) reminisced two shared events, a positive event and a negative event. Parent-child conversations were transcribed and coded for children’s internal-state talk (emotional and cognitive IST), as well as parents’ reminiscing style. The results showed that children used more internal-state talk, specifically emotion IST, during discussions of negative events compared with positive events. Contrary to previous research, parents’ use of low elaboration strategies did not hinder children’s use of internal-state talk. No significant interactions were found between event valence and reminiscing style
Children\u27s Peer Selection in STEM: The Influence of Gender, Ethnicity, and Disability
No full textThe present study examined how children’s peer selection in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) may be influenced by gender, ethnicity, and physical disability. Sixty-four children (ages 6-12) from elementary schools in Southwestern Ontario completed three tasks: a simulated peer selection task, an attribution of ability task, and a stereotype belief questionnaire. In the peer selection task, participants were repeatedly asked to select one peer from a set of AI-generated photographs showing children who differed by gender (male, female), ethnicity (White, Black, East Asian), and physical disability status (able-bodied user vs. nondisabled). The Peer Selection Task was based on the Peer Selection tasks in Wauters and Roberts (2022) study. For each of 16 scenarios in the Peer Selection task, four in each STEM domain (Engineering, Math, Science, and Technology), participants chose a partner and then rated each peer’s perceived ability in each area of STEM. Participants were also asked to verbally explain the reasoning behind why they selected the peer that they did, allowing for qualitative analyses of reasoning patterns.
Results revealed that both males and females were selected more than chance, however there was no consistent preference for males in STEM, although, in-group gender preferences emerged, especially among males. Additionally, males were still preferred in engineering, highlighting that it may still be a male dominated domain. This finding suggests that in-group preferences, as well as gender stereotypes may potentially contribute to children\u27s peer selection.
No significant preferences were found for ethnicity or physical disability. Ethnicity based differences were minimal suggesting that although children may be aware of ethnic stereotypes, these may not yet be applied in academics consistently. For physical disability, peers with disabilities were selected less often in unadjusted data selections, which may suggest competence-based exclusion. However, when data was adjusted to account for unequal selection probability, no significant differences between selecting an able-bodied peer or a peer with a physical disability were found.
Exploratory analyses also found that children’s justification for selecting peers to collaborate with was mainly based on cognitive ability (i.e. who seemed smart or skilled).
Task-specific reasoning, such as experience, and perceived task fit, relates peers\u27 traits to the perceived task competence. Social factors, such as friendliness and cooperation, were also frequently mentioned, particularly when children explained selecting peers with physical disabilities. Importantly, while moral reasoning occasionally led children to select peers with physical disabilities out of fairness or inclusivity, this was not the only pattern, and ability-related reasoning remained most common.
Together, these findings highlight the possible importance of social stereotypes and in-group preferences in shaping children’s collaborative decision-making in the STEM field. Even at an early age, children may demonstrate in-group biases and rely on visible physical differences when making STEM collaboration choices. These results align with Social Learning Theory and bio-cognitive perspectives, which highlight both social reinforcement and natural categorization processes in stereotype formation. The findings highlight the need for interventions that address biases early, particularly by promoting inclusive group work practices and challenging assumptions about competence involving gender, ethnicity, or physical disability. By examining both the patterns of selection and the reasoning children provide, this study offers a nuanced view of how stereotypes may operate in academic collaboration and provides a foundation for future research examining broader disability categories and more diverse ethnic groups. Implications for stereotype development theories, inclusive education, and equity in STEM participation are discussed
In the Line of Fire: Military Emissions, the National Security Exemption and NATO Expansion in Climate Governance
No full textThe end of the Cold War with the peace dividend and the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Earth Summit in 1992 created the ideal conditions for international cooperation on the threat of global warming. However, thirty years later, greenhouse gas emissions and military spending have risen to record levels and climate change is getting worse. My dissertation puts military emissions, the national security exemption, and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “in the line of fire” and critically examines them in the context of global climate governance.
