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The Blair Witch Phenomenon: Alternate Reality Games and Contemporary American Horror Cinema
Get PDFIn 1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’ found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project was released alongside a widely successful marketing campaign that made the world believe that three film students had disappeared in the Maryland woods. The campaign is often remembered as an internet sensation, a hoax, or simply a viral marketing campaign, while few consider its gamified components, or particularly its likeness to an alternate reality game (ARG). ARGs are collaborative, transmedia games which blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and hide their own game-ness through immersive puzzles, compelling mysteries and vast story-worlds. This thesis therefore offers a reading of The Blair Witch Project campaign through the lens of an ARG. More acutely, this thesis explores ARG-like marketing techniques, specifically within the horror genre, positioning Blair Witch as a trailblazer for other film-based ARGs and ARG-type techniques. The first chapter of this thesis formulates an ARG axis model, which is then used in the second chapter to reconsider Blair Witch through the framework of an ARG. The third chapter of this thesis showcases other horror film examples through this same ARG model, including Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) and Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) among newer examples, establishing the Blair Witch phenomenon as a contemporary trend within the genre. Finally, I consider how and why these novel industrial tactics work so well within the horror genre in particular, as they offer new modes of engagement and horror creation in the digital era
borderself
No full text'borderself' is a collection of poems haunted by borders. It investigates different types of human fault lines: bureaucracies, customs rituals, stamps of naturalized/foreign, accents, slips of the tongue, intersectional words and worlds. It is written from a Latinx perspective but without romanticizing Portuguese/Spanish/French as more legitimate spaces than English, which raises the question: does one have a 'native' language if their first voice is a colonial byproduct? 'borderself' is interested in language loss/gain/overdub and the spaces for complex identities such layering opens. Besides language, 'borderself' implicates poetic forms and the relationship between speaker and reader—exposing traditional forms as non-neutral spaces with historical privileges and questioning who has the right to speak for whom. Implication is seen as a practice of accountability that begets solidarity and makes new poetic forms possible. Structurally, apart from a prologue and a coda, 'borderself' has three main parts: (1) a series of 'xelf' poems dramatizing speakers caught between borders; (2) 'DANTE'S BUREAU', a prosimetrum linking the origins of bureaucratic and poetic forms; (3) 'The death of Jean Charles de Menezes and footnotes after Lorca', a long poem employing footnotes to dispute official accounts of state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against immigrants. The 'Propersitions' prologue invites the reader into disorientation as a method. The coda, titled 'Salutation to the Border', reflects back to the 'xelf' poems by turning their essential rhythms into a yoga series—a score of instructions on how to move through or breathe within borders
L'œuvre Maman de Louise Bourgeois: vecteur de compréhension de la relation entre l'institution muséale et l’espace public
Get PDFDe Tokyo à Ottawa en passant par Bilbao, le lien que le public tisse avec l’œuvre Maman (1999) de Louise Bourgeois se forge dans l’espace interstitiel situé entre la rue et l’institution muséale. Les esplanades publiques du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada à Ottawa et du Musée Guggenheim Bilbao dans le Pays basque espagnol permettent d’analyser comment le passage entre les artères urbaines et l’institution muséale possède des fonctions qui peuvent être décodées par l’entremise de l’étude de Maman. Ainsi, pourquoi faut-il considérer l'œuvre Maman de Louise Bourgeois comme un outil de capitalisation permettant aux musées qui l’accueillent d’exploiter leur connexion physique à l’espace public, de disséquer toutes les facettes de la relation qu’ils entretiennent à leurs publics et de préserver leur positionnalité au sein de l’écosystème urbain?
