Social & Political Thought

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Open Access
Affect & Play: Socio-political Videogames as a Site of Felt-knowledge Production
(2021-03-08) Shamdani, Sara; Bell, Shannon M.
Videogames are affective networks, made up of organic and in-organic matters that come to create a space, where the player learns through doing and watching herself do. For decades, videogames researchers and players have discussed the myriad of ways in which videogames carry enormous pedagogical potentials through their procedures and the creation of a space of play that immerses the player in those procedures and the story of the game. This dissertation builds on this body of knowledge by bringing together the different understandings of affect and affective capacities to further examine the pedagogical potentials of socio-political games through the creation of a felt-knowledge-producing assemblage. I argue this felt knowledge is achieved through the processes of acting in the space of play, watching that action while it takes place, and then engaging with the consequences of the said action. The socio-political videogames curated for the purposes of this research are primarily from the perspectives of civilians living in a warzone, engaging in revolutionary efforts, or civilians who are forced to cross borders as refugees and immigrants as a result of chaos and violence of their homelands. I examine the affective capacities of the space of play through the works of D. W. Winnicott, and I assert that the unique space of videogame play is not only a space where we work through sensations that impact us through play, but we also experience affective intensities that would otherwise remain invisible. In order to access this space of play, I claim the player becomes an assemblage, a network of connectivity, with the power to observe itself forming and reforming through the connections that make the entity: the player+avatar. For this I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and assemblage theory. This dissertation, itself, is an assemblage of affect theories and socio-political videogames that capture the invisibilities of our socio-political reality and make them known through the process of play. These games put the player in the story of anothers suffering and oppression by capturing the affective sensations and intensities of a refugee camp or a war zone and ask the player to engage and experiment with what would have been otherwise remained unknown. These socio-political videogames are a new genre of art for an age of digital (mis)information that bring forth a space of play where we can experience and experiment with sensations, vibrations, and affective forces of oppression in order to feel something of it and to know it differently.
Open Access
After The Death Of God: From Political Nihilism To Post-Foundational Democracy
(2017-07-27) Lewis, Clayton David; Horowitz, Asher
The topic of this dissertation is Heideggers deconstruction of metaphysics viewed through the prism of Nietzsches declaration that God is dead. I argue that Nietzsches transvaluation of value remains ensnared by the will to power and the nihilistic destiny of the eternal return. I look at Heideggers late thought as a response to the disenchantment of nature and the technological framing of Earth. I argue that the delineation of a non-instrumental way life requires a political turn that is quite different from Heideggers own conservative nationalism. While the post-structuralist appropriation of Heideggers late thought makes some tentative moves towards a post-foundational democracy, I argue that the deconstruction of political community stemming from Derrida, Levinas, and Nancy fails to adequately deal with the question of democratic sovereignty. In light of this inadequacy, I take up the political theory of Benjamin, Schmitt, and Agamben in order to further delineate a negative political theology without reference to any metaphysical grounding of sovereign power. Essential to such a politics is the non-linear experience of time as event. I contrast Benjamins notion of empty homogenous time with Agambens analysis of non-linear revolutionary time. I suggest that the eschatological remembrance of democracy requires an interruption of history as a linear sequence of time. Against the instrumental framing of democracy, I advocate for the decentralization of sovereignty to local modes of participatory self-government such as general assemblies, councils, and cooperatives.
Open Access
An Ecology of Immanent Otherness: The Onto/eco-poethics of Hlne Cixous
(2019-11-22) Valiquette, Renee A.; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
Notions of identification and resemblance have been central to the onto-epistemologies of Anglo Environmental Ethics in the 20th and 21st centuries. In order to dismantle Western conceptions of the human as separate from the material world the case needed to be made for the likeness of humans and nature; nature is us (Crutzen and Schwgerl 2011). This dissertation builds on such efforts while also proposing a change of course, one that moves away from sameness and toward otherness. To contend with and address the deeply unsettling and unprecedented conditions of Anthropocenic life we need an environmental ethics of immanent otherness. To conceive such an ethics, I turn to feminist post-structuralist Hlne Cixous. Cixous remains under-represented within eco-theoretical readings of post-structuralism, despite expanding interest in her contemporaries. Too material for social constructivism, and too textual for new materialism, Cixouss singular approach to materiality and immanence have remained decidedly overlooked. (Re)reading Cixous from within the literature of new materialism and environmental (post)humanities, we discover an onto/eco-poethics of immanent otherness that not only conceives poetic textuality within materiality, but otherness as constitutive of a seething, lively immanent world. In following Cixous, we surrender enduring enchantments with environmental ethics of unity, certainty and purity and discover how the poetry and jouissance of immanent otherness can help us to better navigate these strange, contaminated and incoherent times.
