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Theses and dissertations

There have been over 100 theses and dissertations completed by CSPT students since the program’s inception. Going through these titles indicate the diversity of interests of CSPT students and faculty, as well as the vast range of focuses and methods employed, from abstract and conceptual studies to empirical research and fieldworks.

These theses can be viewed on . Simply search the title of the thesis or the name of the author there for a link to a PDF version of the thesis.

Note: PSPT refers to Political Science/CSPT; SSPT refers to Sociology/CSPT; ESPT refers to English/CSPT; HSPT refers to History/CSPT.

PhD dissertations

2021

Linnitt, Carol (ESPT), World unmaking in the fiction of Delany, VanderMeer, and Jemisin.

Zielke, Dustin (SSPT), Destruction loops: expressionistic phenomenology and the ontological possibility of self-destruction.

2020

Zúñiga, Didier (PSPT), Relational ethics for a world of many worlds. An ecosocial theory of care, vulnerability, and sustainability.

2019

Bashovski, Marta (PSPT), Determinations of dissent: protest and the politics of classification.

2018

Lukas, Michael (ESPT), The rhetoric of wolves.

Personn, Tim (ESPT), Fictions of proximity: the Wallace Nexus in contemporary literature.

2017

Carmichael, Adam Burke (PSPT), Problematic settlers: settler colonialism and the political history of the Doukhobors in Canada.

2015

Gill, Andréa B (PSPT), Spectres of development: corrupted dreams of a chronically emerging Latin American giant.

Girvan, Anita (INTD/CSPT), Tracing Carbon Footprints: Sensing with Metaphor in the Cultural Politics of Climate Change.

2014

Simon Labrecque (PSPT), .

Molnar, Adam (PSPT), In the Shadow of the Spectacle: Security and Policing Legacies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.

2013

Parsons, Christopher (PSPT), The Politics of Deep Packet Inspection: What Drives Surveillanceby Internet Service Providers?

2012

2010

Bjorn Ekeberg (PSPT), .

David Cecchetto (INTD/CSPT), A Practice-Informed Critique of Technological Posthumanism and its Ideologies. Winner of CAGS/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Canada and 2010 Governor-General’s Gold Medal.

Sebastien Malette (PSPT), .

MA theses

2021

Higgins, Stefan (ESPT), “Imagining information: the uses of storytelling”

2020

Fontenot, Tyler (ESPT), “We were never Cajun: créolization and whitened identity at the margins of memory”

King, Georgia (HSPT), “National housekeeping": rethinking nationalism through the Irish Housewives Association”

MacPherson, Sean (ESPT), “Rising and remembering: Ktunaxa history and settler mythology in the East Kootenay”

Thombs, Paige (HSPT), “Arc of the Covenant: Trinity Western University's Community Covenant as a response to secularization”

Ziegler, Micheal (PSPT), “Traversing the digital world: questing for the socio-political realities of a digital age”

2019

Cowan, Maya (ASPT), “The Salt Spring dollar: toward a re-embedded economy”

Richter, Mairi I. (ESPT), “Using the concept of play to broaden the reach of cultural theory”

Koehn, Drew (HSPT), “Masks of hegemony: populism, neoliberalism, and welfare narratives in British Columbia, 1975-2004”

Cox, Philip (ESPT), “The politics & poetics of Gulliver’s travel writing”

McAllister, Shianna (PSPT), “Speaking with authority: gender and Indigenous politics in the Mount Polley Mine Disaster”

Davey, James (HSPT), “A bridge to nowhere: British Columbia’s capitalist nature and the Carmanah Walbran War in the Woods (1988-1994)”

Burgess, Olivia (ESPT), “Reconciling indigenous exceptionality: thinking beyond Canada's petro-state of exception”

Corbett, Morgan (PSPT), “The great forge of nations: violence and collective identity in fascist thought”