I use a multimethod, qualitative research design that includes archival and Access to Information (ATI) records, field work, and interviews to investigate the international and national governance of military emissions. My primary research question is: How are military emissions governed? Militaries use vast amounts of fossil fuel and public funding for training and combat, but there has been a lack of oversight and transparency of their climate impacts. As well, military emissions are largely exempt from national mitigation plans. I use critical theory and critical discourse analysis that are framed by the salient concepts of primacy, security, militarism, and alliances to interpret the extensive material that I collected.
With the archives from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and the Library of Congress along with substantial supplementary material, I construct a historical narrative to show how and why the United States negotiated an exemption for military emissions at the third Conference of the Parties (COP) in Kyoto, Japan in 1997. The documents reveal that the Clinton-Gore administration pursued a national security provision to exempt military emissions as it contemporaneously planned the expansion of the military alliance that it dominates. My research uncovers the individuals, institutions, and interests that were involved and traces the geopolitical and climate impacts.
This historical analysis is complemented by field work at the COPs in Glasgow in 2021, Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, and Dubai in 2023, where I investigated how the UNFCCC governs military emissions and how civil society organizations advocate for greater oversight. As well, I assess NATO’s governance of military emissions. Using ATI documents, I examine how Canada manages military emissions and carbon disclosure in defence procurement. In 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration launched the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program, which later evolved into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the costliest, most carbon-intensive weapons system in history. Air superiority and allied interoperability have been central to NATO strategy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, but this has led to carbon lock-in. In the post-Cold War period, allies have used coercive air power to conduct interventions, which have had grave impacts on the targeted countries and the climate. I also critique the military’s “green defence” and net-zero plans as governing practices.
The Clinton-Gore administration’s decision to exempt military emissions intersected with and was contingent upon the expansion of the U.S.-led military alliance, which has been consequential for climate governance. The war in Ukraine has focused attention and increased research on the climate damage of the military and the social cost of carbon from conflict, but the roots of the tragic war stem from NATO enlargement in the 1990s. I conclude that a new climate of peace and cooperation, through demilitarization and environmental peacebuilding, is urgently needed for the effective governance of military emissions and to ensure human security and survival as the climate crisis dangerously accelerates
Science Fiction Cinema and the Technological Sublime: Spectacle and the Infinite from Early Cinema to Digital
No full textThis dissertation examines how science fiction cinema constructs and reimagines the technological sublime in the twentieth century: the experience of awe, terror, and admiration provoked by human-made power and scale. Drawing on the philosophical foundations of the sublime in Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant and extending through Leo Marx’s and David E. Nye’s theorization of the technological sublime, I propose an aesthetic mode in which representation inflected with affect translates technological spectacle into examinations of humanity’s role and agency in the face of overwhelming technologized worlds and in some cases, even the universe itself.
Through three distinct historical periods across the science fiction genre, the dissertation traces this phenomenon’s evolution. Pre-1950 films such as Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1936) transformed the awe once reserved for natural landscapes into monumental visions of factories, electrified cities, and vast industrial infrastructures. Mid-century cinema repositioned the sublime around space rockets, nuclear weapons, and cosmic exploration, staging temporal as well as spatial immensity in films from Eugène Lourie’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (both 1968). By the 1980s and 1990s, the locus of technological fascination shifted again as CGI produced new immaterial forms of spectacle in works centred on virtual reality such as Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982), Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992), and Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (1995).
By demonstrating how science fiction film continually redefines the sites of the sublime, this dissertation shows that cinema does not merely document technological change but actively shapes how audiences feel and conceptualize it. The technological sublime persists as a mutable aesthetic and cultural force, shifting from factories to rockets to cyberspace, yet always retaining its core experience, one that negotiates the boundary between human reason and the incredible power of technology
Review of “Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War” by Shawna M. Quinn
No full textReview of Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War by Shawna M. Quin