Some of our current students:

 

Linnea Catalan

BA Honours, History and English, Trent University

Research interests:
The general scope of my project is an examination of Black masculine sexual identity as portrayed in West Indian literature. How do issues like race, cultural identity, gender and sexuality intersect to form a definition of identity that is both embraced and subverted in literature? How is this concept of identity constituted within a history of colonization and slavery?

 

Gregory Frankland

BA Honours, Cultural Studies, Trent University

Research Interests:

Cultural History; Aesthetics; Critical Topography; Patristic/Medieval Philosophy.

My research is focused on the recent exhumations of mass graves from the civil war period in Spain (1936-1939) and the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden Germany. The thesis attempts to re-think questions concerning irretrievability, memory; reconciliation; revelation and concealment. I formulate my question giving primary attention to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image and his notion of Messianic time alongside Sophocles’ Antigone.

 

Teresa Mayne

B.A. Honours, Philosophy and English, University of Ottawa

Research Interests:

I am interested in the question 'What is the force beyond the definable
attributes that get labeled as natural and as civilized?' By extending
research of the natural beyond merely the empirical, there is a space that is opened up that allows sensation, feeling and intuition – aspects that are central to our humanity – to be incorporated into our sense of the world, thereby bridging the seemingly contradictory nature of our existence and the existence of the world. Likewise, not only affecting our view of the empirical world, there is a necessary effect of changing the way in which we view our political world. Therefore the way in which we view the natural becomes a catalyst to change the way in which we view the political.

Publications

Review of *The Political Life of Sensation *(2009) by Davide Panagia.
Culture Machine, (2010).

 

Andrea Palichuk

BA Highest Honours, Political Science and Sexuality Studies Minor, Carleton University

Carleton University Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement Winner

Research Interests:

Queer theory; borders as assemblages, migration and mobility, concepts of 'citizen'; critical race theory, post-colonial theory; political economy;
(critiques of) identity politics, performativity; power, governmentality,
subjectivity.

MA Thesis:

For my thesis, I will be interested in examining food politics and the
commodification of food in a neoliberal, capitalist society. I hope to
explore the cultural and political implications associated with the shift
from understanding food as a basic need to be fulfilled to viewing food as a commodity to be sold and marketed. I hope to examine the race, class, and gender implications of the accessibility of food and nutrition in North America. Within this, I would like to consider the ‘slow food,’ ‘go local,’ and ‘organic’ food movements from a critical perspective. I will be
considering how these food lifestyle movements, which originated as a
resistance against the increased industrialization of food, continue to work according to a neoliberal logic within capitalism. These movements, or lifestyles, are fraught with differing intersections of power relations, and work within a pattern of consumption, which makes them inaccessible to many people. I will be using queer theory critiques of identity politics to consider how food lifestyle movements work as a sort of performed identity of consumption that creates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The overall goal of the project will be to examine how the commodification of food, and newly developed counter movements that work according to similar commodity logic, reproduce patterns of inclusion and exclusion and relationships of power.