Open Access
At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics: Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno on the Work of Art
(2015-01-26) Belmer, Stephanie Lynn; Horowitz, Asher
This dissertation undertakes a comparative study of the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I argue that Levinas’s resistance to aesthetics and Adorno’s to ethics have led interpreters to miss an essential overlap in their writings. My first concern is to demonstrate that Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, when placed side by side with Levinas's philosophy, serves to expand Levinas’s conception of the ethical encounter. While Levinas provides a rich account of the ethical, he does not commit himself in any serious way to the study of aesthetics. The expression unique to ethics, for Levinas, occurs as a face-to-face encounter, and Levinas is quite emphatic that the ethical encounter is not produced by any work, including and especially the work of art. Nonetheless, Levinas finds in certain artists evidence of ethical expression. When read alongside Adorno's aesthetic theory, it becomes possible to argue that Levinas’s ethics of responsibility need not be limited to the relation between two human beings. The experience of ethics described by Levinas can then be extended to include the experience of works of art. My second concern is to demonstrate how Levinas’s notion of ethical transcendence challenges Adorno's perceived confinement within a system of immanent critique. Adorno, like Levinas, criticizes a form of rationality that would elevate the subject to an absolute; and Adorno, again like Levinas, seeks ways to interrupt this subject’s totalizing stance. However, Adorno refuses to outline an ethics and there is much to his writing, particularly his reliance on a negative dialectics, which makes it very difficult to imagine ethics in the way that Levinas describes. Nonetheless, I argue that the two thinkers are not as far apart as they at first seem. There are striking similarities between Adorno's account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity and Levinas’s description of the effect of alterity on the subject. By exposing these similarities, it becomes possible to attribute a Levinasian ethical dimension to Adornian aesthetic experience. In other words, Levinas helps us to push Adorno beyond his reliance on a privative description of ethics and thus allows for a productive rereading of Adorno's theory of art as critique.
Open Access
Athletic Labour, Spectatorship, and Social Reproduction in the World of Professional Hockey
(2016-09-20) Kalman-Lamb, Nathan; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
Existing literature in the sociology of sport largely omits any discussion of the relation between the spectator and athlete in professional and high performance sport. This dissertation explores that relation, demonstrating that exploitation in athletic labour and the enduring allure of sport as spectacle are inextricably linked as part of a broader political economy. The labour of professional athletes is theorized as a form of social reproductive labour that offers affective/subjective renewal for fans. Spectators who experience isolation and alienation in their day-to-day lives as capitalist subjects come to sport seeking a sense of meaning, connection, and community. Athletic labour in professional sport provides this to them and enables them to continue to function as productive capitalist subjects by serving as an armature upon which an imagined athletic community of fans can be built. However, for social reproduction to occur for fans, athletes must sacrifice their bodies completely in the performance of their labour. It is only through this sacrifice that the imagined athletic community becomes concretized as something tangible and real and spectators become willing to spend their money on sports fandom. This theoretical understanding of athletic labour and spectatorship is explored through semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight former professional hockey players and eight spectators of sport. The testimony of former players consistently links the political economy of professional sport and the harm and exploitation they experienced in the course of their work. The testimony of spectators, on the other hand, typically fails to acknowledge that the meaning and pleasure derived from watching professional sport is predicated on the destruction of athletic bodies. This study ultimately suggests that a form of alienation exists between athletes and spectators. The spectator grasps for an elusive sense of community within a society structured to deny that form of connection by placing vicarious investment in the bodies of athletes. Yet, this act of investment instrumentalizes and commodifies the athlete. Athletes understand this process as it occurs because it denies them their humanity by transforming them into something both more (the heroic vessel) and less (the abject failure) than human.
