Southern Ontario is an exciting place to study our relationship with wetland landscapes, as almost 75% of these ecosystems have been transformed and seized for urban or agricultural development, although the rate of wetland loss may recently be decreasing (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, 2017; Ontario Biodiversity Council, 2015). This thesis is constructed around fieldwork conducted in Norfolk County during the late summer of 2020 and extensive engagement with various marsh complexes within the region. This research aims to present a more holistic understanding of our current relationship with wetland environments in Southern Ontario. This includes situating the wetland landscapes of Norfolk County within the infrastructures of the local Great Lakes region and the global and affective entanglements of the Anthropocene. Additionally, we explore certain co-constitutive present-day relationships that approximate people to wetland refrains. Finally, this research highlights the political intricacies of wetland management. Through this work, I will describe the complexities of these environments and demonstrate how being attuned to wetland landscape temporalities may be the best way to reterritorialize the wetland landscape.

“The city of living garbage” tours private houses in Austin transformed by their inhabitants into quasi-public places – art environments and permaculture systems made possible by urban waste. The creators of these micro-utopias collect and improvise with salvaged materials like roadside junk, greywater, unwanted animals, and half-forgotten cultural forms to cultivate habitats where undervalued things flourish. They revalue waste through a variety of practices like caring for, teaching, learning, enjoying, and tinkering. Becoming part of these relational patterns is a way to slow down and find wonder and pleasure in the ordinary, but also to act on ecological problems in the larger world. The landscape patches that emerge are lively but vulnerable assemblages that artists, activists, and their nonhuman allies belong to as local characters. By being open for tours, the places loosely connect publics that share modes of attention set on urban natures, salvageable garbage, and vernacular aesthetics. These informal institutions, non-profits, and vulnerable for-profit businesses are caught up in Austin’s current sustainable and cultural development strategies, but also share in an informal economy through their use of valueless wastes. Some articulate with contemporary localization movements that seek to reconfigure water, food, and energy production to decrease their precarious dependence on globalized economies. Others refuse the boundary between art and everyday life by recasting houses as never-ending aesthetic projects. Similarly, as wildlife habitats and urban gardens, they are thriving examples of cultivated places that disrupt an assumed antithesis between cities and ecosystems. These embodied critiques or dreams are small-scale manifestations of what urban natures might become. Borrowing from Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Latour, and Thrift, I attend to these places’ ecological and aesthetic relational dynamics that communicate directly through bodies, senses, and forms. This non-representational approach recognizes the contributions of nonhuman agents like plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing affective landscapes. The writing strives to be a mode of research that is isomorphic with the phenomena it describes. It is impelled by a love of the places, people, and beings it researches; it aspires to preserve a little bit of them by redoubling their presence in the world. / text

This dissertation provides the first full-scale musicological study of Stuttgart 95, a thirteenth-century song book, formerly thought to be from the abbey of Weingarten. Upon further examination, it is clear that rather than a single unified corpus of Latin songs, the musical portions are composed of three separate layers. Furthermore, I argue that these layers were best understood as separate entities. This delineation between writing campaigns indicates that the original musical project likely constitutes a mostly intact collection, with only one or two folios missing from the beginning of the codex. Moreover, the song repertoire in the first layer is partially comprised of addenda entered into other Engelberg liturgical manuscripts, mainly at the close of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century, shortly before the manufacture of Stuttgart 95. I focus, in particular, on the first layer of its musical corpora, arguing that the earliest stratum in this composite manuscript points to the double cloister of Engelberg as a likely provenance. As a collection of addenda, it demonstrates that musicians in Engelberg actively collected pieces that addressed Mary, the community’s patrona. I first discuss the consistent use of majuscule and rubrication to visually highlight the name of Mary amidst its surrounding text. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Mary along with each of these additional saints had liturgical ties to the double house of Engelberg; Mary was the monastery’s patrona, and the additional figures were either especially venerated at Engelberg or were the namesakes for dedicated altars or chapels in joint community’s churches.

