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photo of Kacie Hopkins

Kacie Hopkins

Kacie Hopkins

Tell us about your research
Kacie uses an intersectional feminist lens to study pedagogy around women’s empowerment in rural communities. She has studied communities in rural Appalachian America, Grand Bahama, and will soon study rural Canadian communities. She has worked closely with women artisans to discuss the collaboration of art, social change and story. She has also looked at neoliberal capitalism’s impacts on rural communities and evaluated forms of power and control as they relate to an individual’s personal relationships and one’s relationship with society.

Research Interest
Rural pedagogy, narratives of women’s empowerment and social justice in women’s advocacy, storytelling on new media, documentary film, feminist movements, and neoliberalism

Esther Sampson

Tell us about your research
My research thesis examines a specific collection of intercultural book covers to address issues of postcolonialism, cultural identity, representation, and ideology, drawing on Social Semiotics/Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), cultural studies, and Gérard Genette’s work on Paratexts. More specifically, my thesis applies MDA and du Gay et al.’s cultural circuits, to the analysis of the covers of culturally Western, English translations of the Japanese self-help book, "The Courage to be Disliked", by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. My thesis focuses on the ideologies and representations that are conveyed thorough the covers of the books, with special interest in the potential for pernicious ideologies and representations to be perpetuated, as emphasized by the books statuses as translated books.

Research Interest
cultural artifacts, social semiotics/multimodal discourse analysis, cross-cultural book covers, identity, representation, diaspora, Other, Orientalism, ideologies, culturally Western English translations of Japanese self-help books, self-help book covers

composite image of different book covers

The Courage to be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga.

photo of Davis Valessi

Davis Valessi

Davis Valessi

Tell us about your research
I am interested in developing connections between the communicative landscape and the political/electoral process in Canada. My doctoral dissertation, "Trudeau Squared" entails a comparative analysis of the 1968 and 2019 federal elections, intended to illustrate how the technological or material qualities of communication mediums influence the ways that voters are politically informed.

Research Interest
journalism, democracy, elections, citizenship, public opinion, newspapers, digital media, public sphere, surveillance capitalism, privacy

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