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Listen! Can You Hear Me? Unheard Voices: A Critical Ethnography of College Practitioners’ Perspectives and Experiences Working in a Competency-Based Mediated Environment
Get PDFThe expansion of neoliberal globalization has influenced the marketization of education and led the charge to shape competency-based educational policies. In Québec, Canada, public school curricula have mandated competency-based education (CBE) to address and remedy student retention rates and employability concerns. While the stated goal proposed by reform policies for instituting CBE is to eliminate social and economic inequities, teachers are concerned that it may exacerbate inequality gaps among our most vulnerable populations. A critical ethnographic methodology was employed to structure and analyze individual interview narratives of ten CÉGEP college teachers, using critical theory and critical pedagogy as philosophical underpinnings. Additionally, I examined the neoliberal marketization of education to shed some light on the conditions that influence CBE practices.
The results indicated that the conditions under which CBE persists alienate college teachers from their work and perpetuate educational, structural, and societal inequalities. Teachers’ feedback discloses that the excessive focus on CBE and the execution of its practices does not align with their beliefs of the experience education should offer students. The findings revealed disproportionate marginalizing of teachers’ voices and participation in decision-making and workplace changes due to inequalities generated by neoliberal hierarchical connections. Consequently, my research shifted teachers’ roles from reform implementers to allowing them to participate in interview dialogues about educational changes. Teachers’ voices illustrate that such collaborative initiatives could result in educational progress, equitable changes, and positive effects on professional development. These findings support the notion that more intentional collaboration among educators is critical to re-address power inequalities, eradicate undemocratic neoliberal practices and sustain educational reform. It also suggests that teachers’ involvement in critical discourse could be leveraged to work toward positive educational change. Given that little research has conducted an in-depth analysis of teachers’ views and experiences in fulfilling CBE mandates, my thesis offers insights into how teachers can deliberate and mobilize their responses to address and challenge unilateral neoliberal competency-based reforms.
Keywords: competency-based education, neoliberal, critical theory, critical pedagogy, critical ethnograph
How effective have national parks in Canada been since their designation at preventing landscape fragmentation?
Get PDFLandscape connectivity has become an important focus of Canada’s conservation goals. However, ongoing habitat loss and the break-up of habitat patches change a landscape’s composition and configuration, creating additional barriers for wildlife movement and reducing its connectivity. Canadian national parks are at risk of becoming fragmented from direct and indirect stressors, and of becoming islands of natural habitat that are disconnected from their surrounding ecosystems. This study measured the landscape fragmentation of 43 Canadian national parks and paired control areas at key time-steps throughout their history, including before their designation to present-day. It also studied the divergence of fragmentation levels over time between the parks and their control areas. The Effective Mesh Size metric (meff) with both the CUT and CBC procedures was used to measure fragmentation levels, alongside a Progressive-Change Before-After Control-Impact Paired Series study design. The results demonstrate that overall, park protection across the Canadian National Park System has been somewhat successful in preventing landscape fragmentation within their boundaries, in comparison to unprotected control areas. Half of the parks and control areas had a very small change in fragmentation over time. In 35% of parks, fragmentation levels increased faster than in their control areas, and in 15% of parks, fragmentation levels increased more slowly than in their control areas. Older parks with a long history of human influence on the landscape are more fragmented than their control areas, whereas parks that have been designated more recently have a greater effective mesh size than their associated control areas. The regions with the most successful parks in terms of preventing fragmentation are the Taiga and Hudson. The variety of park sizes in these regions indicates that the size of a national park does not necessarily indicate its fragmentation levels. This study provides insights into trends of landscape fragmentation over a long time-period and relates them to different Parks Canada management strategies throughout the agency’s history. The findings will help inform ecological connectivity programming and can indicate the effectiveness of Canada’s efforts to achieve its conservation goals
Home range size of freshwater fishes: a meta-analysis through a new lens
Get PDFMeasuring the home range size of freshwater fishes provides crucial information on community structure, population dynamics, and conservation management. Earlier studies have shown that home range size increases with fish size, water body size, and trophic level, and that lake fishes have larger home ranges than stream fishes. However, in previous studies, there were sometimes conflicting findings, a lack of a standardized methodological approach, and some key variables that may influence home range were not considered. Using a systematic quantitative review of 272 studies, we revisited previous meta-analyses and evaluated the home range estimates in both lentic and lotic environments to verify whether home range: 1) increases with fish length, water body size, latitude, and study duration; 2) is influenced by trophic guild and data collection method; 3) decreases with the presence of dams; and 4) varies across fish family. Our results indicated that home range size was 4 times larger in lake than stream fishes and increased with fish length. However, home range size of lake fishes was mainly influenced by lake surface area and latitudinal gradient, not fish length. In streams, fish length, stream width, data collection method, and study duration all significantly influenced home range size. We also found significant fish family variation across lakes and streams when using the most robust available data from three families. These results demonstrate that the home range size of freshwater fishes was explained by different predictors in both lentic and lotic environments
