Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default
<p>Noteworthy is a joint publication of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, and the Writing Department at York University, Toronto Canada. In this publication, the winning entries for each year of the LA&PS Writing Prize are reviewed and winning entries published online. </p> <p>This refereed journal features the written work of outstanding undergraduates in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Profefssional Studies (LA&PS), York University, Ontario, Canada. Submissions are reviewed by full-time LA&PS faculty. </p>LA&PS, York Universityen-USNoteworthy: The LA&PS Writing PrizesFirst Year Winner: Against All Odds
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/75
<p class="elementtoproof" style="background: white;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; color: #201f1e;">“Against all Odds” is a response to a “familiar essay” assignment, the culminating stage in a portfolio which includes a scene, sources, and a journey. A child arrives in England from a first home in Jamaica, and the writer’s rich description uses the sights, smells, and sounds of this new setting to bring the young protagonist’s disappointment to the reader. The journey in the essay is built through the writer’s engagement with others, especially with poems by Maya Angelou and Russell Kelfer, as the essay shows us not only how it feels to have one’s humanity threatened for the first time, but what it means to find purpose in moving through, and beyond, that experience. Grounding their personal account in the social, connecting school and “the school of hard knocks,” to poetry and sociology, the writer shows the tenacity and determination required to survive racism which, the author reflects, is not only based on “ignorance” but “cruelty”.</span></p>Sonia Clarke
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071First Year Hons. Mention: Out of the Park
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/76
<p>In the thought-provoking and beautifully written critical analysis “Out of the Park: A Creative Work and Reflection on Baseball’s Subordinate Masculinities”, the author seamlessly weaves an informative and in-depth discussion of the startlingly few professional baseball players who have “come out” as gay with the author’s own self-reflections. By combining detailed research with thorough analysis, the author helps us to realize the significance of the courageous actions of a few gay baseball players, as we wonder how many continue to conceal their true sexuality. As a result, the reader finds themselves inevitably considering their own connection to the sport and their own complicity with the sport’s heteronormativity, let alone with the superficial response of the baseball industry itself. This exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly researched and wonderfully lucid analysis and reflection is certainly most worthy of a first-year writing award.</p> <p> </p>Stefan Blacha
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071First Year Hons. Mention: Resistance: The Song of Healing.”
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/77
<p>The course, “Law and Morality in Literature and Culture,” asked students to “write an essay on the two-headed serpent in Lee Maracle’s novel, Celia’s Song, and how this figure sheds light on the struggle against colonialism in Canada,” specifying a close reading. This essay, “Resistance: The Song of Healing,” deserves Honorable Mention as an impressive example of a close reading in a Humanities context, paying careful attention to the ways that Maracle’s deployment of the two-headed serpent figure structures the plot of her novel and the forces pulling her characters toward each head – Restless and Loyal. The essay is an articulate analysis that works closely with the language of the novel to connect, throughout, the concerns of the individual characters and the events in one community, to the larger, continuing, struggle against colonialism in Canada. As the essay notes, Maracle uses the serpent figure to present both a “labyrinth of intergenerational trauma” and an “Indigenous family’s resistance to the havoc of cultural genocide [. . .] the community’s dance with restlessness and their recovery from it”.</p>Hasti Jamalomidi
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071Second Year Winner: Pawmi: An Exploration of Rhetoric in Pokémon Relevance
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/78
<p>In this interesting paper, the author effectively explores the rhetorical similarities and differences within Pokémon’s generational mascots. Pokémon, an intellectual property featuring video games, anime and trading cards, features a series of fantastic creatures (Pokémon) who gain levels (and thus power/new abilities) through completing quests or player vs. player combat. The generational mascots represent each new iteration of the game, and so are designed to look visually similar through their various incarnations—instantly recognizable as Pokémon to a wide group of fans even if the particulars differ from year to year.</p> <p>The author carefully explores the design elements of “Pawmi,” the 9th Generation mascot, and argues that the mascots are ongoing a slow evolution, which finds its most recent apotheosis in shifts to Pawmi’s design. The writer, making use of course concepts and a fine, accessible writing style, recognizing how minor changes to Pawmi have allowed for a shift in branding from “cute” to “strong and powerful”—but without abandoning the charming and appealing elements of previous designs. This analysis demonstrates how the Pokémon brand has managed to retain traditional elements of rhetorical communication via design, but still update their mascot for a modern audience. Convincing and usefully illustrated, this rhetorical analysis is very effective indeed at deconstructing an iconic popular brand.</p>Robert MacIsaac
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071Second Year Hon. Mention: Human Resources: Livestreaming as a Form of Biolabour in Neoliberal Society
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/79
