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Sociology Unlocked
Sara Cumming
This engaging new introduction presents sociological concepts in easy-to-understand, relatable, and practical terms - with just the right amount of depth. Featuring an authentic narrative writing style, real-world examples and activities, and extensive pedagogical tools, Sociology Unlocked is your students' key to understanding sociology.
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Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020
Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch has reinvented the “new and selected.” Bringing together the very best of his poetry from the last quarter century with new and never-before-published works, Shared Universe is a sprawling chronicle of the dawn of civilizations, the riddles of 21st-century existence, and any number of glorious, or menacing, futures. Selected poetry collections are traditionally organized according to the books in which the poems first appeared, but these poems are arranged by prophecy and mythos, corresponding to the human (or trans-human) body, or as dictated by animal speech. In this universe, time is thematic instead of chronological, and space is aesthetic rather than voluminous. Here, alongside popular favourites, are recently unearthed gems and visionary new poems that reveal the books hidden within the books of one of Canada’s most distinctive and imaginative poets.
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The Musicality of Canadian Cinema
Michael Brendan Baker
This chapter offers a narrative account of music in Canadian cinema that highlights the contributions of its pioneers. Case studies spanning the critically acclaimed, the curious, and the marginalized allow for an effort to flesh out the place of music, particularly popular music, in this national cinema. While the esthetics and dollars-and-cents of music in film may be similar in Canada as elsewhere, the expectations of filmmakers and audiences are perhaps uniquely Canadian as a result of industrial and institutional forces. Animation, the avant-garde, and documentary are particularly vibrant spaces for the innovative use of music and differentiate the history of music in Canadian cinema from other more commercially oriented contexts.
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It’s Such a Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: A Genealogy of the Music Mockumentary
Michael Brendan Baker and Peter Lester
Recognized primarily for its commercial breakthrough, Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (USA, 1984), the music mockumentary genre comprises dozens of films addressing a range of musical styles and performers in comedic ways. This chapter presents a genealogy of the music mockumentary, detailing its successes, limits, and potential in the contemporary history of film and television comedy. Styled primarily upon the rockumentary genre, the basic premise of the music mockumentary is comedic engagement with the world of popular music through satire, farce, or parody, using the representational strategies of nonfiction. The format leverages the audience’s knowledge of the codes and conventions of the rockumentary genre and, more generally, those of popular music, to establish and deliver its comedic premise.
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COMM 19999: Essential Communication Skills
Julie Warkentin and Jonathan Filipovic
This open educational resource textbook provides Sheridan students with the foundational information and skills necessary to be successful in diploma-level programs. The book integrates customized Sheridan-centred content, including information on academic resources available on campus and customized readings that reflect the cross-disciplinary work of Sheridan programs, students, and faculty. With a focus on writing and research skills for both academic and professional contexts, the COMM 19999 course text is a valuable resource for students as they transition from post-secondary studies into their chosen fields.
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Intuition, reason, and creativity: An integrative dual-process perspective
Nathaniel Barr
Long before psychology was a science, creativity was seen in many cultures as an essentially important yet difficult to understand aspect of human experience. Throughout history, to account for the mysterious inception of novel and useful ideas, appeals have often been made to supernatural forces and divine intervention. Decades ago, as psychology first began to approach, in earnest, the study of creativity from a scientific perspective, the perception that creativity was enigmatic persisted, with the construct being identified as amongst “the vaguest, most ambiguous, and most confused terms in psychology” (Ausubel, 1964, p. 344). Recent years have seen increasing amounts of research in the psychological literature aimed at understanding the nature of creative thought, yet this increased attention has done little to rectify the longstanding difficulty in characterizing the true nature of creative thought. At the global level, creativity studies has been described as fractionated, with researchers from diverse academic disciplines and subfields of psychology, such as social, cognitive, and industrial/organizational areas, having little convergence in the way they approach the study of creativity (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Empirical exploration and theoretical development seems to exist within silos, and the opinion of some leading researchers diverges little from Ausubel’s (1964) characterization, with contemporary research having been described as “murky but plentiful” (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010, p. 576). Confusion abounds within more local issues as well, with a particularly glaring inconsistency appearing in the cognitive literature regarding the extent to which executive cognition aids or hinders the creative process (e.g., Barr, Pennycook, Stolz, & Fugelsang, 2015; Smeekens & Kane, 2016). The current chapter considers this local issue – the relative contribution of executive processing – in light of increasing amounts of evidence that reason is important in many types of creative thinking. Importantly, it is argued that such findings are not contradictory to results that find analytic thinking can hinder creative thought, nor are they in conflict with work that illuminates the importance of associative processing in insight problem solving. Rather, such evidence constitutes complementary qualifications surrounding a nuanced and dynamic