Open Access
Colonial Theology: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin and the Emergence of the Colonial-Capitalist World System, 1500-1900
(2016-09-20) Kolia, Zahir Yasser; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
My dissertation examines the relationship between the theological political and temporality in the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. World systems and postcolonial approaches to colonial expansion have often reduced questions of theology to a discursive feature of producing difference through the binary frame of self/other in order to justify a will to power, territory, and capital accumulation. My dissertation argues that the theocentric epistemic tradition of commensurability and resemblances structured by theological temporal formations have played a large role in colonial expansion, and can be better understood by applying the decolonial concept of coloniality to illustrate how theology, political economy and philosophy form plural points of enunciation for the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system. What is distinctive about this project is that I bring together world systems theory, postcolonial theory and theological political perspectives under a decolonial approach in order to highlight the importance of epistemology in the establishment of a global hierarchical system that produces and locates Western knowledge, cosmology and spirituality over non-Western forms. This dissertation, therefore, outlines a methodological trajectory that does not instrumentalize the theological to a materialist rendition of capitalist accumulation, colonial expansion and conquest. Rather, I will seek to characterize how capital, colonialism and theology were entwined, negotiated and expressed in often contradictory ways through the writings of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin. In doing so, I examine the material inscriptions and historical particularity regarding the entangled secular and theological forms of reasoning, knowledge traditions, and temporalities that emerged in relation to the contingencies of coloniality.
Open Access
Contemporary Ruins: Politics and Aesthetics Beyond the Melancholy Imagination
(2014-07-09) Henderson, Christine Rose; Forsyth, James Scott
This thesis attempts to elucidate the specificities of contemporary ruins using critical theory and cultural studies applied to various sites of analysis ranging from art and film to abandoned factories and disaster zones. It is motivated not only by the question of whether thinking about the contemporary world through the conceptual paradigm of the ruin might offer insight into the crises that afflict our everyday lives, but by the political desire to seek, amidst the ruins, an opportunity to re-imagine the possible.The ruinous processes of creative destruction, dispossession, commodification, forced obsolescence, deindustrialization and disaster are examined in their relation to the workings of capitalism. Capitalism is seen to systematically manufacture ruins, producing physical, ecological and affective geographies of ruination. These ruins are the starting point to ask the question: What does it mean for the political imagination to be confronted with social reality as a mounting pile of wreckage? I suggest that it has a profound impact upon our sense of historical agency, upon our capacity to dream, to imagine, and to act. Ruins are bound up with losses of all kinds, and, as such, with larger cultural practices of memory and mourning. While ruins in capitalist modernity still embodied a dialectic tension between old and new, loss and invention, nostalgia and optimism, ruins in postmodernity lack the same productive tension: they seem to signal unqualified loss and the foreclosure of all possibilities for the future. I argue that moving beyond this depressive melancholy imagination, one of the many 'ruins of modernity', requires that we confront and work through these losses in order to be better able to seize the opportunities for resistance and social change that exist in the present. The representation of ruins, the relation of form to content, is considered from the standpoint of its ability to restore perceptibility and responsiveness or, inversely, to anaesthetize and make us numb. Radical, self-reflexive aesthetic practices, concerned with symbolizing loss and deepening historical awareness, are presented as a creative and promising approach to re-appropriating the ruins.
Open Access
Decolonizing Literacies: Transnational Feminism, Legacies of Coloniality, and Pedagogies of Transformation
(2016-09-20) Ruddy, Karen Ann; Taylor, Patrick D M
Since the onset of the U.S.-led Global War on Terror (G.W.O.T.) and Afghan War in 2001, the literacy crisis of Afghan women has been central to the U.S.s counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency doctrines, and to its post-conflict reconstruction efforts in the country. While many aspects of the G.W.O.T. have been subject to critical scrutiny over the last decade, literacy remains curiously absent from such discussions. This silence is primarily due to the widely-accepted views that literacy is a necessary precondition for female empowerment, and that the extension of literacy education to Afghan girls and women is therefore one of the few undisputed successes of the Afghan war. Troubling this conventional wisdom, this dissertation employs an anti-racist transnational feminist framework to argue that the narratives of Afghan womens literacy crisis that have circulated within the Western imaginary since 9/11 are enmeshed in, and are forms of, the epistemic, semiotic, and political-economic violence that characterizes present-day practices of neo-liberal war and dispossession. They have been central to U.S. foreign policy discourse because they install a civilizational divide between the post-feminist, literate West where gender and sexual justice allegedly have been achieved and the racialized and gendered figures of the Afghan woman as an illiterate Third World woman in need of saving from dangerous Muslim men. As such, these narratives have served to legitimate not only the Afghan war, but also the modernization of Afghan women according to a Western neo-liberal agenda and the normalization of a particular image of Western gender and sexual exceptionalism that conceals continuing gender, sexual, colonial, racial, and class disparities at home. This study traces the disavowed and forgotten colonial legacies of this divide between the literate West and the illiterate Other to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the history of racialized slavery and anti-Black racism in the U.S., and the institutionalization of the literacy/orality divide in mid-twentieth century sociolinguistics and anthropology. Moreover, it explores how such legacies of coloniality are reproduced in the liberal feminist internationalism of Martha Nussbaums capabilities approach to international development which emphasizes female pain and suffering in the global south and some forms of third-wave international feminism which celebrate female empowerment and the pleasures of trans* and gender-variant subjects. Finally, this study contends that feminists committed to the liberatory potential of literacy must grapple with the promises and failures of anti-colonial (Paulo Freire) and postcolonial (Gayatri Spivak) theories of literacy in order to elaborate literacies of decolonization: ways of reading and writing the word and the world that challenge the epistemic domination of subaltern knowledges, while also elaborating alternative political imaginaries and pedagogies of hope and transformation that move beyond the necropolitics of the neo-liberal global order.
