Communication and Culture

Four major discourses within the climate change are identified and explored in this paper. First and foremost, there is the scientific discourse of climate change. The prevailing themes in this discourse are complexity, uncertainty, risk, and ultimately, the authority and legitimacy of science-based policy making. Secondly, there is the economic discourse, where the climate change issue is framed in terms of the relative costs and benefits of mitigation vs. adaptation, and command-and-control approaches are compared to free market approaches. Next, there is the political discourse, characterized by issues of cooperation between States, regime formation, and international law vis-à-vis climate change, where realist conceptions of power, based on military and economic strength, are challenged by post-structuralist theories, which stress the roles of knowledge, and persuasion in international politics. Lastly, there is the ethical discourse of climate change. Here, the issue is usually framed in terms of burden sharing, rights and responsibilities, historical accountability, and ability to pay. While it is possible to understand each of these discourses in isolation, the analysis undertaken here critically examines each of these discourses in detail and explores the connections between them. Two key findings emerge from the analysis. Firstly, there is the recognition that a purely objective analysis of the climate change issue is neither possible, nor desirable. Secondly, each of the four discourses are intimately connected to one another; thus, the science of climate change cannot be divorced from the political context in which it is deployed, just as economic analyses of the issue cannot be understood without also considering the ethical dimensions of the various assumptions involved in any such analyses.

Political communication and public discourse W hen the Harris Conservatives introduced their "Common Sense Revolution" (CSR) in the months before the 1995 election, they intended not only to change the nature of election campaigns in Ontario but of governance as well. These changes involved not only major policy changes-restructuring health care, education, and local government, not to mention reducing the rights of unions, and proposing balanced budget and referendum legislation-but also changes in the nature of political communication and public discourse in the province. The 1999 campaign and the nature of the government's political communication in their second mandate suggest that they are succeeding. The shift from consensus-based politics to a polarized discourse may well be permanent. Certainly, election campaigns are unlikely to be the civilized affairs of earlier decades, where the governing party rarely mentioned the names of the other party leaders. Indeed, the Conservatives ran in 1999 as if they were in opposition.

This dissertation aims to excavate the narrative of educational programming at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) from 1960 to 2016. The producers and creative staff of Studio Gthe epicentre of educational programming at the NFB for over thirty yearsproduced extraordinarily diverse and innovative multimedia for the classroom. 'Multimedia' is here understood as any media form that was not film, including filmstrips, slides, overhead projecturals, laserdiscs and CDs. To date, there have been no attempts to document the history of educational programming at the NFB generally, nor to situate the history of Studio G within that tradition. Over the course of five years, I have interviewed thirty-four NFB technicians, administrators, producers and directors in the service of creating a unique collective narrative tracing the development of educational media and programming at the NFB over the past fiftysix years and began to piece together an archive of work that has largely been forgotten. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that the forms of media engagement pioneered by Studio G and its descendants fostered a desire for, and eventually an expectation for specific media affordances, namely the ability to sequence or navigate media content, to pace one's progress through media, to access media on demand and to modify media content. As new waves of mediated practices emerge throughout the time-period here covered, the complex interconnections between media innovation and pedagogical practice are revealed to be deeply interwoven within the political, social and economic pressures of particular historical moments. The first of these waves focuses on the media produced by Studio G primarily during the tumultuous 1960s to the mid-1980s. The second wave (early-1980s to mid-1990s) marks the shifts in practices and social expectations with the rise of the PC computer. The third wave (mid-1990s to 2004) recognizes yet another shift as Internet technologies and the privileging of iii consumer expectation eclipsed what were by then seen as dated practices. In the fourth wave (2004 to 2016), the NFB's focus on interactivity is co-opted as a strategy of audience engagement in an ever-more competitive media landscape. The four affordances are realized to a greater and lesser degree in each of these waves. The narrative of the NFB's production of educational multimedia provides an ideal lens through which to identify and more deeply understand the nuanced and complex intra-action between technology, practice and society in which the interface is revealed to be far from neutral. iv DEDICATION With gratitude to my parents, who did not live to see this milestone reached, but whose support and encouragement made it possible. They would have been delighted, of this, I am sure. With apologies to my children, Matthew, Jessica, Cody, Kieran and Quinton, who grew up with a mother who must have seemed always to be buried in books or on the computer. You are, and always have been what I have cherished most in life. vi

Landscape of a Dream, was an unusual departure from these themes of action, dominance and victory. Instead, the Vancouver performance seemed to unfold in an imaginary landscape, with an emphasis on stillness and silence. The performance featured subjects

The title of this talk suggests that I will be examining the role-playing genre in gaming, and after a slightly circuitous route I will indeed get there. First, I have to spend some time elsewhere -a side quest, if you'll allow the abuse of a pun. The idea for this paper comes from the commonlyexperienced reality that there is never enough time to complete all that we want to finish in life. Now that I have begun to study gaming, I am noticing that my use of time is following the precedent of my experience with cinema studies. Namely, the more that I study the medium, the less time that I can dedicate to the source texts themselves. In retrospect, my mother was warning me of this trend when throughout my childhood she told me that I was wasting time playing videogames. Bodies are bound in time, even when they are engaged in subjectivities which expand or contract the sense of time passing.

Videogames stand at the vanguard of critiques into the hybrid identities produced by human interaction with technology. Many game fictions motivate players by invoking a messianic complex as foundational to their activities in the game. Almost universally, digital game players are tasked with saving their avatar, and often the game world around them, from destruction by a force which can only be countered by player activity. In addition to the survival of the player's avatar at a 'formal' level (the continuation of gameplay), most games involve key 'narrative' tasks which players must accomplish in order to counter threats to the safety of their game avatar and restore or maintain 'order' in the fictional world in which they play: characters must be saved, enemies need to be overcome, political systems representing the transcendence of a specific moral authority need protection from corrupting or revolutionary influences, or a transcendent goal will be reached by the player's avatar. These elements constitute the realization of a utopic state predicated simultaneously by the game fiction and the rules of play which in tandem interpellates and binds the player to their avatar.