Seamfulness is a narrative-based and arts-informed inquiry into young women's "depression" as pedagogy. Unfolding in rural Nova Scotia, this research is rooted in my experience of depression as the most transformative event in my life story. While memoirists tell me I am not alone, there is currently a lack of research on personal understandings of depression, particularly for young adult women. Through storytelling sessions and self-publishing workshops, I explored four young Nova Scotian women's depression as a productive site for growth. Participants include four young women, including myself, who experienced depression in their early 20s, and have not had a major depressive episode for at least three years. Aged 29 to 40, we claim Métis, Scottish, Acadian, and British ancestries, and were raised and lived in rural Nova Scotian communities during this time. At the seams of adult education, disability studies, and art, I ask: How do young women narrate experiences of "depression" as education? How do handmade, self-published booklets (or “zines”) allow for exploring this topic as embodied, emotional and critical transformative learning? To address these questions, I employ arts-informed strategies and feminist, adult education, mental health, and disability studies literatures to investigate the critical and transformative learning accomplished by young women who experience depression. Through a feminist poststructuralist lens and using qualitative and arts-informed methods, I situate depression as valuable learning, labour, and gift on behalf of the societies and communities in which women live. I argue that just as zines are powerful forms for third space pedagogy, depression itself is a third space subjectivity that gives rise to the "disorienting dilemma" at the heart of transformative learning. I close with "Loose Ends," an exploration of depression as an unanswered question. This thesis engages visual and verbal strategies to disrupt epistemic and aesethetic conventions for academic texts. By foregrounding participant zines and stories, I privilege participant voices as the basis for framing their experience, rather than as material to reinforce or contest academic theories.

The need and longing to connect to another is a fundamental desire of the human heart, enforcing a sense of movement toward social and personal security and, moreover, the future. Yet it is paradoxical that, where people are the most closely crowded together, feelings of alienation and loneliness are often the greatest. We live in times of busy isolation, on streets where we dont know our neighbours, in societies where our lives are lived behind closed doors. As the global village grows, our personal worlds shrink, both by circumstance and by choice. Our innate, gregarious nature faces its greatest challenge, or ultimate defeat.<p> The story of my hometown, New Waterford, is a substantial element in the story of my life as well as my art. The woodcuts and many of the paintings in the exhibition, Slag, are documentations of this place, its inhabitants and their way of life. It is a town with a unique character resulting from the circumstances surrounding its relationship to coalmininga town that is withering away now that the mines are gone. Other paintings in the exhibition depict people and spaces from other places that I have lived. Though the environments change, there are similarities in the pathos of the human subjects that remain constant. In my work, whether I am depicting the inhabitants of a hollowed out town or the solitary subway commuter, they are united as those things that have been lost or left behind in the name of progressthe leftovers and waste: the slag.

The need and longing to connect to another is a fundamental desire of the human heart, enforcing a sense of movement toward social and personal security and, moreover, the future. Yet it is paradoxical that, where people are the most closely crowded together, feelings of alienation and loneliness are often the greatest. We live in times of busy isolation, on streets where we dont know our neighbours, in societies where our lives are lived behind closed doors. As the global village grows, our personal worlds shrink, both by circumstance and by choice. Our innate, gregarious nature faces its greatest challenge, or ultimate defeat.<p> The story of my hometown, New Waterford, is a substantial element in the story of my life as well as my art. The woodcuts and many of the paintings in the exhibition, Slag, are documentations of this place, its inhabitants and their way of life. It is a town with a unique character resulting from the circumstances surrounding its relationship to coalmininga town that is withering away now that the mines are gone. Other paintings in the exhibition depict people and spaces from other places that I have lived. Though the environments change, there are similarities in the pathos of the human subjects that remain constant. In my work, whether I am depicting the inhabitants of a hollowed out town or the solitary subway commuter, they are united as those things that have been lost or left behind in the name of progressthe leftovers and waste: the slag.

Thesis (M.A.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Restricted until June 2001. Bibliography: leaves 154-169.

Thesis--Université de Paris. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [249]-255).

Youth councils are an increasingly popular tool that both government and non-governmental organizations use to inform policy and program development, to increase the participation of young people, and to improve the connection of youth to their communities and to civic life more broadly. In this thesis, the youth engagement experiences of local governments in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia are examined. Both municipalities initiated youth councils in recent years in an attempt to consult on issues affecting youth in their communities. The two communities have experienced varied degrees of success in implementing these strategies. In broad terms, youth councils operated more successfully in the smaller, more self-contained community of Amherst than in the more sprawling urban municipality of the Halifax area. The divergent experiences of these two municipalities inform a discussion about the merits of youth councils as a tool for engagement for local governments. It is concluded that while youth councils can be both effective in terms of achieving immediate objectives, success is not easily reproduced in all scenarios and depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the community itself, the level of support from adults and facilitators, and the ability of the councils to meet their objectives and thus achieve legitimacy among stakeholders, creating a positive feedback look which engenders further effectiveness.