Open Access
Democracy Against: The Antinomies of Politics
(2017-07-27) Nelson, Bryan Derek Knox; Singer, Brian; Breaugh, Martin
How should democracy be thought? How do we go about organising its concept? On what basis? And to what end? Rather than confine democracy to an ancient political constitution or modern system of government, this dissertation pursues a conception of democracy often concealed by the customary institutional analysis. Written as a sustained appraisal of the often antagonistic encounter between philosophy and politics, as a strategy to reframe democracy an emancipatory, transformative agency of the demos, it is proposed that the topic of democracy be initiated according to what democracy is against. This approach serves to entirely reconsider the question of democracy, engendering a renewed interpretation of what the power of the people can mean. Through a series of detailed studies of Jacques Rancire, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour, it is argued that democracy invariably appears as a counter or objection to an established social order in which a spectrum of familiar modes of domination are already in place. As the initiation of a unique political controversy and dispute, democracy is presented as an unprecedented challenge to unrestricted and arbitrary rule, concentrations of authority, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of all kinds. It is identified with the forces that seek to expose, contest and transform oppressive and exclusionary arrangements and practices from below, from the outside, from a minoritarian positionality. Ultimately seeking more inclusive, participatory and egalitarian institutions and relations, democracy is consequently conceived as the perpetual democratisation of society. After a preliminary reflection on the Hellenistic roots of politics itself, the dissertation undertakes an extensive analysis of what is determined to be democracys most general form: its being-against the arch (the underlying principle that divides governor from governed, ruler from ruled). It then proceeds to consider two contemporary theoretical models that uncover the against in more distinguishing terms: Rancires democracy against the police and Abensours democracy against the State. It concludes that contrary to its long tradition since Plato, philosophy can enhance and embolden an emancipatory politics, as Lefort demonstrates, when it ventures to advance a radical, savage conception of democracy organised to critique the here and now.
Open Access
Elective Breast Surgery and Body Image: A Poststructural-Phenomenological Investigation
(2018-03-01) Rodrigues, Sara Marie; Rutherford, Alexandra; Teo, Thomas
This dissertation examines what happens when elective breast surgery intervenes on women at the level of their body images. In this theoretical-empirical project, I compare practitioner discourses and patient narratives of the impact of breast augmentation and reduction surgeries on female body image. To this end, I conducted two case studies: first, a feminist-poststructuralist discourse analysis of practitioner-authored studies on elective breast surgery and body image, as published in peer-reviewed journals; and second, a feminist-phenomenological inquiry into womens first-hand accounts of their experiences of these surgical procedures. I argue that body image is, at one and the same time, an uncritically accepted concept that encourages normative understandings of surgical outcomes and a productive lens through which women make sense of how surgery instigates a reorientation of the body and its habits. The unique contributions of this project are that it brings together poststructuralism and phenomenology so as to concurrently examine practitioner and patient perspectives of the effects of surgery, and critically examines the mainstream notion and widespread acceptance of body image.
Open Access
Epistemologies of Imperial Feminism(s): Violence, Colonization, and Sexual (Re)Inscriptions of Empire.
