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Shoo-fly cookery. From the Lillian Carefoot Cookbook Collection

We, Animals is an assemblage of vignettes comprised of observations and reflections of urgent ethical issues concerning our relationship to nonhuman-animals, human-animals and more broadly to Mother Earth. Its aims are to explore and expose our paradoxical relationship with nonhuman-animals, to explore the intersections of animal ethics and veganism with other forms of oppression and exploitation such as misogyny, sexism, racism and colonialism, and to draw parallels between the oppression of nonhuman- animals and human-animals.We, Animals deviates from standard animal ethics by exposing rampant and persistent institutionalized violence in our relations with nonhuman-animals through parallel stories of Nonhuman and Human-Animal oppressions.

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/7619/Sept11-1913.pdf?sequence=2

In 1993, Maxine Greene issued a call to expand the standard of humanness and to look beyond normative culture in the hopes of moving toward a greater inclusivity of diversity in schools. Current Canadian curriculum theory is seeking to include more voices into a conversation that seeks to recognize unheard narratives. To contribute to this goal this study sought to speak to those who successfully navigate the normative world through their unique narratives, unswayed by the pull towards the norm. In a discussion of successful arts teachers, Smithrim and Upitis (2001) describe a person who is unswayed by normative pressures as “someone who is able to write his or her life like a poem, who marches to his or her own drum, and whose identity is strong enough to withstand the many influences of the dominant culture” (p. 21). They name these individuals strong poets. By exploring the perspectives and experiences of students who are strong poets, this research contributes to the understanding of how curriculum can encourage people to extend the standard of humanness by embracing their non-normative narratives. This study used a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Data were collected through two phases that emphasized the interpretation of texts and the negotiation of the meaning of those texts through a community of strong poet interpreters. The data were analyzed and presented through the use of hermeneutic windows in order to develop an understanding of those who accept their own unique narratives without hesitation. The four windows described present the essence of how the strong poet participants interpreted the expansion of the standard of humanness through their awareness of self, their ability to humanize the humans around them, and the ways in which they creatively resist and negotiate norms. The strong poets who participated in this study shared their experiences of the lived curriculum and shed light on how they embraced their own non-normative narratives and how they encouraged others to embrace their own stories.

This study examines the rural-urban post-secondary education participation gap in Canada. Using data collected in the Access and Support for Education and Training Survey (ASETS) released in 2009, this research investigates the barriers to post-secondary education faced by rural students, and whether these barriers differ from those experienced by other Canadians. A literature review, crosstab analysis, and logistic regression are used to help assess four policy alternatives and the status quo. To increase rural participation in post-secondary education, this study recommends the creation of an early intervening, outreach counselling program for rural high school students.

Classical epidemiological models assume mass action. However, this assumption is violated when interactions are not random. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting shelter in place social distancing directives, mass action models must be modified to account for limited social interactions. In this paper we apply a pairwise network model with moment closure to study the early transmission of COVID-19 in New York and San Francisco and to investigate the factors determining the severity and duration of outbreak in these two cities. In particular, we consider the role of population density, transmission rates and social distancing on the disease dynamics and outcomes. Sensitivity analysis shows that there is a strongly negative correlation between the clustering coefficient in the pairwise model and the basic reproduction number and the effective reproduction number. The shelter in place policy makes the clustering coefficient increase thereby reducing the basic reproduction number and the effective reproduction number. By switching population densities in New York and San Francisco we demonstrate how the outbreak would progress if New York had the same density as San Francisco and vice-versa. The results underscore the crucial role that population density has in the epidemic outcomes. We also show that under the assumption of no further changes in policy or transmission dynamics not lifting the shelter in place policy would have little effect on final outbreak size in New York, but would reduce the final size in San Francisco by 97%.

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/14970/Apr13-1917.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y