psychological construct. Through consideration of the evidence surrounding the interaction of autonomous and controlled thinking in diverse forms of creativity, and the sorts of theoretical models required to account for such evidence, suggestions are made for how to conceptualize creativity more globally, with an eye for unifying some of the broader challenges faced by the study of creativity as a whole. Thus, this chapter has several aims. First, it reviews the growing evidence implicating a central role of analytic thinking in certain types of creative thinking and considers the implications for local debates surrounding the utility of executive engagement in creative thought. It is concluded that different sorts of creative thinking require varying degrees of executive engagement and that more local theories of specific sorts of creative thinking are required. It is then argued that conceiving of this local issue from this perspective has implications for the sorts of broad conceptual frameworks that should be used to describe creative thought across subfields. In particular, it is suggested that researchers ought to adopt a metatheoretical model that can account for the dynamic exchange between autonomous and controlled processing and the way that these modes of thought connect to generative and evaluative content in diverse contexts. To satisfy these requirements, creativity is argued to be best considered in the context of a broader dual-process meta-theoretical framework of human thinking, which has been explicated in the reasoning and decision-making literatures (cf., Evans & Stanovich, 2013). It is suggested that an important aspect of clarifying the nature of creative thinking is to strive for common conceptual language and frameworks across subfields wherever reasonable and feasible (see Silvia, 2014). The benefits of adopting such a perspective within the study of creativity are discussed, as are the positive implications for greater cross-pollination across reasoning and creativity research.
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Why Reason Matters: Connecting Research on Human Reason to the Challenges of the Anthropocene
Nathaniel Barr and Gordon Pennycook
The capacity to reason has improved the life of human beings in innumerable ways through the innovations it has wrought and the experiences it affords. Culture, art, music, literature, science, and engineering are all products of reason that enrich our collective experience and well-being. Although these benefits are intuitively apparent, a reflective analysis reveals that the same advances that better our lives also have come to threaten them. George Miller famously made this observation in his 1969 APA address, arguing that the “most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. … They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions” (p. 1063). This chapter aims to unpack this assertion by mapping the relations between human reason, innovation, and some of the biggest obstacles to the continued success of the human species. A review of contemporary societal and environmental problems in the context of modern reasoning research and applications of behavioural science reveals much in the way of interconnection. Reason is intimately bound to both the causes of and solutions to modern risks like climate change and large-scale conflict. In this chapter we argue that the empirical study of how we think, what we believe, and how we behave, and the practical application of lessons from such research, have the potential to play an important role in how we address our most threatening global problems. The study of morality, cooperation, creativity, belief formation, and how thinking relates to technology are identified as particularly pressing areas for researchers and practitioners to focus upon. It is argued that the pursuit of advancing and applying reasoning research must be elevated from an important area of psychological research to an urgent matter of global priority. In light of the strong ties between thinking, beliefs, and behaviours of relevance to large-scale challenges, the study of human reasoning and its application holds a particularly potent position in our navigation of the novel risks we now face. To survive and flourish, we must study human reason and apply what we learn to how we live our lives.
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When Are Students Ready Enough? Issues and Dilemmas Around Assessment of L2 Writers in a WAC Program
Hee-Seung Hee-Seung
This vignette chapter reflects on the complexities surrounding assessment of L2 writers in a WAC program. As Director of ESL Writing Program working with disciplinary faculty, the author observes that faculty members’ expectations for L2 writers vary, and as a result, faculty assessment practices differ. Some faculty were uncertain how to respond and accurately evaluate L2 writers’ writing while being equitable to other students. When L1 standard was used to assess L2 writers, those writers were often perceived as deficient or problematic. This chapter ends with suggestions on how faculty can design equitable and inclusive writing assessment for L2 writers.
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Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy
Paul Vermeersch
It is the Third Millennium. The 20th century is a memory. Humans no longer walk on the moon. Passenger planes no longer fly at supersonic speeds. Disinformation overwhelms the legitimate news. The signs of our civilization’s demise are all around us, but hope is not lost. In these poems, you will find a map through our dystopia and protection from all manner of monsters, both natural and human made. Only the products of our imaginations — buildings and movies, daydreams and wondrous machines — can show us how to transform our lives. Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy is a survival guide for the Dark Age that lies ahead.
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The Sheridan Notebook
Brandon McFarlane, Kristine Villeneuve, and Devin Murray
The Sheridan Notebook is an integral component to a series of studies that seek to better understand (1) the impact of adult colouring on creativity and mindfulness, and (2) the educational potential of adult colouring. A growing volume of research suggests there is a noteworthy connection between mindfulness and creativity: mindful individuals through presence, openness, acceptance, and self-inquiry are able to adopt many perspectives and pursue multiple solutions when solving problems—characteristics held by highly creative and innovative individuals.