(2022-12-14) Fraser, Faye Marie; Agathangelou, Anna M.
This doctoral thesis project brings together Indigenous theory and post-colonial feminism under a decolonial framework to highlight the significance of feminist moral epistemologies in establishing global hierarchical systems. I argue that when situated within the sexual matrices of coloniality, feminist moral regulation knowledge production in Canada institutionalizes hierarchical social ordering through the de-mediation of non-secular agency and sacred Indigenous self-consciousness. This dissertation warns feminist moral regulation scholars of the contamination of feminist knowledge produced about the “sexual Other” that remains colonized within the methodological grids of the epistemic structures of secular-coloniality. It highlights how a focus on epistemology allows us to understand the role of feminism’s contingent investments in imperial knowledge systems and the effects this has for structuring neocolonial governmentality and settler colonial domination, in the service of sexual empire. In it, I employ deconstruction and genealogical analytics to reveal how structures of empire are intertwined with discourses of sex and colonial law to trace how such intertwinements shape the production of subjectivities, liberal state-making projects, and colonial enterprises under the promise of “sexual progress” and political freedom. This framework allows me to explore the co-production of knowledge systems within neocolonial orders by focusing on philosophical debates about human rights, gender and racial (in)security, liberal secularism, transnational imperial feminist power. Central to the argument that I pursue in this dissertation is that in the wake of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, feminist knowledge about sex work and morality is not mediated by a singular site of annunciation via moral regulation theory. I argue, instead, that moral regulation feminist theorizations of sexual morality are also conditioned by the epistemic and methodological project of imperial feminist praxis. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the epistemological dimensions of moral regulation feminist knowledge production and excavates the modalities of power that drive this discipline and explores the epistemological regions from which it speaks.
Open Access
Eurocentric Archival Knowledge Production and Decolonizing Archival Theory
(2015-08-28) Gordon, Aaron Andrew; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
This dissertation is interested in how archival theory—the theoretical work of archiving produced by archivists and, to a lesser extent, the modes of doing archival research deployed by researchers—tackles the colonial roots and routes of archives, archivists and archival theories and practices. At the base of this examination of archival theory is the assumption that theory produces the object it evaluates. Thus, as opposed to interrogating a pre-existing archive, archival theory produces imaginative and material archival spaces in which archivists and researchers labour. In this dissertation, then, I examine the ways in which Eurocentric intellectual frameworks continue to frame archival theory and, thus, delimit how archivists and researchers produce knowledge about and through archives. In particular, this dissertation is interested in how the Eurocentrism underwriting archival theory as much shapes archivists’ understanding of colonialism and colonial archives by establishing the archive’s and archival theory’s geography, history and future trajectory as covers over the archives’ and archival theory’s colonial history. With an eye to the work of contemporary archivists and theorists who critically interrogate the ways archives and archivists reproduce unequal social relations of power, the following chapters negotiate the tension within these critiques between developing more democratic, socially just and postcolonial archives and archival theory, and the Eurocentric intellectual frameworks that reiterate the divisions between West and non-West, modern societies and traditional communities, literate and oral, and between reason and feeling. The works of Canadian archivists and scholars figure prominently in my dissertation as they both shape my analyses of the effects of Eurocentrism and continuing settler colonial relations on archives, archiving and archival research, and also become objects of analysis through which I trace out the discourses that work to secure and trouble settler title and entitlement to Aboriginal land by erasing or nullifying Indigenous sovereignty in and through Canada’s archives. The aim of my dissertation is to propose modes of archival knowledge production that trouble, if not displace, these Eurocentric and settler frameworks to decolonize archives and archival theory.