Can a Coffee Shop be Abolitionist? Business–Police Relations in Halifax’s North End Neighbourhood
Get PDFAs profit-seeking consumption spaces, sustained by wage labor, local businesses generally em-brace neighbourhood police practices. Yet, whether business-police relationships differ across business spaces, has been largely undocumented and unexplored within the academic literature. This research uses North End, Halifax as a case study to investigate how businesses influence po-licing practices both within their own space and within the neighborhood more broadly. Using abo-lition as my geographical method, I study business spaces as potential commons: sites for prefigu-rative politics, or abolitionist geographies in the making, while remaining attentive to the ways business spaces resist these framings, and instead map on to carceral geographies. I carry out this analysis in the form of a three-part audio documentary series, included here as three written scripts. Interviews with business owners, business association board members, and long-term res-idents, living and working in the North End between the 1960s and today, populate these scripts, showing how diverse actors have mediated and understood safety, and policing, across time and space. Altogether, this research situates neighbourhood businesses within the complex Canadian landscapes of carcerality, while also aiming to document how these same businesses might, and have been, sites of radical placemaking and abolitionist futures to come
Men’s Experiences of Paternity Leaves in Accounting Firms
Get PDFAccounting researchers and practitioners have made strides in addressing persistent gender inequalities in the accounting profession. However, these efforts have largely sidestepped men and masculinities. Our study considers the role of men and masculinities in gender inequalities by exploring how men in accounting experience paternity leaves. We conduct interviews with thirteen men in audit firms in France. We find that fathers are reluctant to take leaves which they view as vacation periods incompatible with their professional work. They see audit firms as offering less support to fathers than mothers, with support for fathers growing but still marginal. Finally, they experience a variety of emotions, including positive emotions around fatherhood and negative emotions around difficulties in reconciling fatherhood with professional responsibilities and paternity leaves. Practically, our findings imply that to address gender inequalities further, accounting firms need to change the norms around care work, including paternity leaves
Supporting Information Visualization Research in an Academic Library
Get PDFThis paper summarizes librarian research on information visualization as well as general trends in the broader field, highlighting the most recent trends, important journals, and which subject disciplines are most involved with information visualization. By comparing librarian research to the broader field, the paper identifies opportunities for libraries to improve their information visualization support services
Art Therapy, Meaning-making and Lacan: A Philosophical Inquiry into Traumatic Loss
Get PDFThis research examines the application of Lacanian psychoanalysis in art therapy to address traumatic loss, which is defined as the sudden and violent death of a loved one, using philosophical inquiry methodology. Given the limited presence of Lacanian theory in art therapy literature, more generally, this research seeks to bridge that gap by proposing that this approach can provide a useful theoretical framework for understanding and treating traumatic loss within art therapy. By critically analyzing and synthesizing existing literature on trauma, grief, and Lacanian theory, the inquiry argues that integrating Lacanian concepts, specifically the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the sinthome, into art therapy can help frame avenues for meaning- making and processing traumatic experiences. The findings suggest that Lacan's insights into how individuals process and integrate traumatic experiences can enhance the therapeutic potential of art therapy, particularly through the creation of a personalized sinthome. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for applying this model in art therapy in practice and includes recommendations for future research
Variation in Effects of Climate Change on Salmonid Demography: Extent, Scale, and Underlying Mechanisms
