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OPUS: Open Ulethbridge Scholarship

Open ULeth Scholarship (OPUS) is the University of Lethbridge's open access research repository. It contains a collection of materials related to research and teaching produced by the academic community.

Self-archiving your research in OPUS is one way to meet Open Access policies of granting agencies. It is important to retain your final, post-peer-reviewed drafts for submission to OPUS, as this is often the only version publishers will allow to be archived. Click here for information on the U of L Open Access Policy.

Check here for more information about OPUS.

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    Settling in and settling down: the making of a Latter-day Saint landscape in southern Alberta, 1940-1975
    (Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of History and Religion, 2026) Cummins, Brendan; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science; McManus, Sheila
    This project explores the depth of connection Latter-day Saints feel to the small corner of southern Alberta they began colonizing in 1887. This dissertation explores how a relatively small group of white outsiders built a community and social landscape that has thrived for 139 years on Blackfoot land with very little interference or disruption. I contend it is through everyday practice and everyday routine, the things that establish a rhythm and schedule of life, that led to what geographer Marwyn Samuels called an authored landscape: something that is not tied specifically to physical geography but felt, made, and experienced by people interacting in spaces and places. This dissertation will focus on 1940-1975 and argues that LDS settlers’ connections to southern Alberta were built through everyday rituals and routines that develop as groups of people become settled in places and spaces. These everyday activities generated a tangible, malleable barrier between their community and the world, creating an LDS landscape that was simultaneously recognized on the inside as a place of comfort and insulation from the world and by those on the outside as being distinct from other white, settler communities. The Latter-day Saint landscape is not just about the physical geography; it is more fundamentally about the sense of belonging to Mormon region that the Saints have developed over time. Their sense of ownership and belonging is connected to how they understand their lives in relation to the daily acts of living, playing, worshiping, and working in their landscape.
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    The space of love: problematizing the interaction of close and distant reading in the study of courtly love
    (Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of English, 2026) Pafumi, Davide; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science; O'Donnell, Daniel Paul; Bordalejo, Barbara
    This thesis asks whether computational methods can intervene productively in an established humanistic debate while remaining answerable to the interpretive traditions they seek to extend. It approaches this question as a methodological problem, using the longstanding debate over courtly love in later medieval English literature as a test case. Reconstructing the Anglo-American debate from Gaston Paris through the decisive influence of C. S. Lewis, the thesis argues that its persistent impasse can be understood partly as a problem of archival restriction. The major interpretive traditions identified here as philosophico-theological, sociological, and psychological each recover genuine features of medieval representations of love, but do so from overlapping yet differently delimited bodies of evidence. Their internal coherence therefore derives partly from the evidentiary fields through which courtly love has been constituted as an object of inquiry. Drawing on Rüdiger Schnell, the thesis consequently reframes courtly love not as a unified doctrine or historical system but as a discourse: an ongoing and contested negotiation of love across texts, genres, authors, and linguistic traditions. To make that discourse computationally analyzable, the thesis brings together two traditions of discourse analysis. A post-Foucauldian account provides the concept of the archive as a historically conditioned field of statements, while Zellig Harris’s distributional hypothesis provides an empirical account of how patterned linguistic relations can be recovered from textual data. Spitzmüller and Warnke’s DIMEAN supplies the multilevel framework through which these approaches can be synthesized, specifying how linguistic regularities at the level of words and texts may be interpreted as evidence of larger discursive formations. Vector-space modelling provides the computational means of representing those distributional relations. The thesis also addresses the epistemological conditions under which such an intervention can count as humanistic interpretation. It argues that the opposition between close and distant reading rests on reciprocal misreadings in which each approach privileges a different object of authority: textual complexity and minutiae for close reading, and scale, archive, and evidentiary breadth for distant reading. Through a critique of the falsificatory logic exemplified by Matthew Jockers, this study argues that computational findings do not supersede or invalidate established interpretations, because humanistic interpretations need not succeed one another through falsification. Computational and non-computational approaches instead produce different, partial models of their objects. The consequential distinction is therefore not simply one of scale but of modelling: how evidence is bounded, represented, and made to stand for a larger field. This framework is tested on a deliberately bounded corpus of Middle English texts. At the word level, distributional analysis shows that the theological, sociological, and psychological dimensions isolated by scholarship coexist within the semantic field of love. At the document level, the analysis uses C. S. Lewis as a benchmark because subsequent courtly-love scholarship has repeatedly developed from, revised, or defined itself against his synthesis. Testing the fourfold taxonomy of The Four Loves reveals that its categories do not map evenly onto the corpus and motivates a revised three-part description of literary discourse: courtly-romantic, secular-erotic, and theologico-philosophical. The purpose is not to falsify Lewis but to show how