2018

Elliott, Russell (SSPT), “Aesthetics of absence: an exploration of the apocalypse of the Anthropocene”

Williamson, Shaun (HSPT), “Creating the American carceral state: the evolution of liberal criminology”

Smith, Kimberly (SSPT), “It isn't getting better: the transformative potentials of hopelessness”

2017

Scolnic, Galina (SSPT), “Pentecostalism in Soviet Union : a Nihilistic analysis”

Charlebois, Tim (PSPT), “Coldness and compassion: the abnegation of desire in the political realm”

Singh, Jessica (PSPT), “Syrian refugees in Canada? Interpretation and judgement in the political production of security threats”

Butler, Ryan Edgar (SSPT), “Between nature and artifice: Hannah Arendt and environmental politics”

Fabiani, Christina (HSPT), “(Im)permanent body ink: the fluid meanings of tattoos, deviance, and normativity in twentieth-century American culture”

Ahlstrom, Angelique Rose (PSPT), “The indeterminate subject: urban citizenship and the aporias of sovereignty”

Bethune, Stephanie (SSPT), “Manly bodies: theorizing masculinities through affect”

Tagharobi, Kaveh (ESPT), “The fascination of what's difficult: the adaptive function of difficulty in Ulysses”

2016

Cerisano, Domenico (SSPT), “Husserl and intersubjectivity: the bridge between the Cartesian and Ontological Way”

Evans, Julian (PSPT), “The experiment of friendship: anarchist affinity in the wake of Michel Foucault”

Feng, Janice Mingjia (PSPT), “How can I deny this body is mine: performativity, embodiment, and normative violence”

Henderson, Phil (PSPT), “Worlds on the edge: the politics of settler resentment on the Saugeen/Bruce Peninsula”

Kujala, Will (PSPT), “Origins and openings: modernity, time, and finitude in Hobbes' political science”

Roberston, Veronica (SSPT), Title not available

2015

Liu, Jasmine Shaeen (PSPT), “Pathos of (In)Difference: Subject Formations Through the Liberal Imaginary”

Gioreva, Viara (PSPT), “Nonhuman Neighbours: Animals, Community, and Relationships on the West Coast of British Columbia”

Gruenewald, Aleta Frances (ESPT), “Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Transgender Epistemologies in the Biopolitical State”

2014

Laura Anctil (PSPT), "."

Albrecht Berg (INTD), "Gezi Spirit on Russian Streets?: The Emergence and Potential of Russia’s Contemporary Left."

Regan Burles (PSPT), "."

Deanne LeBlanc (PSPT), "."

Steven Ray Orr (PSPT), "."

2013

Tyler Chartrand (PSPT), “Impossible Canadians: Discourse, Subjectivity, and Sovereignty as National Identity.”

Kevin Elliott (ESPT), “Redemptive Violence and the 2011 England Riots.”

Rebekah Ludolph (ESPT), “Bare Mind-Dementia and the Diaspori State of Exception in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting.”

Ruth Emode (ESPT), “Possibilities of ‘Peace’: Levinas’s Ethics, Memory, and Black History in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.”

Caleb Langille (ESPT), “Terror, Composition, Embodiment: The Politics of Nature in Zizek, Latour, and Nancy.”

2012

Elina Hill (HSPT), “Indigenous Knowledge Practices: A Study in Decolonization.”

Laticia Chapman (PSPT), “Vital Materialism and Political Theory: Reanimating Nature, Reconstituting Colonization?”

Timothy Vasco (PSPT), “Human, Not Too Human: A Critical Semiotic of Drones and Drone Warfare.”

Lori Steuart (ESPT), “The Neoliberal Conditions for Posthuman Exceptionalism.”

Craig Ashbourbe (SSPT), “Rules of Engagement: How Current Tactics Corrode the Relationship Between Progressive Parties and Their Bases, and Potential Means of Re-Mobilizing the Left.”