Get PDFPredicting species responses to climate change is an increasingly important objective in ecological research and natural resource management. However, heterogeneity in demography, life history, and habitat characteristics across multiple spatial scales can generate substantial diversity in population responses, complicating species-level assessments. Therefore, for widely distributed species consisting of many fragmented populations, understanding the mechanisms that underlie population variation can improve predictions of climate impacts across the species range. Using salmonid fishes as a model system, my thesis investigates variation in population responses to climate change at global, regional, and local scales. First, through a global meta-analysis of 156 studies of 23 species, I demonstrated that population responses to temperature and precipitation exhibit significant spatial, temporal, and biological patterns that broadly align with predictions based on salmonid thermal limits. Importantly, I showed that salmonid populations at low latitudes and elevations tend to be most negatively impacted by rising temperatures. Subsequently, I analyzed mark-recapture and stream temperature data collected during field surveys in Cape Race (Newfoundland, Canada) since 2010 to characterize local-scale variation in demography, climate impacts, and thermal regimes among eleven populations of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) separated by <5 km. I showed that variation in recruitment, growth, and demographic relationships combined to generate diverse population dynamics that stabilized brook trout abundance across Cape Race, and that thermal regimes driven by groundwater inputs contributed to population diversity. Finally, using population-specific demographic and life history data, I built eco-genetic models that simulated responses to future climate warming across Cape Race brook trout populations, which emphasized the role of life history evolution and thermal habitat variation in determining population persistence. Together, my thesis shows that large-scale gradients in latitude and elevation structure salmonid responses to climate change, but substantial fine-scale variation is embedded within these trends due to heterogeneity in habitat characteristics, human impacts, and eco-evolutionary dynamics experienced by populations. Similar research frameworks that employ diverse methodologies and integrate data across scales will be crucial for understanding the complex impacts of climate change on salmonids and other freshwater fish populations, and should inform the conservation of a wide range of species
Built Ecologies in Contemporary Palestinian Cinema
Get PDFThis thesis puts formal analysis of films by Kamal Aljafari and Larissa Sansour in dialogue with scholarship on both contemporary Palestinian issues and their cinematic representations. Through this analysis I highlight the visuality of the ecological and architectural violence sustained by Palestinians and the resistance to these structures of oppression realized by Aljafari’s and Sansour’s images. Their films showcase a Palestinian perspective on spatial issues in their engagement with built and natural environments through film form, demonstrating how cinema can foster reimagined futures. Palestinian cinema provides a mode of resistance to Zionist spatial logic and to the occupation. To clarify this, I explore how Israel’s settler colonial project uses infrastructure and ecology as tools to maintain control of Palestinian land through my analysis of a promotional video by Zionist tree-planting organization HaYovel. Palestinian cinema resists this and this thesis argues that many Palestinian filmmakers, including Aljafari and Sansour, reclaim Palestinian space using the medium of cinema and cinematic techniques. Because of the lack of physical access to Palestine for diasporic Palestinians, inhabiting space digitally and imagining new spatial configurations through cinematic techniques allow these filmmakers to experience a different kind of presence on the land. I analyze several recent short films by Aljafari and Sansour to demonstrate how editing, mise-en-scène, and dialogue allow for filmmakers to transgress imposed spatial boundaries and return to Palestine, if only digitally
Dynamic Properties of Bimodal Polyethylene: Crystallization and Flow Instabilities
No full textThe emergence of new single-reactor technologies has enabled the production of bimodal polyethylene at reduced capital costs, prompting a need for deeper investigations into the characterization and property-structure relationships of these materials. In this thesis, we are looking at how the molecular structure affects both the solid-state and the melt-state properties of polyethylene.
This study employs a material set featuring systematic variations in molecular weight distribution and short chain branching distribution. The initial step involves extracting the fundamental molecular parameters of the materials by utilizing statistical modelling to acquire the ethylene sequence length distribution and its features. Subsequently, we identify the key parameters governing our materials’ environmental stress crack resistance, a crucial concern, particularly for solid-state properties in pipe applications of bimodal polyethylene. We showed that many mechanical properties from strain hardening tests correlate with features of ethylene sequence length distribution, showing that this distribution is the most meaningful in describing the structure of bimodal polyethylene in terms of solid-state properties. An approach to studying the critical correlations between structure, crystallization, and mechanical properties is presented.
In the latter part of this study, we investigate the effect of molecular weight distribution on the wall-slip behavior of bimodal polyethylene melt under simple shear. The study under simple shear is important as it eliminates the confounding effects of pressure and shear rate gradient. We examine the impact of low molecular weight content on various slip regimes. We showed that the stress level at which the slip velocity becomes independent of molecular weight distribution decreases with an increase in short-chain content. The degree of entanglement between the interfacial and bulk chains drops sharply in the transition region based on the friction of coefficient investigations.
Throughout our investigations, we frequently observe melt rupture in our materials, prompting further exploration of this instability using visualization techniques. Melt rupture is critical as it limits the industrial applications of these materials. We showed that melt rupture is a time-dependent phenomenon that can occur after a stress and slip velocity plateau is reached, inviting additional studies on the effects of interfacial structural changes during slip