The thesis project is a study for the integration of farming, urban use, and ecology at the edge of the city. The aims of the test-of-principle are to connect the urban consumer with the rural food producer, processing and productive landscape, and to examine mechanisms for local self-sufficiency and the preservation of farmland from suburban encroachment. The proposed model for this study is a sheep farm within the outskirts of Truro, Nova Scotia. At the landscape scale, the thesis takes the position that urban areas and farmland mutually benefit from co-localization. At the site and building scales, the thesis adopts the ‘farm-to-table’ model, seeking to vertically-integrate the full cycle of food-related programming. The public experience within this food hub is choreographed through visibility, porosity and overlapping circuits with farmer, sheep and product. By balancing the public, process and pragmatism, the thesis demonstrates a role for architecture within the agrarian domain.

Each architectural exploration requires grounding. This body of work begins with an interest in that which made historical settlements authentic to a place. The thesis is focused first and foremost on the single most predictable, yet varying influence. The sun which acts as a clock, a calendar, and source of energy, has shaped architecture for thousands of years and should be considered with far greater attention in the future, both experientially but also thermally as source of energy. The proposal for an artist studio located on the Northumberland Straight in Nova Scotia will require an acute relation to the light and solar energy which the sun has to offer. The studio will attempt to function as a self sufficient working space in the landscape, using the resources locally available. As sole users, each artist will shape the habitable space based on specific needs, while continually keeping in mind that which drives the form, light, heat and energy. / How can the Solar Cycles of light and temperature inform a method of design, which allows the architecture to reflect the patterns of the sun?

Background: CVD is a major cause of premature death in Nova Scotia, Canada. Objective: To determine the role of inflammation in the relationships between obesity, physical activity and IHD. Methods: Secondary analysis using exposure data from the 1995 Nova Scotia Health Survey, morbidity data from CIHI and mortality data from Statistics Canada. Results: A statistically significant association was found between abdominal obesity and IHD for women; the relationship between physical inactivity and IHD was of borderline statistical significance in men. Inflammatory markers were independently associated IHD for women. Conclusions: Abdominal obesity was a risk factor for IHD for women, whereas physical inactivity was the was the strongest predictor of IHD in men. Inflammation was found to be an independent risk factor for IHD in women but not men. There was no evidence that inflammation plays a mediating role in the obesity-IHD and physical activity-IHD relationships for women and men, respectively.

Background: Women who inject drugs continue to represent a disproportionate percentage of new cases of HIV in Canada (PHAC, 2006). However, in Nova Scotia, HIV has still not been conceptualized as a major health issue, especially among women (Gahagan, Rehman & Baxter, 2006). At the same time, recent research findings suggest that female injection drug users in Nova Scotia are engaging in unsafe injection and sexual practices and often lack access to harm reduction-based programming and resources (Ploem, 2000; PHAC, 2006; Jackson et al., 2010; Parker et al., 2011; Hodder, 2011). In a provincial context of high prevalence of injection drug use and HIV risk behaviours, preventing increasing rates of HIV infection will depend on the development of proactive and gender-informed HIV prevention policies. Purpose: This study had two main aims. First, it aimed to chart the development of provincial HIV prevention and harm reduction policies and to identify how, and if, the policy development processes address the HIV prevention needs of women who inject drugs. Its second aim was to identify key barriers and facilitators to developing HIV prevention policy for women who inject drugs in Nova Scotia. Methods: This study involved a review of key HIV prevention and harm reduction policy documents as well as interviews with 27 key informants directly involved with HIV prevention and/or harm reduction policy decision-making. Findings/Discussion: The existing Nova Scotia-based policy development network, their policies, their processes and the context within which they have functioned over the past ten years do not appear to be supporting the development of HIV prevention and harm reduction policy which addresses the needs of women who inject drugs. Policy committee composition lacked inclusivity and organizations that work directly with women who inject drugs held less influence in policy processes. In addition, gender was not prioritized by decision-makers and therefore not comprehensively addressed in policy content. As a result, the needs of women who inject drugs have not been prioritized in policy processes and subsequently few targeted resources are going to the community-based organizations that provide services to these women.