Cette thèse utilise ces deux expositions publiques permanentes de l'œuvre de Bourgeois afin de sonder l'impact de la sculpture sur les comportements des utilisateurs de la place publique lorsqu’en présence d’un musée côtoyé dans l'environnement urbain. Plus particulièrement, elle analyse les points d’intersection physiques entre l’œuvre et les plazas muséales en relevant cinq facteurs qui permettent à ces institutions de contrôler et pérenniser leur image publique grâce aux choix curatoriaux qui caractérisent les expositions publiques de Maman
Disorientation as Pedagogy in the High School Classroom: Or, What I Learned about Teaching from Thomas
No full textThis project is based on my experiences teaching at an alternative high school in Montreal from 2017 to 2018. It is a case study of one student’s “disruptive” behaviour that demonstrates the pedagogical value of disorientation in the trauma-informed classroom, as well as the personal value that this disorientation held for me in navigating my own queerness. I will be analyzing classroom anecdotes through the lenses of queer theory, feminist pedagogy, and affect theory, arguing that disorienting the classroom space is at the core of equity-centred trauma-informed education. In particular, I will show how one student’s affinity for drag ball culture untethered my whole class from the normative expectations of an overwhelmingly white and heteronormative school staff and school board, opening up vital explorations of sexuality, gender, and race
Numerical investigation of gaseous cellular detonation propagation in rough-walled channels
Get PDFWhen a cellular detonation propagates in a tube with rough-wall boundary conditions, its propagating velocity becomes less than the ideal Chapman-Jouguet (CJ) value due to losses. In addition, the intrinsic cellular pattern of this quasi-detonation and its reacting flow fields can be strongly changed by the presence of wall roughness. This study aims to clarify the wall boundary effect by investigating the quasi-detonations under different degrees of wall roughness defined by various characteristic factors. A computational analysis is conducted using two-dimensional numerical simulations. The governing equations are given by the reactive Euler equations with a two-step Arrhenius induction-reaction kinetic model and solved numerically using a second order finite-volume scheme with Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing. A parametric study is reported by varying the channel width, obstacle size, obstacle spacing and chemical reaction parameters, to investigate perturbations created by the rough wall to the intrinsic cellular detonation instability and eventually the detonation failure or propagation limit. Apart from the numerical smoked foils to reveal the dynamic evolution and irregularity of cellular detonation patterns, the degree of instabilities caused by the roughness is analyzed by looking at the probability density function of the pressure and induction rate from the detonation flow fields
A Work and School Perspective on the Experiences of Working Students
Get PDFThe purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of working students at both work and school domains by investigating how demands from the two domains interfere with one another, and how personal resources affect those domains. The main theoretical framework of this thesis is the Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R). I hypothesized that work/school time pressure positively predicts work/school emotional exhaustion and work/school engagement, and that work-school conflict partially mediates the two relationships. I further hypothesized that dispositional mindfulness moderates the relationship between work/school time pressure and work-school conflict. These hypotheses were tested in a correlational study with on through an online survey. Data was collected from the Management Department undergraduate subject pool (N = 152) at John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. In terms of the results, work/school time pressure was found to be positively related to work/school emotional exhaustion but not work/school engagement. Work-school conflict was found to mediate the relationship between time pressure and emotional exhaustion but not the relationship between time pressure and engagement. Finally, dispositional mindfulness was not found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between work/school time pressure and work-school conflict. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings
Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) for multiple-dependent faults of chillers
Get PDFAs an indispensable system in modern buildings, the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system usually takes a large proportion of building energy usage. However, faults of HVAC system in modern buildings are becoming a growing issue. These faults can aggravate equipment degradation or even damage equipment, and sequentially lead to the increase of maintenance cost and the significant energy waste. Therefore, it is paramount for the HVAC system to run as effectivity and fault free as possible; as a result, research and development into HVAC faults turns to an effective approach to improve building energy efficiency. This dissertation is a contribution to the research of fault detection and diagnosis with a new topic of chiller multiple dependent faults in a real building.
The forward fault detection model and the backward fault diagnosis model are developed to identify and isolate chiller system-level and component-level faults respectively, based on the measurement data from an institutional building. The second law of thermodynamics is applied to analyse the energy flow over an electric chiller, for the purpose of selecting target variables. Benchmarking grey-box models are developed to predict target variables, and sequentially to estimate the impacts of regressor variable faults on target variables. A fault symptom is detected when the residual of a target variable, the difference between the measured value and the predicted value, exceeds the corresponding threshold. Then, a backward rule-based approach is presented to identify if (i) the fault symptom is correct (i.e., a variable has abnormal values), or (ii) the fault symptom is incorrect (i.e., the symptom of target variable is caused by impacts generated by other faulty variables due to the dependency between variables), or (iii) both target and regressor variables are abnormal. The proposed model for chiller multiple-dependent faults is validated by a case study with a cooling plant serving an institutional building, where some faults are artificially inserted into the measurement data file. This dissertation also explored the effectiveness of transfer learning method in the application of improving deep learning model performance
Challenges in Masters level education: Supervision, stress and mental health
Get PDFBackground and objective: In recent years, research has highlighted the prevalence of mental and emotional distress among graduate students. The objective of this manuscript-based PhD dissertation is to validate and iterate a conceptual model of Masters students mental health and wellbeing, with a focus on student expectations and the role of research supervision.
