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CSI at UBC: How David Sweet is using dental forensics to pit modern science against criminals.

Canadian remembrance of the Great War (1914-1918) in the early twenty-first century is often associated with grand gestures at national monuments like the opening of the new Canadian War Museum in 2005 and the restoration of the Vimy Ridge Memorial in 2007. However, these sites of memory, what Pierre Nora terms lieux de mémoire, are not part of the everyday environments of memory, the milieux de mémoire, of most Canadians. In my investigation of three contemporary works of Canadian literature: The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane, Broken Ground by Jack Hodgins, and Unity (1918) by Kevin Kerr, locally-based storytellers describe the continued influence of the Great War on their individual Canadian communities. The fictionalized narrating personas in these three works create what I refer to as bio-geographies: first-person accounts of the narrator’s particular social and memory environments. While the bio-geographers in these three texts lack first-hand experience of the Great War, their writing reflects the continued repercussions of the conflict in the weeks, years, and decades after the 1918 armistice. The Great War differentially affected thousands of communities in Canada and Newfoundland. Constructing a coherent national narrative that accounts for the multiple lived experiences of individuals in communities across North America is virtually impossible. Turning to local representations of the Great War (in the case of the three bio-geographic texts: depictions of communities in Newfoundland, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan) provides a sense of the nation as a diverse landscape of memory with multiple vantage points. Negotiating the complex terrain of self, place, and memory, the bio-geographers in the three works I examine create representations of the past that reveal how sites of memory, lieux de mémoire, come to be firmly embedded in the ongoing lived experiences of comunity members, the milieux de mémoire.

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The name of Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes has always been known to students of Scottish history by reason of his 'Annals of Scotland', long accepted as a fundamental reference book for that period of Scottish history which it covers. It is safe to say, however that few of his other historical publications are now read. Those familiar with the anti-Gibbon literature also know him as one of Gibbon's most respected critics, while the recent studies of the 18th Century revival of interest in early and medieval literature have revealed his key position in this movement, both as an editor, and as an adviser and helper to others. In the legal profession, he was highly thought of as a lawyer and judge, and the number and importance of his correspondents testify to his wide acquaintance and high reputation amongst men of learning. Despite all this, no full account of the man and his work has previously been made, although there have been several unfinished attempts. [...] An attempt has been made to fit Hailes into the cultural and social background of his times, and to make some estimate of the influence and importance of his published work, with particular reference to the fields of history and literature. Much of the basic research in this thesis was done in compiling Appendices A and B. No reliable list of Hailes's publications has ever been drawn up, and Appendix A is a serious attempt to fill this gap. A complete check-list of Hailes's extant correspondence has not been attempted previously and Appendix B is designed to supply this omission.

In his liberal theory of justice, John Rawls stipulates that the principles of justice selected will be generally complied with. This assumption of full compliance is characteristic of what Rawls calls “ideal theory,” i.e., a theory that seeks to formulate and justify ideal principles of justice. David Schmidtz contends that the full compliance assumption undermines the practical relevance of ideal theory. I argue that Schmidtz’s criticisms of full compliance do not succeed. Understanding why his arguments fail requires an examination of both Schmidtz’s and Rawls’s views of the nature of justice and the function of political philosophy. I explain why full compliance can plausibly be assumed in Rawls’s ideal theory given the conception of justice he employs, and articulate the problem Schmidtz’s argument faces if it relies on his view of the role of political philosophy.

HBO's The Wire examines the relationship between institutions and individuals in American society and concludes that institutions restrict the agency of individuals, and series creator David Simon likens the power of institutions to the gods of Greek tragedy. In this project, I argue that shame culture enables institutions to have the social influence described by Simon. The paper's introduction defines the term "shame culture" and distinguishes it from "guilt culture," and I use medieval examples of shame culture to illustrate how shame functions in The Wire. This paper divides its detailed discussion of The Wire into four sections, each of which focuses on a different institution. The essay's first section explores how drug dealers and criminals use their reputations aggressively to build drug empires or simply survive, as the characters Marlo Stanfield, a drug kingpin, and Omar Little, a stickup artist, demonstrate. The second section examines Marlo and Omar's influence on young drug dealers, called corner kids in the series, and I argue that the public schools cannot prevent shame from being ingrained in these children. The third section focuses on police officers and, specifically, eventual police commissioner Cedric Daniels, and I examine how the police department's preoccupation with crime statistics reveals their dependence on shame and reputation—the police force is ineffective since they mirror in many ways the criminals they are trying to arrest. Lastly, the essay's fourth section analyzes politicians in The Wire and how Mayor Carcetti is powerless to respond to and exacerbates the city's social problems due to his need to preserve his public image. The paper concludes that social reform that grants agency to individuals in The Wire is impossible as long as shame culture shapes the various institutions depicted in the series.

Contemporary postcolonial critique poses questions about the impact of colonization on the construction of the political. Beginning with David Scott’s account of the limits and even hopeless condition of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial theory, this thesis explores one way in which the political might be reconstructed under postcolonial conditions. The analysis is primarily theoretical in character. I work through texts by Immanuel Kant, Mary Douglas and Partha Chatterjee to recount the narrative of modern politics and its affect upon postcolonial societies. On this basis, I recognize the sovereign state as the key point of contention in accounts of the continuing reproduction of social exclusions. I then identify the imposition of colonial Enlightenment to have refigured authentic modes of self-representation for the colonized; colonial Enlightenment I suggest, conflated cultural difference with the value of right, and has thereby largely depoliticized practices of exclusion. Shifting to consider how postcolonial political space might be reconstructed, I draw on Warren Magnusson’s understanding of urban politics. By challenging the ontological positioning of the sovereign state, the city may be understood as a dynamic political actor that does not erase cultural difference. Then by examining practices of scavenging in Brazil and Argentina, I compare one case in which the sovereign state has effectively perpetuated conditions of social exclusion with a case in which a municipality has been able to address these conditions. I conclude that the contemporary condition of postcolonial critique can indeed be taken in more optimistic directions through challenges to the ontological primacy of the sovereign state so that the value of difference can be recognized and emancipation rethought. / Graduate / 0615 / kerstin@uvic.ca

Outre-amer is a collection of short stories set in a contemporary Quebec society and depicting events in the genealogy of a family doomed with mythological predispositions. / Intertextuality is an important aspect of Outre-amer, since the stories are independent from one another, while linked together by various themes, clues and details which carry enigmas beneath the surface of the stories from one end of the collection to the other. Thus, it is suggested to read the stories in a chronological order. / Etude du dialogue dans Nouvelles de J. D. Salinger studies the conversational aspect of the prose of the American author J. D. Salinger. It reflects on the importance and the role of dialogues within a short story, as well as their scriptural representation and mimetic function. The article investigates the French translation of two short stories which are part of Nine Stories. It analyzes the particularities of the translated dialogues compared to those of the original version, and questions the critical validity of a text in translation. The study raises and discusses issues related to the process of translation towards French and denounces the French translator's ethnocentrical approach towards the American text: in this case, the French language and culture assimilate Salinger's stories, thus altering the poetics of the text in translation.