Corey Ranford-Robinson (PSPT), “The Incipient Denationalization of Political Membership and the Disaggregation of the Canadian State’s Monopoly on Mobility.”

2011

Nicolas Graham (SSPT), “The Ecological Forces of Production: Reconciling Environmental and Class Based Politics.”

Nicholas Montgomery (PSPT), “Molarization and Singularization: Social Movements,Transformation and Hegemony.”

Noah Ross (PSPT), “The Perry Ridge Blockage of 1997: Environmental Political Action, Place and the Role of Local Knowledge.”

Jeanette Parker (ESPT), “Natality and the Rise of the Social in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought.”

David Barrett (ESPT), “Contested Meaning(s): Freedom as Responsibility in Three Nonfiction Texts.”

Shohadaei, Setareh (PSPT), “The Biopolitical Theatre: Tracing Sovereignty and History in the 2009 Show-Trials.”

Lea Gamache (PSPT), “L’Object De Collection Entre La Mort de l’Être et La Naissance de la Communauté.”

Jenny McCartney (PSPT), “Seducing the Void: An Exploration of Baudrillard’s Phenomenology of Absence.”

2010

Sagi Cohen (PSPT), “Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology.”

Daniele Taschereau Mamers (PSPT),

Victor Lorentz (PSPT), “Producing the Boreal: the Politics of Environmentalism, Capital and Nature in Canada’s Northern Forests.”

Sylvia Nicholles (PSPT), “Spaces of Atrocity: Political Architecture and Visualizing Vancouver.”

Amy Cox (SSPT), “Telling Multiple Truths of Youth Disengagement: A Multi-method Study of Low Youth Voter Turnout in Canada.”

Stephanie Cram (SSPT), “Framing BSE: Canadian news coverage of Canadian-born cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).”

Kelsie Laing (SSPT), “Towards Minoritarian Genderqueer Politics: Potentials ofDeleuzoguattarian Molecular Genderqueer Subjectivities and Bodies”

Christopher Nichols (SSPT), “Thinking the Social in Zarathustra’s Shadow: Foucault, Butler, Buber and the Question of Freedom.”

Jasmine North (ESPT), “With and Against Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: A

Case Study of Live Earth, Its Politics, Its Contradictions, and Its Political Potential.”

Devin Soper (ESPT), “Subjective Rupture: An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Subjective Transformation.”

Nicholas Van Orden (ESPT), “The Cyber-Performative in Second Life.”

David Huebert (ESPT). “Outrunning Silence: Adorno, Beckett, and the Question of Art after the Holocaust.”

Dustin Zielke (ESPT), “The Decline of Certainty: On Gianni Vattimo’s Weak Belief.”

Margaret Bosse (PSPT), “Bodies in Motion: Signification, Intensities, Dance.”

Renee McBeth (PSPT), “The Bellicose Politics of Peace.”

Kelsey Wrightson (PSPT), “We Are Treaty Peoples: the Common Understanding of Treaty 6 and Contemporary Treaty in British Columbia.”

2009

Daniel Harvey (ESPT), “The Biopolitics of Life at Sea, or, Toward a Theory of Maritime Exception.” Supervisor:

Seth Asch (PSPT), “Relational Ontology: An Exploration Through the Work of M.Foucault.”

Caroline Bagelman (PSPT), “Tours of Non-Arrival: the Politics of Escape in Tourist Practices.”

Youcef Soufi (PSPT), “At Home in One’s Habitus: The Accommodation of Communities of the Good Life.”

2008

Jarrad Reddekop (PSPT), "."

Adam Molnar (PSPT), "."

Melissa Murdock (PSPT), "Birthing at the Margins: (Re)conceptualizing Maternal Health  Care in BC."

Timothy Paugh (PSPT), "."

Jennifer Vermilyea (PSPT), "Borders, Statelessness, Agency: Rethinking Political Space."

Rhéa Nadine Wilson (PSPT), "Securing the Human: A Critique of Human Security and The Responsibility to Protect."

