The feeding ecologies of leaf pack-associated systellognathan stoneflies were examined from 6 June 1980 21 May 1981. Species composition, seasonal abundance, nymphal growth, feeding habits and mouthpart morphology were determined for the eight dominant stonefly species. Prey preferences and predator-prey size relationships were also examined for omnivorous and carnivorous species. Foregut analysis from 2860 individuals indicated opportunistic feeding on the most abundant prey insects, usually in proportion to prey frequency. Feeding preference studies generally indicated random feeding on major prey groups. Prey and predator sizes were usually highly correlated (p<0.01), with predators expanding their prey size thresholds with growth. The potential for competition between sympatric stoneflies for prey is discussed.

Current practices of landfill restoration can be characterised as anthropocentric, violent and unsuccessful gestures of purification and control, while they erase traces of planetary history and habitats generated by waste and dirt. The dominant notion of landfill restoration insists on a concept of humans as directors of geo-bio flow who are capable of controlling and reversing the dirty chaos they created. However, matter has its own agency and as any other form of life, waste flows; it may eventually spill, leak and reach our bodies and surroundings through water, air and geological strata. Focusing specifically on Fyli landfill in Athens, the project’s goal is the articulation of a design proposal that questions the current practices of landfilling and landfill aftercare seeking for a reconceptualization of ecological restoration that does not imply a clean, purified and beautiful landscape but generates acts or re-membering and adapting towards a symbiosis with our mess. But how urban design can create the conditions between the coexistence between landfill’s processes of contamination and deformation and human attachment to cleanliness and sameness?This is the research question that is investigated through the specific context of Fyli landfill, seeking a new story for restor[y]ing our relationship to waste.

Expanding on the fields of bio-mimicry, morpho-ecologies, and dynamics and fluidity in architecture, this thesis proposes architecture as organism. It suggests that as organism, architecture is inherently responsive to the thresholds it exists on and within, thresholds which are composed not just of the physical but of the ephemeral; of time and of space. The existence, metabolism and morphology of an architectural organism becomes a function of the dynamic world into which it is born, inextricable from the ecology of the space it will inhabit. This thesis explores the architectural organism in the context of a visibly and significantly changing threshold, how connections are made between it and the world around it, and how it might engage those who are its inhabitants. The thesis is located in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy, at the mouth of the Gaspereau River.

This thesis is concerned with the conditions of generating a livable Karoo landscape and the arts of living on a damaged Karoo veld. It takes place in a context where the anthropogenic influences on land degradation, desertification and biodiversity loss continues to haunt the Karoo in the present. The Karoo is a semi-arid region that spans the interior of South Africa. It is also region that has been subject to ongoing and widespread concern of the impact of overgrazing, threatening the livability of the Karoo landscape. This is a result of human/nonhuman relations that have been grounded in a colonial mastery of the land, whereby the advent of private property regimes, modernist technologies and capitalist extraction has allowed for the land to be cheapened, exhausted and severely degraded in a process of colonial dispossession. This research is a qualitative ethnography interacting with farmers and nonhumans on rangelands in the Great Karoo. This thesis shows how the earlier degradation of the Karoo has demanded farmersto pay attention to the relationalities between ecology and economy, since their economic/ecological survival depends entirely on the ongoing multispecies assemblages of which humans form a part. Infrastructures and technologies have become grounds for new ontological practices of regenerating the Karoo veld. Infrastructures (namely fencing) and sheep are used in ways that mimic the earlier migration of large herds of antelope. Here, the bodies of sheep are curated and moved in order to perform a particular ordering of a Karoo ‘nature’. This movement is believed to instigate multispecies liveliness. Sheep, who were once destroyers of the veld, are now enrolled in practices that are believed to bring back the ‘natural’ vegetation of the Karoo. The thesis problematises the ongoing Western ways of knowing that separate the world into binaries of ‘nature’/’culture’, ‘human’/’non-human’, ‘subject’/object’, ‘domestic’/‘wild’, ’economy’/‘ecology’, ‘life’/‘death’. Rather, it argues that a concern with ontological plurality is a process of paying attention to the mutual ecologies and multiple species that gather in human/nonhuman worlding projects on rangelands in the Karoo.

The January 2021 edition of PMLA housed an entire cluster on "Indigenous Literatures and the Anthropocene," in which at least four of the eight non-Indigenous contributors directly addressed and supported a call for learning from and collaborating with Indigenous voices. The unanimity of the discussion dissolves somewhat drastically when considering exactly how this should be done, leading Melanie Taylor to voice one of the framing questions of the cluster: "If it is increasingly clear that not all members of Anthropos are equal drivers of the Anthropocene, and that not all are uniformly compromised by its havoc, how can we begin to manufacture a communal will to redress it?" (Taylor 10). My thesis presents as a potential solution collective environmental guilt—collective guilt responding to the specifically ecological violence enacted by settler-societies. William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land and Geraldine Brook's Caleb's Crossing, two works of settler-authored historical fiction, utilize collective environmental guilt to manufacture a communal will in their popular readerships by demonstrating and assigning guilt to the settler-collectives of their protagonists before guiding readers to embrace and center Indigenous ecologies as a potential path to mitigating that guilt and promoting positive environmental change. As settler-authored works, the texts offer an alternative mode of engagement with Indigenous knowledges for an audience traditionally outside of scholarly discourse's reach in a way that models a path for ally authorship supporting Indigenous environmental movements.