<p>“Human Resources: Livestreaming as a Form of Biolabour in Neoliberal Society” is an interesting and erudite formal essay. The author carefully describes how life-work balance has been overwhelmed in neoliberal societies, resulting in both an “emotional famine” for the average worker, and the rise of livestreaming, where emotional intimacy has been commoditized and become transactional. By Livestreaming, the artist can monetize activities as banal as eating on camera to satisfy the deprived workers wishing for some kind of connection with another.</p> <p>Though the Livestreamers (a largely female community) rely on donations, they are mostly bound by restrictive contacts and see little actual profit from their emotional labour. In this well-researched and convincing paper, the author has done well to note that even as patriarchal and capitalist norms constrain them, the gendered Livestream community is deeply subversive. Just as accurately though, an excellent conclusion underlines that Livestreaming is unlikely to fundamentally challenge a neo-capitalist order that knows the price of every human activity, but the value of none of them.</p> <p><strong> </strong></p>Jona Domingo
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-212023-10-2171Second Year Hons. Mention: Counter-Hegemony In Historical Fiction: A Babel; Or The Necessity Of Violence Case Study
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/80
<p>In the insightful essay “Counter-Hegemony in Historical Fiction”, the author deftly utilizes the novel Babel or the Necessity of Violence as a compelling case study to confront colonialism and its oppressive legacy. The author convincingly reveals the power of such fiction to motivate the reader to recognize the on-going repressive effects of colonialism and its erasure from contemporary life. By extension, as the author cogently explains, by focusing on the consequences for the oppressed themselves, the novel, and through it the essay’s author, we come to realize that giving voice to the silenced provides hope for overcoming these oppressions. The essay is certainly a thought-provoking pleasure to read and most deserving of a second year writing award.</p>Dafina Royer-Chacha
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-212023-10-2171Third Year Winner: ‘A land without people for a people without land’: Colonialist discourse in the framing of Israel’s formation among selected North American Newspapers, 1945-1949
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/81
<p>The essay offers a more-than-fitting response to a complex and challenging research project, that of employing contemporary newspapers as the primary source for an analysis of the prevailing range of attitudes to a specific historical event. In this case the author treats North American views of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 via the coverage in such newspapers at the Globe &amp; Mail, the Toronto Daily Star, and the New York Times. It views these views through a critical anti-colonial lens. The essay is admirably clear about its theoretical and methodological bases and makes its case tellingly. It is particularly effective in highlighting the various shadings of opinion within the ideological field it discerns and accounts as shared amongst the sources cited. In foregrounding such variations the essay both strengthens its case and permits a particular past to speak</p>Brandon Lamorena
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-212023-10-2171Third Year Hon. Mention, Family and Freedom: A Study of Terentia and ‘Turia’
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/82
<p>This is a maturely considered essay that reviews the status of women citizens of Rome by means of two first-century BCE texts: the orator Cicero’s letters to his wife Terentia and the anonymous Laudatio Turiae. The essay is finely aware of the limitations of the evidence of which its case is based, but it perhaps more modest that it needs to be about the strength of its argument. The available evidence is employed with great care and subtlety to argue in a wholly persuasive way for the recognition that, for some women at least, greater agency in the public sphere was available than is conventionally allowed. The essay makes frequent and fluent use of both its primary and secondary sources and integrates its citations with a grace not always seen in the works of far more senior scholars.</p>Lex Flavelle
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071Third Year Hon. Mention: Changes in educational composition and average earnings of Italian immigrants and U.S.-born workers from 1960 to 2010
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/83
<p>The report effectively summarizes a data set and insightfully deploys the data therein to compare educational attainment and average earnings between Italian immigrants and people born in the United States from 1960 through 2010. The report describes both the available data and the reporter’s analytic methodology with remarkable clarity. And, as the assignment requires, the author illuminates their analysis with six graphs—both bar and line—that do exactly what graphs are supposed to do: communicate the relations among the data in visuals that are immediately apprehensible. The graphs are visually appealing, and are labelled and legended in ways that encourage comprehension. They provide an ideal complement to the text’s cogent analysis, an account that is both concisely and elegantly written.</p>Giacomo Setten
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-212023-10-2171Fourth Year Winner: Animal Rights: Examining Socio-Legal Claims for Animal Justice
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/84
<p>In this fictional (but highly realistic and compelling) legal debate, the author charts the conflict between the Indigenous peoples of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Ontario Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry. The Nanfan Treaty grants the Haudenosaunee Confederacy the right to hunt in what is now known as South Hills Provincial Park. What happens when the Minister tries to curtail that right? What recourse does the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have to push back against the Minister’s restriction, and can the Minister make that restriction in the first place? Is the Canadian government obligated to uphold the terms of a treaty it signed over three hundred years ago? Should we consider the rights of the deer that are being hunted?</p> <p>This author confronts these questions with a stunning level of thoroughness and sophistication. They fearlessly take the Crown to task for a series of procedural shortcomings and thoughtless lack of due diligence. The author has taken the time to anticipate possible objections and has addressed them with clarity and confidence. The resulting paper showcases a level of research- driven critical thinking that would be impressive in almost any context (we feel that the author’s work wouldn’t look out of place in a graduate law school seminar or a professional legal journal) and is therefore an even more remarkable achievement for a fourth-year student.</p> <p>We commend the author for this powerful and thought-provoking paper, and enthusiastically name it our fourth-year winner.</p>Bixuan Hao