2007

Timothy Eric Smith (PSPT), “JS Mill and Liberal Imperialism: The Architecture of a Democratization Theorem.”

Tobold Leif Rollo (PSPT), “Mixed Emotions: The Phenomenal Experience of Recognition.”

Mark Christopher Vardy (SSPT), “Climate Change at the Intersection of Science, Society and the Individual.”

Mariah Harrower (ESPT), “Responding to Significant Otherness: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Critical Theory and NonHuman Animals.”

Lawrence Loiseau (ESPT), “Pathological Joyce: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Neurosis and Perversion in James Joyce’s Dubliners.”

Robyn Perry (SSPT), “Ultimate Referentiality and the Critique of Foundational Thought.”

Jacqueline Miller (PSPT), “The Persuasive Force of Exceptionalism and The Limits of The Modern Subject.”

2006

Shiri Pasternak (ESPT). “War By Other Means: A Genealogy of ‘Improvement’ from John Locke to Genetically Engineered Food Aid.”

Goldwynn Lewis (SSPT), “Techniques of Vision: Photography Practices and the Governing of Subjectives.”

Delacey Tedesco (PSPT), "Building the Good Life: The Politics of Sprawl in the Okanagan Valley."

Mark Reed (SSPT), “Individual Freedom or Eco-Social Justice? Autonomous Self or Interconnected Self?”

Dave Thompson (HSPT), “Direct Action, Subsidiarity and the Counterhegemonic: Three Case Studies of Antipoverty Activism in Twentieth Century Canada.”

2005

James McCrory (ESPT), “A Program for a Better Life: Consumerism and Socialism in the Canadian Depression.”

Stephanie Clare (ESPT), “Queer Theory and Foucault’s ‘Self’ a Reflexive Activity.”

Christopher Hurl (PSPT),

Serena Kataoka (PSPT), “Re-acting Aesthetic Politics: From City to Red Zones to Scenes of Downtown Victoria.”

Anne Nguyen (HSPT), “Crossing the River: An Ethnohistorical Study of Ancestor Worship in Two Central Vietnamese Villages.”

2004

Roman Joerger (SSPT), “Practices of Resistance in Zapatista Politics.”

Nicholas Matte (HSPT), “Putting Patients First : Harry Benjamin and the Development of  Transgender Medicine in the Twentieth Century.”

Rachel Phillips (SSPT), “"Health and the Sex Trade: An Examination of the Social Determinants of Health Status and Health Care Access Among Sex Workers"

2003

Anna Drake (PSPT), “Inclusion and Consent in Deliberative Democracy.”

Cassie Hague (PSPT), “The Politics of Social Movement Education: The Educational Program of the Anti-Globalization Movement.”

Kristin Lozanski (SSPT), “Public Space, Democracy, and Colonialism: British Columbia’s Referendum on Treaty Principles.”

Susan Pell (SSPT), “Mediated Knowledge and Possibilities for Political Participation.”

2002

Sheri Dankevy (SSPT), “Investigating Gender and Development Discourse: An Examination of the International Development Research Centre’s Practices.”

Matthew Holmes (ESPT), “Eaten for a Word: The Intersection of Food and Revolution in Russia.”

Emmanuel Raymundo (PSPT), “‘The sentence of history’: The Politics of Death and Life-Writing.”

Jakeet Singh (PSPT), “Making Freedom Meaningful: Why Choice is Not Enough.”

2001

Sophia Forster (ESPT), “‘something that would have shed itself in nature’: Ecological Politics, Ecocriticism, and the Poetry of Don McKay and Jorie Graham.”

2000

Maggie Quirt (ESPT), “Living Words: Tracing Processes of National Subject Formation and Racialization in Japanese Canadian Life Writing.”

Sailaja Krishnamurti (ESPT). “Boundaries on Fire: Hybridity and the Political Economy of Culture.”