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This dissertation examines the public writing and civic engagement of an online community of a sportsmen forum, as the writing and engagement relate to natural resources management. Drawing from theories of public discourse and public rhetoric, this dissertation argues the sportsmen forum represents a specialized online public"publics that are constituted in digital spaces around shared interests and the circulation of texts and (vernacular) discourses, while existing in rhetorical ecologies. This dissertation argues sportsmen and sportswomen are an overlooked public within the field of Rhetoric and Writing. Not only are sportspersons stakeholders in natural resources issues, but they also represent primary reader-users of natural resource policy, making them a public of interest for rhetoric and writing scholars in areas such as public rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and technical communication. Beginning in the digital archives of the sportsmen forum, the dissertation isolates two case studies, each focusing on a current natural resource issue: deer management and feral swine management. The deer management case study represents the ways in which specialized online publics operate within rhetorical ecologies, while also exposing a space where these publics might make a greater impact in management practices through the formation of hybrid publics. Illustrating how hybrid publics might operate, the feral swine case study, examines collaboration between wildlife managers and sportspersons in the digital space of an online forum. Following the case studies, the dissertation concludes with a discussion of the scholarly and pedagogical implications of specialized online publics. / Ph. D.

En s’intéressant aux écrits entourant l’histoire houleuse de la mouvance écoféministe, cette thèse dresse le portrait des différentes manifestations littéraires de l’écoféminisme contemporain en soutenant l’idée selon laquelle la critique littéraire constitue le cœur de cette mouvance, plutôt qu’une simple manifestation de celle-ci. La première partie de notre travail reprend l’histoire complexe de l’écoféminisme et de la critique littéraire écoféministe, depuis les années 1970 jusqu’à nos jours, en opérant une remise en contexte historique. Ceci permet d’aborder le problème de l’essentialisme souvent associé à l’écoféminisme en faisant apparaître la stérilité de ce débat au regard des évolutions que la mouvance peut apporter, d’une part, et, d’autre part, d’insister sur les racines (éco)féministes de l’écocritique. Notre seconde partie établit les grandes lignes d’une praxis écoféministe transversale, avant de se concentrer plus particulièrement sur la façon dont l’écocritique féministe articule le rapport au lieu, à la corporéité et le rapport au langage. Enfin, la troisième partie de la thèse porte sur l’objet d’étude de l’écocritique féministe : la littérature. Nous y proposons nos propres analyses écocritiques féministes d’une sélection de textes contemporains. La troisième partie offre ainsi une application concrète de la praxis écoféministe transversale à laquelle la seconde partie s’intéresse, afin d’illustrer notre point clef : la théorie sert à guider et informer la lecture, bien entendu, mais la littérature et la critique littéraire ont également alimenté et enrichi la pratique critique et l’activisme. / By focusing on the writings which have accompanied the ecofeminist movement’s heated history, this thesis offers an overview of the literary manifestations of contemporary ecofeminism and argues that literary criticism is in fact at the heart of the ecofeminist movement instead of being a mere manifestation of it. The first part of our work retraces the complex history of ecofeminism and feminist ecocriticism, from its beginnings in the 1970s to the present day, which puts it back into its historical context. This allows a closer look at the essentialist problem which is often associated with ecofeminism, this debate’s sterility appears by itself when one takes into account the changes that this movement can help establish from the one hand, and from the other, this allows us to concentrate on the (eco)feminists roots of ecocriticism. Our second part offers a broad outlining of a transversal ecofeminist praxis by unearthing ecocriticism’s feminist roots and by focusing on the way feminist ecocriticism deals with the sense of place, corporeality and its relationship towards language; three main themes of feminism and environmentalism of the past forty years. Finally, the third part of the thesis emphasizes the object of feminist ecocritical studies: literature. We offer our own feminist ecocritical analysis of a selection of contemporary texts. This allows for a practical use of the transversal ecofeminist praxis which our second part sheds light on and illustrates our main argument: theory is, indeed, useful to guide and inform a critical reading, but literature can also guide and inform critical practice and activism.

All forms of cultural interaction are expressive and creative. In particular, what the performing arts express is not always the conscious, the ideal and the rational, but more often the preconscious, pre-verbal, asocial and irrational, touching on darker undercurrents of human and extra-human interrelations, experiences, beliefs, fears, desires and values. So what is performance and how does it differ in cultures? A performance is a translation of an idea into a synaesthetic experience. In the context of this thesis, however, translation does not imply reductive literal translation as can be attempted by analogy in spoken or written descriptions and notation systems. The translation is one through which participating groups and individuals seek to understand the being in the world of the Other by means of mutual, embodied negotiation of meaning - sensually, experientially, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally - that is, by means of performance. As a contribution towards a social theory of human performance, the author offers reflections on an exchange between two performance ecologies - those of a group of Aboriginal Australian performers from Mimili, Central Australia and a mixed ethnic group of Australian performers from Penrith, NSW, Australia. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Swift and radical technological change necessitates a re-appraisal of the phenomenology of the house. Canonical phenomenology often has been technologically averse and the phenomenological appraisal of the house, as offered by philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1958) and architect Juhani Pallasmaa (1994), has notably omitted its technological components. This thesis asserts that neither the technologization of the flesh nor the field can be ignored. Upon asserting the importance of both technology and the house to our Being, the thesis proposes some basic principles for understanding technological change. A re-appraisal of the phenomenology of the house is then initiated, starting with a selected series of behavioural and symbolic foci: the hearth, the toilet, the table, the bed and the window. These are discussed with regard to their historical importance in the house and speculated upon as they become increasingly changed by advanced technology. This thesis takes the form of a book. It is a synthetic and removed work, navigating the overlapping zones of a number of disparate discourses. Its perspective is situated in the midst of many complex and interconnected metaphors. It is part historical description, poetical observation, philosophical conjecture, curation, and design.