In this study, the unique style of percussion writing in the chamber works of George Crumb, written between 1960 and 1980, is examined. The principal aspects examined within this study include: the extended instrumental techniques, the use of percussion within the musical imagery, soloistic treatment, compositional and notational procedures, and specific performance problems pertaining to the chamber work Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death.

This dissertation deals with the poetry of C.S.Z. Ntuli, with specific reference to themes, diction and form. The introductory chapter deals with the aim of study, the author's biographical background, the development of modern Zulu poetry, the state of critical studies in modern Zulu poetry, the scope of study and the method of approach. Chapter 2 examines the main themes manifest in the poetry of Ntuli. Chapter 3 is devoted to diction, with particular reference to imagery, compound words, ideophones and deideophonic derivatives. Comment is also made on ways in which these amplify the theme in selected poems. Chapter 4 discusses outstanding formal features and techniques including stanza formation, refrains, alliteration, parallelism, linking and rhythm. Chapter 5 concludes the study by giving observations about the quality of Ntuli's contribution to modern Zulu poetry, and by exploring some possibilities regarding future studies on the poetry of Ntuli / African Languages / M. A. (African languages)

Fairy tales are enchanting geographical stories, which affectively organize space-time in socially, politically, and ethically significant ways. Despite this, fairy tales have been neglected in the discipline of geography, and the inter-discipline of fairy tale studies has rarely interrogated the spatialities of tales, or of storytelling more widely. This thesis addresses this lacuna by theorizing the relationship between fairy tales, storytelling, and geography through the subversive folkloric figures of the trickster and crone. It posits, first, that we understand fairy tales as iterative stories that constitute mythic communities; and second, that trickster and crone figures are enchanting territorializing and deterritorializing refrains that subvert this mythic community. These two concerns are explored through Nolan’s (2008) Batman film The Dark Knight, and Maitland’s (2009) short story Moss Witch. An experimental research approach provides insight into these ‘worldly,’ enchanting, and symbolically rich stories, without sacrificing their liveliness or ‘systematizing’ them for ideological gain. The research begins with an interpretive textual analysis to address the symbolic traditions of the fairy tale refrains. Collage enables a ‘retelling’ of the stories as materially and visually expressive media. Genealogical analysis traces the material-discursive matterings of the geographical refrains within academic ‘storytelling.’ These combined approaches ‘story’ the trickster and crone as spatial patterns with affective force. Trickster refrains are animating forces of destruction and chaos. They shift between the centre and periphery of mythic community, violently overturn its seemingly ordered realities, and unfold insecure and profane in-between places, where (human) community can no longer be sustained. The crone refrain enacts a ‘wilding’ in fairy tales, entangling the civilized, storied human polis (or culture more generally) with the nonhuman ‘environment,’ and undermining both relational accounts of being and more romantic discourses of dwelling. Going forward, continued engagement with this nexus of geography, storytelling, and fairy tales promises to enrich our multidisciplinary endeavours, highlight our theoretical ‘matterings’ of fairy tales, and enable more responsible engagement with these endlessly enchanting stories.

This dissertation deals with the poetry of C.S.Z. Ntuli, with specific reference to themes, diction and form. The introductory chapter deals with the aim of study, the author's biographical background, the development of modern Zulu poetry, the state of critical studies in modern Zulu poetry, the scope of study and the method of approach. Chapter 2 examines the main themes manifest in the poetry of Ntuli. Chapter 3 is devoted to diction, with particular reference to imagery, compound words, ideophones and deideophonic derivatives. Comment is also made on ways in which these amplify the theme in selected poems. Chapter 4 discusses outstanding formal features and techniques including stanza formation, refrains, alliteration, parallelism, linking and rhythm. Chapter 5 concludes the study by giving observations about the quality of Ntuli's contribution to modern Zulu poetry, and by exploring some possibilities regarding future studies on the poetry of Ntuli / African Languages / M. A. (African languages)