Studies and findings: Manuscript #1, an integrative literature review, suggests a framework of four systems of graduate education that impact students’ emotional experiences: the culture and expectations of academia, the university and department, the lab and cohort systems, and the socio-economic system. Based on this framework, Manuscript #1 proposes a conceptual model for student experiences of mental and emotional distress and wellbeing that frames the research questions of the next studies.
Manuscript #2 is a quantitative analysis focused on student expectations of graduate study. The results show that students whose expectations are aligned with their lived experiences of Masters study have less mental and emotional distress and greater wellbeing compared to students whose expectations do not match their lived experiences, and are less likely to consider withdrawing from their programs.
Manuscript #3 is a qualitative analysis of Masters students’ descriptions of their graduate school expectations and experiences. Several themes are identified in the overall sample, including the importance of research and coursework, relationships, and academic culture. Students with aligned expectations in general reported more positive experiences of graduate school across all themes. The results also suggest an extension of the conceptual model presented in Manuscript #1, to include the idea that students perform a multi-factor cost-benefit analysis of their decision to enrol in their programs.
Manuscript #4 is a mixed quantitative-qualitative study. Quantitative results show that students with greater satisfaction with supervision experience less mental and emotional distress and greater wellbeing compared to students who are dissatisfied. Qualitative results illustrate that satisfied students have positive experiences across different dimensions of supervision, whereas students who are not satisfied have equivocal or negative experiences across these dimensions.
Discussion and conclusions: The dissertation findings support and extend the initial conceptual model. Several practical implications and recommendations are discussed
Networks of Endometriosis: An Analysis of the Social Media Practices of People with Endometriosis
Get PDFEndometriosis is a chronic inflammatory condition that has been historically underfunded and mistreated despite affecting approximately 200 million people worldwide. In the face of this lacking care, increasing numbers of people with endometriosis have turned to social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram, in search of representation, information, and community. This dissertation is a multidisciplinary analysis of the social media practices of people with endometriosis on Facebook and Instagram between 2018-2022. Using ethnographic and small-data methods for social media analysis, this study highlights the voices of people with endometriosis to consider why and how they go online. The surveys and interviews conducted for this study show that people with endometriosis use social media for a wide range of practices, including information-sharing, community building, meaning-making, and advocacy. This research addresses the following research questions: how and why do people with endometriosis use social media; what draws them to these spaces and what pushes them away; and how do these practices both respond to histories of endometriosis as well as shape the future of the disease?
On social media, endometriosis is mediated not only through technology, but also through people, conflicts, businesses, discourses, and patient-centred stories. These networks of endometriosis are complex and difficult spaces, but these complexities often reflect already-existent, offline challenges surrounding endometriosis. As a patient-researcher and a person living with endometriosis, I have included my own auto-ethnographic research notes and excerpts from my medical journals within this work, in part to be transparent about my own bias and connections, as well as to illustrate some of the barriers that people with endometriosis face, whether in seeking out care or trying to be represented in research. In this dissertation I argue that, in the face of inadequate care, imperfect social media spaces have become a significant resource for many people with endometriosis and this significance as well as these online contributions should not be dismissed. Rather, by including patient contributions such as these in our research—and validating the turn to social media—we can better understand the needs, values, and networks of the people living with this disease
Peak-nic Electronik: Following the Formation & Culmination of Social Atmospheres Through Temporally and Spatially Spread Group Consumption Settings
Get PDFAtmospheres crafted by a range of personal, social, and material stimuli imbue consumption spaces with “qualities of feeling” that inform consumers’ behaviors and emotions (Böhme, 2008; Hill et al., 2021). During collective live events, the experience of atmosphere is shared among the consumers present in the space. Through the lens of sociological interaction ritual theory, a four-stage process underlining the emergence and intensification of social atmospheres was conceptualized demonstrating how the entrainment of consumers’ emotions and behaviors by a shared focus results in lively expressions of collective effervescence (Hill et al., 2021). The interaction ritual chain informing the creation of the social atmosphere was only evaluated within the context of spatially and temporally bound collective live events, leaving out its exploration in live events whereby consumers flow through the space along their own timelines. My qualitative study uses the context of music festivals to examine this gap with research rooted in an ethnography of Piknic Electronik, a seasonal Montreal festival. My findings reveal how spatially and temporally spread contexts distract shared focus among the consumers present, weakening the intensification of the social atmosphere and breaking down the collective manifestation of effervescence into smaller, lower-intensity peaks experienced to different extents among attendees. For practitioners, this research provides insight into managing points of tension that interrupt consumers’ entrainment and facilitating the flow of social atmosphere build up through the design of atmospheric cues in seasonal music festival contexts.
Keywords: interaction ritual chains, social atmosphere, music festivals, group consumptio