Founding Figures

Pictured here from left to right are: Premier John Robarts, Mrs. Grover Egertor of the Allanburg Women's Institute, the woman who first came up with the idea of forming a University in the Niagara Region, Mrs. Bearss, the former chairwoman of the Women's Institute when the project was proposed, and Dr. Arthur A. Schmon, chairman of the Founder's Committee. This photo was taken at a dinner in Niagara Falls in 1963 that marked the official launch of the Brock University Project.

Entering Youthwork Through Love's Many Pathways: A Poetic Rendition

Entering Youth work Through Love's Many Pathways is a text that wanders and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry and a Spinozist and Sufi framework, the concepts of immanence, love and becoming can be explored. This thesis is framed as a walk through which the researcher / youth worker along with the reader, traverses through five pathways that she considers necessary in cultivating a meaningful relationship with the youth: opening, strength, listening, trust and unconditional compassion. By means of engaging the “self”, this thesis approaches youth work as a field that is relational and socially interconnected. In this sense, this poetic inquiry seeks to rupture predictable patterns of behaviour. One of the ways I do this is through found poetry. Through this specific form of poetic inquiry, I bring together various voices, an assemblage – Rumi, Rilke, Whitman, Lalla, Mirabai and Song of Songs – in order to find my voice and by extension, to help the youth find their voice through a human connection that goes beyond colour, race, gender etc. In other words, my aim is to actualize the experiences of becoming youth worker while being in a field of immanence where similarities are understood and differences respected. My hope is that this project may offer an example of understanding, celebration, and engagement of our mutual differences, while still being able to relate to one another through the many pathways of love.

Blocking Top-down awareness of Kanizsa Figures: An ERP Investigation into Bottom-up Processing of Illusory Contours

Neural models of the processing of illusory contour (ICs) diverge from one another in terms of their emphasis on bottom-up versus top-down constituents. The current study uses a dichoptic fusion paradigm to block top-down awareness of ICs in order to examine possible bottom-up effects. Group results indicate that the N170 ERP component is particularly sensitive to ICs at central occipital sites when top-down awareness of the stimulus is permitted. Furthermore, single-subject statistics reveal that the IC N170 ERP effect is highly variable across individuals in terms of timing and topographical spread. The results suggest that the ubiquitous N170 effect to ICs found in the literature depends, at least in part, on participants’ awareness of the stimulus. Therefore a strong bottom-up model of IC processing at the time of the N170 is unlikely.