Strategies and Resources for Integrated Community Sustainability Planning in St. Paul’s, NL

Under the Federal Gas Tax Agreement, Canadian municipalities are required to complete an Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP) by March, 2010. Integration and sustainability are two key concepts that have become the foundation of recent models for community planning. The purpose of such planning is to provide a broad, long‐term plan for a community that will help it maximize economic and social benefits, without depleting the environmental resources upon which community members depend. Like many coastal communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, St. Paul’s is currently facing many challenges to future sustainability. The town also has opportunities to develop linkages between its many assets in order to build a stronger community. This document discusses some of these challenges and opportunities in the context of integrated community sustainability planning. The document also includes strategies and resources that St. Paul’s, and other, similar coastal communities can use to develop linkages between community assets

Private Military Companies, Peacekeeping, and African States: A Critical Analysis of PMCs in Peacekeeping Operations in Africa

Access to the full-text thesis is no longer available at the author's request, due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Access removed on 29.11.2016 by CS (TIS).Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/297) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).This thesis analyses critically the hypothesis that Private Military Companies (PMCs) are a viable option for direct involvement in UN peacekeeping missions in African states. The involvement of PMCs in the affairs of states is a controversial and divisive issue, but since the end of the Cold War, they have become increasingly involved in the security structures of African states, and in post-conflict reform of such structures. They have also become involved in tasks related to commercial activities central to the political economies of African states. Indeed, Africa was the theatre in which PMCs evolved from an opportunist phenomenon that emerged in response to rapid change in the security situation, to become part of the emerging post-Cold War political economy. In the 1990s, PMCs undertook operations in Angola and Sierra Leone that brought about situations where warring factions were compelled to negotiate settlements. While the response of the international community was predominantly one of condemnation of their involvement, others pointed out that operations conducted by PMCs had been remarkably swift and inexpensive in bringing violent conflict to an end, in contrast to those conducted by the UN in African states. PMCs’ involvement in peacekeeping operations is becoming increasingly relevant; they have been involved in every major UN peacekeeping mission since 1990, and have carried out tasks spanning a wide range of UN functions. In 1995, Christopher Bellamy speculated that the UN might augment their numbers with private soldiers. While this was dismissed at the time, it is a concept that continues to resurface when the UN has difficulty finding sufficient adequately trained troops for its peacekeeping missions. This thesis investigates the hypothesis that PMCs are a viable option, in practical, political, legal, economic and moral terms, for involvement in such missions

A Prose Reverie for Charles Baudelaire

As a child of popular culture, it seems fitting that my long-delayed appreciation of Charles Baudelaire began in front of a television screen. Every Halloween since childhood, I ritualistically set myself before the TV to re-watch the first ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode of The Simpsons, which offers an affectionate parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s sombre poem ‘The Raven’ (1845). Electronic images of the cartoon raven, relentlessly repeating the eerie word ‘Nevermore’, ingrained themselves on my young mind, which was completely oblivious to the show’s overt satire. Astride the bust of Pallas, the raven’s cartoon utterances seemed both strange and beguiling, containing an unsettling symbolism I couldn’t understand. After continual nagging, my parents finally relented and bought me a collection of Poe’s works containing this mysterious narrative. That small, mass-produced edition of Poe’s stories and poems, bound in cheap red cloth, its pages tipped with artificial gold, still sits on my shelf, gathering dust until the darker months, when I routinely re-read my favourites: ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), and, of course, ‘The Raven’

Narrative, Context, and Conversion: An Application of Paul Ricoeur\u27s Theory of Narrative to the New Catholic Evangelization in the Postconciliar United States

The New Evangelism, a term popularized by Paul VI and a primary concern of John Paul II, articulates the Catholic Church\u27s reply to the appeal of the Council Fathers for renewed gospel proclamation in the modern age. Theology observes copious permutations of the New Evangelism, and these competing narratives cover a variety of perspectives. My project explores the question of the New Evangelism\u27s meaning within United States Catholicism amidst its various interpretations by applying Paul Ricoeur\u27s theory of narrative to this multiplicity of configurations. Ricoeur\u27s theory actually anticipated the contemporary situation: as new interpretations challenged sedimentation, multiple reconfigurations of the Church\u27s call to proclaim were the inevitable result, in light of story\u27s power upon human imagination. In the reciprocal dialectic between historical consciousness and personal identity, story informs each and is informed by each--an epistemological circle which allows for multiple reconfigurations when narratives engage imagination. My application of Ricoeur\u27s theory will indicate that theology is not about the New Evangelism so much as it is about New Evangelisms, and that the Church may embrace a breathing room for multiple voices without losing herself to the vacuum of relativism nor to the suffocation of autocracy

Art, Androgyny, and the Femme Fatale in Decadent Fictions of the Nineteenth Century

This thesis offers a reappraisal of the recurring figure of the femme fatale within Decadent art and literature of the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of studies concerning the femme fatale, most notably within genres such as Film Noir and Romanticism, the Decadent femme fatale has often been relegated to a single chapter or footnote within these studies. It is here the purpose of this thesis to rectify this critical disregard. Combining multiple disciplines (literature, aesthetics, history, mythology and psychology) each of the four chapters of this thesis will locate the femme fatale within nineteenth-century European Decadent texts as represented as a specific objet d’art: the haunted portrait, the corpse-doll, the fragmented sculpture, and the mutilated and/or sculpted body of the androgyne. Invoking Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, the influence and trajectory of each chapter’s respective femme fatale will be traced from the midnineteenth century through to the fin de siècle. By tracing the lineage of the aesthetic impression made by French Decadent writers of the mid-nineteenth century (such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire) upon subsequent French and British writers and artists of the latenineteenth century (such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Rachilde, and Vernon Lee), this thesis interrogates how the re/construction and usage of the Decadent femme fatale was utilized as a means of exploring ulterior philosophies of classical beauty and a fluid range of forbidden sexualities, including androgyny and homoeroticism. Offering interdisciplinary readings of the nineteenth-century Decadent femme fatale, this thesis shows the different ways in which nineteenth-century Decadent writers and artists move beyond the femme fatale’s malevolence, though without losing sight of it, to explore the mysterious relationships between life and death, art and artifice, pleasure and pain, and the seen and unseen

Uptake and degradation of atrazine utilizing phytoremediation technology with switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)

The goal of this thesis research was to determine the capacity of switchgrass to degrade atrazine. The major objectives were as follows: (1) to characterize the ability of above-ground leaf material of switchgrass to take up atrazine from sand, (2) to quantify the amount of degradation occurring in the leaf biomass, (3) to quantify the amount of degradation occurring in the rhizosphere, (4) and to evaluate the uptake and degradation of atrazine in older switchgrass plants to get a better understanding of what could be expected in a field remediation study. To accomplish these objectives, atrazine was applied to soils, and its fate was monitored in laboratory and greenhouse phytoremediation settings. At the end of the respective test periods, soil and the grass tissues were evaluated for quantification and identification of atrazine and three selected metabolites