Grad Chat - Queen's School Of Graduate Studies

Topic: Mythical Families in Mythical Cities: Small Family Norm in India, 1955-77. Overview: I trace the emergence of India's first advocacy campaign about the nuclear family. Through it, I analyze the nuclear family's rise in metropolitan India.  The project  studies urbanization patterns with an eye on contraceptive use amongst  families. 

Topic: Gender Performance in Children's Literature and Media in the Middle East. Overview: As a writer with an MA in film production, I have explored the child’s perspective in both fiction and screenplays. For the past year, I’ve been engaged with a body of fantasy fiction where the story is told through the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The heroine strives to reconcile certain systems and doctrines in her environment with what she sees in the magical worlds that she travels to. This work brings to my attention the need for a closer look at how Arab children’s identities are shaped by the storytelling that they consume, be it offered by close loved ones or the media machine. For more information on Maram's books and short films, check out her website at https://www.maram-taibah.com/

Topic: Treating hunger: medical expertise, nutritional science, and the development of technical food solutions. Overview: I looked at how, starting with World War II until contemporary times, hunger came to be predominantly seen as a medical object, and food relief was reconceptualized as medical treatment. The scientific community's research of hunger gave it a medical connotation that influenced the way hunger was managed: from the development of technically-engineered nutrition solutions that were guided by medical expertise to making hunger relief subjected to medical supervision. A medical framework reduces hunger to a biological problem, missing the socio-cultural experience and politico-economic roots of hunger. Further, it favors fast-acting, industrialized, expert-designed, and short-term nutritional solutions. This materialized in various products starting in the 1950s until current times. In viewing hunger through a medical prism, the broader structural causes of hunger and socio-cult

Topic: The role of medicine in investigating stigmata, the (re)appearance of Christ’s Holy Wounds on various bodies, in the context of Catholic canonization procedures. Overview: Stigmata are the focus of this research as they are constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted by various groups, going all the way back to St. Francis. I am focused on 20th century stigmatics, as their lives coincide with the rise of professionalized medical organizations, as well as significant global events related to religion, secularity, and secularism (e.g. WWI & WWII, the Cold War, Vatican II reforms, etc.). Despite popular tendencies to see Catholicism and scientific, empirical inquiry as oppositional, this project shows that clinical medicine and the Catholic hierarchy cooperate and overlap in investigative approaches and how they expect stigmatic-patients to present themselves to inquiry.

Topic: The role of medicine in investigating stigmata, the (re)appearance of Christ’s Holy Wounds on various bodies, in the context of Catholic canonization procedures. Overview: Stigmata are the focus of this research as they are constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted by various groups, going all the way back to St. Francis. I am focused on 20th century stigmatics, as their lives coincide with the rise of professionalized medical organizations, as well as significant global events related to religion, secularity, and secularism (e.g. WWI & WWII, the Cold War, Vatican II reforms, etc.). Despite popular tendencies to see Catholicism and scientific, empirical inquiry as oppositional, this project shows that clinical medicine and the Catholic hierarchy cooperate and overlap in investigative approaches and how they expect stigmatic-patients to present themselves to inquiry.

Topic: Teacher acculturation in the context of sojourning overseas. Overview: While overseas teaching can offer many capacity-increasing opportunities plus a chance to see the world, there are many complicating factors that deserve greater scrutiny. For one thing, teacher turnover is higher overseas and in some schools, the rate in which teachers break their contracts is concerning. Among many challenges facing new teachers, those who go overseas to teach must additionally confront culture shock—or acculturation—as well as policyscapes.

Topic: Halloween Special - Vampires and Garlic: the Science, Literature, and Folklore of Fending off Vampirism". Overview: Why does learning more about vampires and garlic matter?

Topic: Canadian history of gay and lesbian/queer parenting. Overview: My research looks at gay parenting from the 1970's to 2005, looking at custody cases in the 1970s where a parent's, often a mothers, sexuality was raised as a potential reason for withholding custody and ending with the ways in which a symbolic child and the presumed childlessness of queer couples was raised in the House of Commons debates on same sex marriage.

