The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification

This dissertation investigates how secondary school students understand their own gendered subjectivity and the discursive and material processes that contribute to it through visual artifacts (photovoice projects) the students created of school washroom spaces. Drawing primarily on Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary space and the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), I view the washroom space as producing and perpetuating gendered power relations that invert, suspect, or neutralize those existing in exterior spaces. Deploying both a Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics, these visual student responses are framed as confessional, queering or (de)subjugating (Stryker, 2006) and cartographic products, and hence, understood in terms of the insights they provide into the complex practices of self-constitution and gender subjectivities. Furthermore, through Britzman’s (1998) queer reading practice and critical readings of voice, the analysis of these queer and cartographic products hopes to offer further insight into how these washroom spaces as sex-segregated and unsupervised are lived and understood by students as highly regulated and inciting self-policing strategies upon all gendered bodies. Through Foucault’s other frameworks of power/knowledge and technologies of self and power, combined with Butler’s work on gender performativity, the abject and gender as bodily matters, I am concerned with how gendered subjects not only are produced in schools, but also how they are capable of resistances to gendered norms through practices of the self, in the interest of pursuing democratic gendered relations that have implications for burgeoning transgender accommodation policies and more nuanced anti-gender violence policies in school boards and Ministries of Education

Gender Fluidity and Youth: Examining the Space In Between

This thesis examines youth’s engagement with gender fluidity or variance through their observations of gender expression. It draws on feminist, queer and transgender theories to highlight important issues about the impact of gender binaries and regulation of gender expression on youth in secondary schools. A qualitative methodological approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was used to select a group of students interested in talking about gender variance in one secondary school in South Western Ontario. Data collection included focus group interviews, individual interviews, writing responses, and drawing responses. The research found that students ranged in their negotiations of gender binaries from resistance to acceptance. Students articulated their ideological position through a reflection on stories about embodied gender and gender regulatory practices. The research contributes to a necessary ongoing discourse about gender variance in schools. It encourages student voice and asks for educational policy to include a competency about gender variance

A New Palaeolithic Giant Handaxe from Britain: Initial Results from Excavations at Maritime Academy, Medway, Kent

This paper will present initial results from excavations at Maritime Academy, Frindsbury which produced several handaxes, two of which can be classed as ‘giant handaxes’. Artefacts were recovered from fluvial deposits in the Medway Valley and are thought to date from the Marine Isotope Stage 9 interglacial. This paper will focus on the largest of these handaxes and will present metrical data for the artefact and initial comparison with similar artefacts from the British Palaeolithic

Shadows and Light Pursuing Gender Justice through Students' Photovoice Projects of the Washroom Space

This paper derives from a larger study examining the gendered striations embedded in school washrooms but focuses on two photovoice projects that explore the implications for student understanding and subjectivation.  Thematically linked through elements of lightness and darkness, I examine these photographs through the theoretical frameworks of the closet (Brown, 2000), the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), as well as Foucault’s (1975) disciplinary space which position them as material precursors to the issues of exposure and vulnerability for all gendered bodies in the space of the public school sex-segregated washroom.  As a queer methodology, or pedagogy, photovoice values student knowledge and pursues a social justice agenda

Optical limits in Left-Handed Media

This thesis determines the response of Left-Handed Media (LHM) to surface effects. A LHM half-space with a roughened interface, modelled by a graded index boundary, is shown to give rise to an analytical solution for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through this inhomogeneous layer. Significant field localization is generated within the layer, caused by the coherent superposition of evanescent waves. The localization is shown to greatly deteriorate transmission when losses are present. The addition of a second interface to the LHM, creating a perfect lens configuration, allows for the exploration of evanescent mode propagation through a perfect lens with roughened boundaries. The effects of the field localisations at the boundaries serves to diminish the resolving capability of the lens. Specifically the layers produce an effect that is qualitatively similar to nonlinearly enhanced dissipation. Ray-optics is used to analyse negative refraction through a roughened interface, prescribed by Gaussian statistics. This shows that rays can focus at smaller distances from the interface due to the negative refractive effects. Moreover, a new reflection mechanism is shown to exist for LHM. Consequently an impedance matched configuration involving LHM (such as the perfect lens) with a roughened interface can still display reflection. A physical-optics approach is used to determine the mean intensity and fluctuations of a wave passing into a half-space of LHM through a roughened interface in two ways. Firstly through the perturbation analysis of Rice theory which shows that the scattered field evolves from a real Gaussian process near the surface into a complex Gaussian process as distance into the second media increases. Secondly through large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations that show that illuminating a roughened interface between air and a LHM produces a regime for enhanced focussing of light close to the boundary, generating caustics that are brighter, fluctuate more, and cause Gaussian speckle at distances closer to the interface than in right-handed matter

Investigation of pre-structured GaAs surfaces for subsequent site-selective InAs quantum dot growth

In this study, we investigated pre-structured (100) GaAs sample surfaces with respect to subsequent site-selective quantum dot growth. Defects occurring in the GaAs buffer layer grown after pre-structuring are attributed to insufficient cleaning of the samples prior to regrowth. Successive cleaning steps were analyzed and optimized. A UV-ozone cleaning is performed at the end of sample preparation in order to get rid of remaining organic contamination

Hydrogen sensors based on electrophoretically deposited Pd nanoparticles onto InP

Electrophoretic deposition of palladium nanoparticles prepared by the reverse micelle technique onto InP substrates is addressed. We demonstrate that the substrate pre-deposition treatment and the deposition conditions can extensively influence the morphology of the deposited palladium nanoparticle films. Schottky diodes based on these films show notably high values of the barrier height and of the rectification ratio giving evidence of a small degree of the Fermi level pinning. Moreover, electrical characteristics of these diodes are exceptionally sensitive to the exposure to gas mixtures with small hydrogen content