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071Fourth Year Hon. Mention: ‘The Others of animals’: Representations and Uses of Insects in Human Culture
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/85
<p>In this well-crafted and interesting paper, the author observes how, despite being essential to the environment and, ultimately, to human existence, insects are commonly “used to represent difference and alienation”. Analyzing the human reaction to the insect, the writer cogently bases their analysis on two contexts—"disgust and fascination”. The essay features a potent combination of natural science and literary analysis (via Kafka’s The Metamorphosis [1915] and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi [2001]) to explore how we are both repelled by and drawn to the insect, beings which represent “the Other of Others” in human cultures.</p> <p>The problem with this, as the author capably argues, is that most life on earth relies on insects one way or the other, and yet many species are appearing on endangered lists, as humans’ penchant for negative stereotyping justifies either ignorance or active eradication. Unless, like butterflies, they’re lucky enough to be pretty, the “otherness” of insects means this precarity receives little attention. In well-written and convincing fashion, the author does well to remind us that unless we abandon our attack on the insect and move to an attitude of “collaboration,” our own species’ exit will follow not long after the last ‘bug’ is swatted. Considerable research and cultural awareness impressed the assessors and made them rethink their own response to the natural world, while clear, passionate prose made the paper a pleasure to read.</p>Srin Kobynathan
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071Fourth Year Hon. Mention: Can Soft Skills Reduce the Gender Pay Gap?
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/86
<p>If we want to solve the gender pay gap (in short, the issue that men make money than women for doing the same job), we should start with helping women to nurture and accentuate the soft skills that corporate culture so desperately needs. That’s what experts think is the key to fixing this problem, and the fact that so many women have experienced professional success in recent years would seem to prove that this is the right approach. But, as this paper explores, the truth isn’t simple. In fact, many soft skills—empathy, teamwork, time management, etc.—can have a surprisingly negative impact on how female employees are perceived and paid. When women lean into more active soft skills like leadership and personal assertiveness, they are negatively perceived from a different angle: selfish, pushy, and undeserving. It seems like just encouraging empathy isn’t enough. The whole system, and how we think about women and power, needs to change.</p> <p>The author of this paper upends conventional wisdom about the gender pay gap with urgency, clarity, and a perceptive ability to find the real story at the heart of the data. This is the paper’s great strength: the author doesn’t accept scholarly evidence without interrogating it, referring to empirical research that supports their claims while also noting its potential gaps and how it might miss important points of nuance. The author refuses to take any truth at face value. This paper is a testament to how great writing and research can be the key to working through big issues and figuring out where to go next, and it’s a reminder that we can’t ever stop thinking about how to solve a problem just because the solution seems easy on the surface.</p>Jacob Shapiro
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071MRP Winner: ‘I’m never going to have a fairy tale ending:’ Girls’ Perspectives on Disney Films
https://lapsprize.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/87
<p>This compelling Major Research Project showcases the author’s original research and excellent writing. Basing their analysis on the concept that children exercise their own agency when responding to cultural artefacts, the writer uses interviews with three teen girls to explore their status as subjects. In other words, they are not just passive vessels, to be pushed this way and that by cultural rhetoric, but “capable of critically analyzing Disney’s narratives, crafting and exploring new ideas, rationalizing their experiences in connection to their identity and childhood while also proposing new solutions for future generations consuming Disney.” Moreover, the author does well to note how children frequently challenge dominant narratives in ways adults often refuse to acknowledge. To do so would mean caregivers would have to stop thinking of children as objects ready to be moulded and shaped as adults thought best.</p> <p>After an extensive literary review and a well-explained methodology, the authors findings are twofold—first, the subjects were united in their desire for more diverse, complex representations of main characters (both mentally and physically) and second, they each recognized a desperate need to update the Disney genre’s male/female behaviours, and to complicate a dynamic of “one needs help, and one does the helping”. Taken together, this report valuably extends our understanding of children’s audience reception. It’s clear, easy-to-read, and taught the assessors something. It has a level of research and careful analysis of which the author can be justly proud and is a very worthy winner of this Faculty-wide competition.</p>Joy Lam
Copyright (c) 2023 Noteworthy: The LA&PS Writing Prizes
2023-10-202023-10-2071