computational modelling can sharpen distinctions within an inherited interpretive framework. Producing this analysis also required confronting the practical limits of computational work on pre-modern textual data. Corpus construction, periodization, textual selection, orthographic variation, and cumulative processing noise make medieval evidence a problem of heterogeneous data integration rather than simply one of scale. The thesis develops an AI-assisted normalization procedure that maps dialectal and scribal variants onto shared Present-Day English lexical descendants while recording cases requiring semantic substitution for audit. These methodological solutions, together with the corpus-construction and modelling framework developed here, demonstrate how computational methods designed for large datasets can be adapted to small, historically mediated evidence. The thesis therefore offers a proof of concept for how computational modelling can complicate, refine, and extend established humanistic interpretation without claiming to replace it.
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    Elucidating the role of adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in B2 sine RNAs during cellular stress
    (Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry, 2026) Roy, Riya; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science; Zovoilis, Athanasios; Kovalchuk, Igor
    Although only approximately 2% of the mammalian genome encodes proteins, much of the remaining genome is transcribed into non-coding RNAs with important regulatory functions. Among these, murine B2 Short Interspersed Nuclear Element (SINE) RNAs are rapidly induced during cellular stress and repress RNA polymerase II activity; however, the mechanisms governing their regulation and the contribution of adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing remain poorly understood. In this thesis, multiple experimental approaches were used to investigate the role of ADAR proteins in regulating B2 SINE RNAs during cellular stress. Stress-induced B2 RNA accumulation was associated with dynamic changes in RNA processing and distinct A-to-I editing profiles in both full-length and processed B2 RNA populations. Functional studies demonstrated that ADAR1 regulates B2 RNAs through both editing-dependent and editing-independent mechanisms, promoting B2 RNA processing while A-to-I editing altered the susceptibility of B2 RNAs to protein-mediated processing. Furthermore, coordinated regulation of sense and antisense B2 transcripts suggests that interactions between complementary B2 RNAs may contribute to their regulation during cellular stress. Collectively, these findings establish ADAR1 as a key regulator of B2 SINE RNA biology and provide new insights into the interplay between RNA editing, RNA processing, and B2 SINE RNA regulation during cellular stress. These findings provide a foundation for future studies investigating the contribution of ADAR-mediated B2 RNA regulation to cellular stress adaptation and disease.
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    Engagement in adolescent extracurriculars and young adult mental health
    (Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Education, 2026) Allenby, Taylor Kathleen; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Education; Wood, Kevin
    Extensive research has linked adolescent participation in extracurricular activities to positive academic, social, and psychological outcomes. However, inconsistent findings suggest that factors such as meaningful engagement may influence developmental outcomes. This mixed-methods study examined young adults’ retrospective reports of meaningful engagement in adolescent extracurricular activities and current psychological adjustment. An online survey assessed self-esteem, anxiety and depression symptoms, and meaningful engagement. Three hierarchical linear regressions were conducted using data from 209 respondents to examine psychological adjustment outcomes. Quantitative data were triangulated with qualitative responses regarding experiences of extracurricular involvement during adolescence. Quantitative analyses indicated that meaningful engagement was not uniquely associated with depression, anxiety, or self-esteem after accounting for mental health history. In contrast, thematic analysis suggested that extracurricular participation fostered connection and belonging, competence-building, structure, and dependable support from others.
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    The first coherent census of optical variability in X-ray binaries with Gemini
    (Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, 2026) Elomina, Efren James; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science; Tetarenko, Alexandra
    X-ray binary systems (XRBs) consist of a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star, that accretes matter from its companion star, ejecting a portion of the accreted matter into relativistic jets. It has been shown that time-domain observations, measuring how observed emission changes over time, can be used to address key open questions in compact object research. In particular, pairing time-domain methods with multi-wavelength observations probing different regions within an XRB, can provide further insight into the accretion and jet launching mechanisms of these systems. To this end, the Gemini Optical FAST timing of X-Ray Binaries (GOFAST–XRB) project is a Gemini Large and Long Program that aims to track matter as it propagates from inflow (probed by X-ray light) to outflow (probed by optical light), and characterize how this depends on the nature of different compact objects. This program uses observations in the optical and X-ray wavelengths from Gemini's `Alopeke and Zorro instruments and several X-ray telescopes, such as the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), and Einstein Probe (EP). In this thesis, I develop the foundational optical data processing pipeline for the GOFAST–XRB program. This pipeline extracts the intensity of the sampled XRBs on rapid sub-second timescales (known as lightcurves) from the raw Gemini telescope data, and quantifies how these measurements vary over different timescales. My work represents a novel use for the Gemini `Alopeke and Zorro instruments, directly enabling a new observation and data analysis mode; rapid time-series observations. In the future, my pipeline can be incorporated in the Gemini observatory software packages and made available for use by the broader astronomical community.