The Very Hungry Housewife and Other Tales From a Recipe Box

The Very Hungry Housewife and Other Tales From a Recipe Box (working title) is a multi-modal research-creation project that brings feminist food studies, performance studies, archival studies, and video production together to examine an inherited recipe box as an archive.

The project aims to visualize the largely invisible reproductive labour and domestic care work of a Finnish-Canadian woman whose personal recipe box contained more than 500 recipes from a wide range of sources and spanning the early 1950s to mid-2000s. Through performing and recording the recipes, I am exploring a range of themes around reproductive labour, feminist care work, food work, and women’s social networks.

Teaching and Learning to Write in a First-Year Large Lecture Course

Teaching writing in large lecture settings presents numerous challenges for both teaching and learning.

The literature suggests that in order to learn to write students need 1) to write a lot and 2) to make mistakes. Both conditions are at odds with the teaching and learning that takes place in large lectures. In large lecture settings with 100+ students, we lack the time and resources to grade multiple iterations of student work and we rely on traditional grading methods for assessment, leaving little room for students to ‘try’ without the pressure of achieving a good grade.

To address this challenge in CMNS120W: Creativity and Communication Across Media, a writing intensive lecture with 160+ student enrolment, I have introduced three techniques between Fall 2022-Summer 2023: 1) low-stakes, in-class writing-to-learn (WTL) exercises; 2) weekly learning reflections; and 3) tutorial activities designed specifically to scaffold major writing assignments

The aim of the project is to investigate in what ways, if at all, writing to learn (WTL) exercises, learning reflections, and tutorial design have impact student’s attitude toward writing in the Fall 2023 offering of the course. Specifically, the central questions I want to ask is in what ways have students’ attitudes toward writing and perception of their writing ability been impacted by the strategies (frequent low stakes exercises, regular reflection, and group support) implemented to teach writing in a large, writing intensive lecture course?

This project is supported by funding from TILT (Transforming Inquiry in Learning and Teaching).

Useful Play: Social Reform, Child Development, and the Problem of Screens

The central question this dissertation asks is, how has play become a natural-seeming strategy for managing the problem of children’s screen time? Methodologically, I draw from Foucault’s writings on genealogy. The hallmark of genealogy is its ability to disrupt taken-for-granted phenomena that, like the value of play or the problem of screens, seem so common sense to us that people rarely think to question them. Using Canadian examples and archival materials ranging from the years 1900-1980 and from a wide range of sources including the early twentieth-century playground movement, the Children’s Aid Society, The Canadian Welfare Council, the Canadian Council for Children and Youth, and Canadian Home and School and Parent Teacher Federation, the Children’s Broadcast institute, The Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I trace some of the factors that have historically conditioned the possibility for our present configuration of concerns with play and screens. I illustrate that those conditions are not natural or necessary but rather contingent, subject to chance, emerging over time by accident, coincidence, convenience, allegiance, tension, or outright struggle and involve a whole constellation of institutions, individuals, practices, discourses, and so on. I conclude by suggesting that rather than assume the current preoccupation with play is the result of progressive views toward child rights and needs, as has often been the case, play should be understood as linked to the exercises of power and knowledge of children’s bodies–as a tool for securing the social body and for producing normative subjects.

Why it Wasn’t Like the Book: Limitations of Fidelity in the Film Adaptation of Children’s and Young Adult Literature

This thesis examines the debate over textual fidelity in novel-film adaptations of five children’s and young adult texts: Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland, Fantastic Mr. Fox and two films in the Twilight Saga: Twilight and New Moon. Each chapter explores a different methodological approach to novel-film adaptation in an effort to move beyond the reliance on fidelity as a criterion for the study of texts adapted to screen. Through narrative analysis, semiotics, and reader response theory, each chapter identifies various reasons why direct transfer between novel and film is not always possible. In addition, I interrogate why, if not viable and largely undesirable, the fidelity criterion persists in adaptation scholarship, film criticism, and audience expectations.