ASTU 100

During the course of ASTU 100A we have analyzed the genre of auto/biographies to identify their capacity to influence the audience’s perspective of the author, and in turn the group they are a part of. Auto/biographies are able to do important work in giving agency to marginalized groups by allowing members to write back to the “hegemonic scripts” which are imposed when discussing marginalized groups by dominate groups in society (Couser 33). This dominate way of discussing marginalized groups perpetuates and reinforces prominent stereotypes, resulting in a “framed view” of…read more

  The establishment and operation of Indian Residential Schools is one of the darkest moments in Canadian history. Over “150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to attend” these schools throughout the twentieth century which were set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches (Perkel). The aim of these schools was to assimilate aboriginal children into the predominate Euro-Canadian culture. This was done by removing them from their community and forcing them to attended isolated boarding schools where they were unable to speak their own language…read more

Archives can be used as a tool to share information about topics that are “omitted from the public memory” of a nation (The Eugenics Living Archives of Canada Team). One such topic for Canada is its inhumane and horrific policies and practices regarding eugenics. According to Robert A. Wilson, eugenics can be defined as “use of science for human improvement over generations… through favouring the reproduction of certain sorts or kinds of people”, while not allowing certain people (most often members of minority) to reproduce (The Eugenics Living Archives of…read more

In the article “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing marginality in News Discourse” Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young use frame analysis to investigate media representation of marginalized groups. They do so by studying five years’ worth of newspaper reports about the missing women from Vancouver’s downtown east side. Through their corpus study, Jiwani and Young found that the media reported on these women, most of whom were Aboriginal sex workers, was organized in a way that promoted the hegemonic discourse that the public, was accustomed to. This portrayal held the…read more

The detrimental effects of a “single story” — the one sided account of an event — is evident in the portrayal of a suffering country by Western media. As Chimadmanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, explains in her 2009 TED talks “there is danger in every” “single story,” as it can create misconceptions with devastating impacts on the West’s perception of third world countries. Adichie depicts how repeatedly showing “people as one thing, [ultimately changes the way people perceive them and that] is what they become,” through her examples of…read more

The stigma that surrounds disability typically revolves around physical impairments which are visible to the public. We as a society label someone as disabled when they have obvious handicap aids such as a wheel chair or prosthetics; however, by defining disabilities as something that needs to be visible we are ignoring the millions of people living with invisible disabilities. The Invisible Disability Association (a foundation aimed at raising awareness of invisible disabilities) defines invisible disability as impairing symptoms that are not always distinguishable to an onlooker. These symptoms could include…read more

The time commitment that reading a book requires can seem daunting; therefore, the process of choosing a book is important. This is where the influence of paratext becomes evident. Paratext, as Dr. McNeil quoted from Whitlock’s “Introduction: Word’s made Flesh” are “features that surround and cover the text”.  As Smith and Watson explain using Ginette’s concept of paratext in “Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives” the discussion around the book, including but not limited to online reviews and critics, is called epitext (100). The epitext helps to form…read more

Rigoberta Menchu gives voice to an otherwise invisible culture. Prior to the publication of her biography, very few people understood the difficulties that the Indian and poor population of Guatemala had suffered under. Guatemala had a history of taking advantage of the Indians. For example after the 1871 revolution, the government of Justo Rufino Barrios created laws to force the Indigenous people to work for nearly nothing in coffee plantations (Martínez Peláez). These plantations were owned by European settlers who treated the Indians poorly. This exploitation continued when Lucas Garcia…read more

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