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Chair: Rachel Sandwell, McGill University Rachel Sandwell, McGill University (rachel.sandwell@gmail.com). “As powerful as an atom bomb”: Women’s Militant Politics in 1950s South Africa Katie Carline, Michigan State University (carlinek@msu.edu). Mothers on the move: women's organizations and the history of mobility in a South African township Diane Whitelaw, Queens University (16dew1@queensu.ca). Gender and Decolonization in Zambia

Turning upon the assumption that art can, in fact, perform a function, and that its function is social, political, and/or cultural, this essay investigates the effectiveness of art as a form of activism. Not all art must be created with political intentions, but somewhere in the process, context, product, or interpretation of art lies social, political, and cultural value. Every work of art is a product of its time and place, and it is indicative of a relationship, sentiment, or occurrence in the artist’s life—and when that life belongs to a marginalized community, those relationships, sentiments, and occurrences take on a different weight. This essay will discuss how art and activism bring out positive and negative attributes in each other, helping each other in some ways and hurting each other in other ways. Finally, it will argue that art, in both its process and product, is an effective and necessary means for Indigenous peoples to engage in healing, decolonization, and social, cultural, and political processes.

Cette thèse examine la problématique de crise et de gestion dans le roman Africain francophone subsaharien, particulièrement la manière dont les écrivains africains abordent la question. Bien qu’il semble que cette question ne figure pas parmi les préoccupations majeures de la critique africaine, tout porte à penser, cependant, qu’il existe quelques textes qui s’y intéressent. Parmi ces textes, nous pouvons citer les œuvres d’auteurs tels que Sembène Ousmane, Sony Tansi, Fatou Diome. L’étude retient ainsi trois romans de ces auteurs issus des différentes générations du roman africain et qui mettent en scène bon nombre des situations de crises qui affectent l’espace africain. Pour ces romanciers, les origines des crises en Afrique sont liées à l’avènement de la colonisation. Notre étude montre ainsi que dans la représentation des crises de la réalité référentielle de l’Afrique coloniale et post-coloniale, l’écriture propose également des mécanismes de résolution qui, pour l’étude, empruntent la voie de l’agentivité conférée au sujet collectif féminin. En nous référant aux études commerciales, nous proposons la notion de gestion plutôt que le terme résistance (terme proposé par une grande majorité de la critique, telle la question de la lutte anticolonialiste), et, en cela, la voix des femmes comme modalité de la gestion de crise dans le roman francophone d’Afrique subsaharienne. Étudier cette voix des femmes dans nos textes prend tout son sens dans la mesure où cette voix se positionne comme une alternative dans la prise en compte des crises qui intéressent les écrivains. Cette image symbolique est explorée à partir de deux approches théoriques, la narratologie et la théorie du Care.

IN LOVING MEMORY / THE REV. CANON SEXTUS K. STILES / BELOVE RECTOR 1925-1955. Location: North aisle, 2nd window from entry. Lead Investigator and Photgraph: C. Cody Barteet (cbarteet@uwo.ca). https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/y_williams_stainedglass_on_toronto_stolaves/1015/thumbnail.jpg

In this presentation, Mitch discusses the independent project he designed to help him develop his skills in journalism. Mitch talks candidly about the plan versus the reality of his project, as well as gaining experience in submitting pitches, writing a feature article, building his personal brand, and networking.

We develop a novel unified representation for the argumentation mining task facilitating the extracting from text and the labelling of the non-argumentative units and argumentation components—premises, claims, and major claims—and the argumentative relations—premise to claim or premise in a support or attack relation, and claim to major claim in a for or against relation—in an end-to-end machine learning pipeline. This tightly integrated representation combines thecomponent and relation identification sub-problems and enables a unitary solution for detecting argumentation structures. This new representation together with a new deep learning architecture composed of a mixed embedding method, a multi-head attention layer, two biLSTM layers, and a final linear layer obtains state-of-the-art accuracy and F1 scores on the Persuasive Essays (PE) dataset. Furthermore, the augmentation of the PE corpus by including copies of major claims substituting the n-gram tokens that occur right before the major claim tokens with other major claim-introducing n-grams has aided in this increased performance on the PE dataset.

In this presentation about her 2020-21 internship at London’s Grand Theatre, Kaitlyn Lonnee discusses the ups and downs of an internship in the world of an international pandemic; the work she completed as a contributor to a souvenir publication meant to document the Grand’s historic multimillion-dollar renovation and modernization by interviewing theatre staff, board members, and donors; the skill sets, lessons, and relationships she has come away from the experience with; and the value and challenges of internships and community learning experiences.

This project explores the synchronicity of psychoanalytic and cybernetic practices from the mid-to-late nineteenth century by recovery and analysis of a shared material media culture. This project takes as a starting point the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who observed the affinity between cybernetics and psychoanalysis, “two roughly contemporaneous techniques,” related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: exact and “conjectural.” I investigate their shared patterns of figuration in the two fields, before they developed significant, and even irreconcilable, differences. This project demonstrates that what Lacan discussed explicitly in the 1950s, particularly, in his “cybernetic” Seminar II, was an expression of a more implicit connection between cybernetics and psychoanalysis ab initio. It offers a media-archaeological account of the pre-history of psychoanalysis (or proto-psychoanalytic practices) that considers the development of the psychoanalytic technique both through and against the technological mediation. The final part of this dissertation switches from the subject of the architectural and institutional panopticon of the nineteenth century to the “interpassive” user-subject of the perverse panopticon of the social media network. My discussion resonates with the current concerns expressed both within academia and in the Lacanian clinic about the degree of mediation, the limits of surveillance, the capacity of the network to exploit the subject, the automation of the gadgets that manage our lives, and the symptoms produced by all these aspects of the human-machine assemblages or even the erasure thereof in the capitalist discourse of global economy.

In her role as archivist for the Grand Theater, Nicole used her community engaged learning credit to research and catalogue the history of one of London's great performance halls. Here, she reflects on the experiences, the skills she gained from the work, and how the course has benefitted her professional development.