This book synthesizes adult colouring with the “In and Out” note-taking technique—developed at the International Center for Studies in Creativity—to provide students with a novel way to develop their mindfulness skills in the classroom and beyond. Colouring promises to enhance mindfulness while the note-taking strategy deepens learning and retention of course material.
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Martin Scorsese and the Music Documentary
Michael Brendan Baker
A Companion to Martin Scorsese comprises original essays by prominent scholars on the career of filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The essays examine Scorsese's work within the history of American and world cinema, his work in relation to auteur theory, and his use of popular music, as well as examining Scorsese's use of themes such as violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, and race.
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Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something
Paul Vermeersch
Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something — Paul Vermeersch’s fifth collection of poetry — is, as its title suggests, a lyrical meditation on written language and the end of civilization. It combines centos, glosas, erasures, text collage, and other forms to imagine a post-apocalyptic literature built, or rebuilt, from the rubble of the texts that came before.
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Who’s on the Home Front? Canadian Masculinity in the NFB’s Second World War Series “Canada Carries On”
Michael Brendan Baker
A study of the National Film Board of Canada's World War II film series in terms of its demonstration of assumed cultural values regarding identity, agency, and "manliness" in the context of the NFB's wartime nation-building project.
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Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada
Michael Brendan Baker, Thomas Waugh, and Ezra Winton
Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada examines the ambitious initiative "Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle" that brought together the unlikely partners of government bureaucrats, documentary filmmakers, community activists, and "ordinary" citizens. Launched in 1967 by the National Film Board of Canada and several government agencies with the primary goal of addressing poverty in Canada through the production and dissemination of documentary cinema, the objective was to engender social change through media. This edited collection studies dozens of films produced by the program, their themes, aesthetics, and politics, and evaluates their legacy and the program's place in Canadian, Québécois, and world cinema.
Michael Brendan Baker contributed to the Introduction, "Forty Years Later… a Space for Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle" that summarizes the NFB's Challenge for Change initiative, the origins of the book project, and the legacy of Canadian activist documentary in the contemporary moment. He is the author of the essay, "The Curious Case of Wilf: Popular Music in Canadian Documentary," in which he provides an in-depth examination of the single film, Wilf (1968), using textual analysis, archival research, and interviews to illustrate the curious place this work occupies within the CFC program and the central role played by music in the project.
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The Reinvention of the Human Hand
Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the acclaimed author of Burn, The Fat Kid, and Between the Walls. Vermeersch has always gone in search of understanding. Now his discoveries speak of a human world exhausted by its divorce from an animal past, terrified of retreating into early places it never truly left, astonished by the forgotten possibilities disclosed there.
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Between the Walls
Paul Vermeersch
Paul Vermeersch examines the forces that divide us and isolate us as individuals in both the natural and man-made worlds, at the moments when those worlds intersect, and in the places where we live and work. During a violent row between teenage boys, a starling explodes like a hand grenade. A clutter of inbred cats plays out the rise and fall of mankind in a secluded country barn. While driving his girlfriend home, a young man is forced to alter the course of his future by the sudden appearance of a plague of toads. And in the harrowing final sequence, we are taken on a tour through a fragile city verging on its own ruin. As fantastic as they are visceral, these poems shed new light on our darkest corners and take us deep between the walls, those that are thrust up before us as well as those of our own making.
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The Fat Kid
Paul Vermeersch
Poetry kills the beautiful people. The Fat Kid, Paul Vermeersch’s second full-length collection of poetry, chronicles a childhood troubled by obesity, poor body image, and low self-esteem. The media’s perfect faces, societal expectations, family concerns, and primitive socialization rituals collide with the already horrendous physical and emotional tribulations of adolescence to drive Calvin Little over the edge. He’ll stop at nothing to become beautiful and weightless, but he must conceal his battle with what the world has come to know as a girl’s disease. Is there redemption in social acceptance, in romantic love, in escaping gravity? Is it enough to learn to love yourself? Calvin’s journey is told in a sequence of poems steeped in both the physical and psychological worlds, in voices that range from the bawdy to the elegiac. In The Fat Kid Calvin Little becomes the ideal antihero — for a shallow culture obsessed with thin.
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Burn
Paul Vermeersch
Accessible and finely honed, as obsessed with the possibility of words as with emotion, Paul Vermeersch’s poems engage and fire and etch their way in — way down deep. Burn mixes spit and sweat and flakes of lye to scar intricate and beautiful patterns in the shapes of animals, friends, family. In Burn, the dark moments of childhood contrast with the epiphanies and horrors which attend illness and death. Sex, too, insinuates and asserts itself. And after Vermeersch’s conflagration nothing remains untouched.
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