Topic: Disappearance narratives in contemporary global women's literature. Overview: My research seeks to identify the social and political uses of disappearance narratives by post-war women writers. Also Carmel speaks about her podcast hyacinthpodcast.com

Topic: Why come back to graduate studies now? Overview: After a successful career as a journalist for the CBC and then a member of various United Nations departments, Jeff has come back to do a PhD. This interview will discuss why some students start their graduate life a little later in their career.

Topic: Chronic pain management in primary health care Overview: The overarching purpose of my thesis is to understand social contributors to chronic pain as well as experiences, barriers, and facilitators to inter-professional chronic pain management in primary health care.

Topic: The feminist IMPLICATIONS OF maternal and infant health promotion in turkey through the current FAMILY medicine model’s pregnancy-monitoring mandate. Overview: In my PhD research, I examined the implications of a Turkish health policy that has a national level mandate to register pregnant women from a feminist perspective. The documented objective of this program and its pregnancy-monitoring mandate is to improve the maternal and infant health rates of the country by providing prenatal medical care and pregnancy-related health-promotion education to all pregnant women.

Topic: Access to primary health care during the military to civilian transition. Overview: My research is focused on how do Canadian Veterans experience the transition from the Canadian Forces Health Services to provincial primary care during military to civilian transition and how do provincial interdisciplinary primary care teams provide service to Veterans.

Topic: Rainbow Reflections: Body Image Comics for Queer Men Overview: Stephanie and her collaborators have put together a comic book anthology. This is an exciting way to explore the consequences of body dissatisfaction to the health of queer men and to highlight the resilience that queer men experience against body dissatisfaction. A launch of the comic books is coming soon to Kingston. If you are interested and what to find out more follow Stephanie's group on the Twitter handle  @QueerBodies

Overview: Sue and Paulina discuss the "Stage 1 Cultural Resource Recording Project: Under the St. Paul’s Church Hall, Lower Burial Ground in Kingston" and how you can also get involved. See the Kingston Lower Burial Ground website for more details and how to volunteer.

Russell Turner, MSc student in Biology, supervised by Dr Vicki Frieisen. Research topic - Population genomics of an Arctic seabird, the majestic Common Eider sea duck! Christina Braybrook , MSc student in Geography, supervised by Dr Neal Scott and Dr Paul Treitz. Research topic - Modelling growing season net CO2 exchange for High Arctic mesic tundra using high resolution remote sensing data. Overview: Part 3 of the Northern Research Symposium, the graduate students assisting in the program and how their research is related to the North.

Research:  The history of the UK charity the Pilgrim Trust from 1930-1960 and its efforts to come to the "rescue of the things that mattered in our country" as a self-defined "salvage corps". Overview: Talking on both Kayla's Master's experience as well as her role now with University Relations and how her graduate experience helped her with this job.

Lila Colston-Nepali , MSc student in Biology, supervised by Dr Vicki Frieisen. Research topic - Using genomic tools to answer conservation questions in an arctic seabird, the Northern Fulmar Jacqueline Hung , PhD student in Geography, supervised by Dr Neal Scott and Dr Paul Treitz. Research topic - Seasonal controls on terrestrial carbon and nutrient cycling in the Canadian High Arctic. Overview: Part 2 of the Northern Research Symposium, the graduate students assisting in the program and how their research is related to the North.  For more information go to the Symposium website

Greg Robson , MSc student in Geography, supervised by Dr Paul Treitz and Dr Scott Lamoureux. Research topic - Risk assessment of permafrost disturbances via differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DinSAR) Dana Stephenson , MSc student in Geography, supervised by Dr Laura Thomson. Research topic - Glaciology, glacier dynamics. Overview: An introduction to the Northern Research Symposium, the graduate students assisting in the program and how their research is related to the North.  For more information go to the Symposium website

Topic: Quantifying ecosystem services to enhance the use of Natural Heritage Systems to respond to climate change. Overview: My research is focused on developing better responses to climate change within the context of land use planning. I am exploring the potential of Ontario’s Natural Heritage System (NHS) planning approach to facilitate this.