Michael Blackburn (PSPT), “Movements of Power and Acts of Resistance: Falun Gong and the Politics of Everyday Life.”

Colin Campbell (PSPT), “Imagining the Possible:  Herbert Marcuse and Post Structuralist Theory.”

Randle Hart (SSPT), “New Natures in Tourism: Local Ecotourism and Environmental Activism.”

Jonathan Havercroft (PSPT), “The Author as Actor: A Defense of Quentin Skinner.”

Karen Jung (SSPT), “The Social Organization of Power in the Academy’s Disability Policy: Chronic Illness, Academic Accommodation and ‘Equity’.”

Ian Matthews (PSPT), “‘We’ are not Amused: R.B.J. Walker on the State of the Political Imagination.”

Murray Shaw (SSPT), “Freedom, Domination and the Liberal Art of Government: Advanced Liberal Technologies in Fraser Institute Discourse.”

1999

Maisaa Youssef (ESPT), “A Violence Properly Political: Discourse, Discrepancy, and Discursive Agency.”

Kevin Brown (PSPT), “Disciplining Critique for Democratic Theory: Connolly’s Interpretation of Foucault.”

Michael Lancaster (PSPT), “The Political Praxis of Charles Taylor.

Jocelyn Maclure (PSPT), “Identity, Subjectivity and Politics: Political Theory in the Simple Limits of Practical Reason.”

Konrad Ng (PSPT), “Meditations on the (Im)possibility of Regicide: Foucault, Government and State Sovereignty.”

Edouard Vo-Quang (PSPT), “The Location of Freedom: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.”

1998

Connie Carter (SSPT), “Not Just Another Story: Lesbian Femmes, Social Narratives and Subjectivity.”

Nigel DeSouza (PSPT), “Content and Context in the Philosophy of Charles Taylor.”

Darren Osadchuk (PSPT), “Sovereignty and Plurality: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of the Nation-State.”

Geoffrey Whitehall (PSPT), “David Harvey: Space, Limits and the Politics of Movement.”

Mairead Cavanagh (SSPT), “Co-Dependency, Discourse, and Lived Experience: Critical Interdisciplinary Dialogue.”

1997

Sandra Kahale (PSPT), Thesis title/record unavailable.

1996

Jordie Allen-Newman (SSPT), “Repertoires of Heterosexual Masculinity: A Depth Hermeneutic Analysis of the Men’s Movement.”

Charles Horn (PSPT), “A Discourse Analysis of the Bureaucratic Text.”

Sara Pash (PSPT), “The Philosophy of Charles Taylor: Schmittian Distinctions, Augustinian Grace and a Language of the Good.”

Neil Reimer (PSPT), “Aboriginal Culture and Sites of Representation.”

Peter Twigg (PSPT), “Death of Providence/Dance of the Liminal: Mabo and the Politics of Postcolonial Identities.”

Lisa Burke (PSPT), “Otherness in International Relations Theory.”

1995

Kevin Frost (PSPT), “The Eye of the Despot.”

Peter Nyers (PSPT), “On the Limit of the State: Gilles Deleuze and the Politics of Space and Time.”

Chad Thompson (PSPT), “Thieves of Knowledge: Philosophy, Politics, Academe.”

1994

James Overboe (SSPT), “Autobiographical Critique of the Category of Disability.”

Cara Stewart (PSPT), “Fictional Foundations and the Politics of Representation.”

1993

Leslie Kenny (PSPT), “The Occupation of Vancouver Transition House, 1985-86: Reflections on Women and Community.”

1992

Mark Franke (PSPT), “Essential Delirium: Negotiating the Texts of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.”

Brian Richardson (PSPT), “Webs of Association: the Textual Construction of A Commonwealth in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan.”

1991

Roderick Neufeld (PSPT), “George Orwell's Social and Political Thought: Power/Knowledge, Identity/Difference, and Guerilla Warfare.”