Open Access
For the Other, Beyond Ethics: Responsibility, Critique, and Praxis in Levinas and Adorno
(2017-07-27) Keikhaee, Aidin; Horowitz, Asher
This dissertation grows out of the conviction that Emmanuel Levinas ethics and Theodor W. Adornos negative dialectics could supplement each other in mutually beneficial ways. While Levinas could provide an articulation of the prophetic ethical drive that underlies Adornos emancipatory project but lies beyond the reach of his dialectical approach, Adornos negative dialectics could offer a historical critique that Levinas (meta)phenomenological ethics calls for but fails to provide. The first part of the dissertation, including Chapters I and II, presents my theoretical engagement with the problem of the relation between ethics and politics in Levinas. The second part, including Chapters III and IV, is concerned with the possibility of a rapprochement between Adorno (and more generally Marx) and Levinas. The development of my analysis in the first two parts of the dissertation follows a spiral path, continuously returning to a tension, though each time in a more concrete form. It begins with the identification of this tension in its most abstract form as the relation between metaphysics and ontology, moves to a more concrete formulation of it in the relation between ethics and politics, and finally culminates in the articulation of the relation between critique and re-appropriation as the historically concrete form of the tension. My argument is that while this irresolvable tension is indispensable in all its forms, its most concrete form reveals a certain paradox that is the characteristic of our time. However, the characterization of the tension between critique and re-appropriation does not itself amount to the concretization of ethics, but rather demonstrates the formal structure of the process of concretization. The actual content of this process is necessarily dependent on the contingencies of the historical reality of politics and can be arrived at only through an engagement with the specific details of each case. It is the task of the third part of the dissertation, i.e., Chapters V and VI, to examine the implications of the tension between critique and re-appropriation for the analysis of a specific historical case, i.e., the (re-)appropriation of sacrifice in Ali Sharats revolutionary ideology.
Open Access
From Social Servitude to Self Certitude: The Social Organization of Resistance of Racialized Diasporic Women
(2018-11-21) Alamdar, Negar Pour Ebrahim; Visano, Livy A
The relationship between migration incorporation and resistance is a quintessential problematic replete with controversy. As Arabs and Iranians migrate to a Western society, they are confronted by a whole new set of choices and experiences making the adaptation process intricate and challenging (Pedraza, 2000). Notwithstanding the voluminous literature on collective or community mobilization, relatively little scholarship, conceptually and substantively, exists that analyzes the individual self-empowerment of racialized diasporic women. This research seeks to bridge this gap by addressing the efficacy of the exigent need for critical analysis of the stages and processes of individual resistance. My study analyzes the different levels of accommodation / resistance racialized diasporic women especially from Iran use to negotiate various institutions of socializing control. Distance and engagement in terms of deference and defiance are constructed relationally to form the basis or precondition of a politically engaged critique (Bannerji, 1991). Informed by the confluence of anti-racist feminist, post- colonial, critical race theories and interpretive sociology, this dissertation argues that any analysis of the relationship of identity (consciousness) and culture (ideology) warrants a far more comprehensive inquiry into the mediating role of institutions of law, work, family, education and religion especially in reference to racialized diasporic women. This study of self-empowerment is theoretically informed by Fanons (2008:14) mimicry (Hawley, 2001), Bhabhas (1994) hybridity, Foucaults (1990) docile bodies, Gramscis (1971) naturalized common sense, Hill Collinss (1990) matrices of domination, Bannerjis (1995) relational/reflexive method and Hookss (1992) forms of representation. From a Weberian social action perspective (Gerth & Mills, 1946), the concept of movement provides a meaningfully compelling typology. Resistance, as a movement of the self, is socially organized according to clearly discrete stages and identifiable contingencies. Identity, institutions and ideologies impact on this movement, a movement from an imposed and internalized marginality towards a more empowered self- consciousness. Resistance, as disconnecting from oppressive life chances to reconnecting to more authentic self-awareness, is further contextualized in terms of responses to pernicious accommodations to conformity (getting and staying connected to the dominant Western culture). Methodologically, this study employs content analyses, a deep reading of post-colonial, anti- racist feminist and critical interpretive thought and a critical auto-ethnography.
Open Access
In the Beginning...Was the Act!: Zizek, Marx, and the Question of Form
(2016-11-25) Flemming, Gregory C.; Short, Nicola C.
In almost all commentary on the work Slavoj iek the question of his relationship to the thought of Karl Marx is either ignored or indirectly addressed in terms of his relationship to contemporary thinkers. This is best exemplified in discussions of what is ieks most significant contribution to todays growing swell of left-wing political theory: the critique of ideology. Against those who find its root elsewhere and who consequently offer various critiques of the positions iek takes, understanding the root of ideology to be the material practice of commodity exchange enables one to see the overall coherence of his work. After differentiating ieks position from many of his contemporaries and arguing that ieks parallax view can be best understood as a development of Marxs commodity fetishism the author goes on to use this as a means to get at the idea of form as it appears in Marx and iek. On this basis the last half of the study takes up contemporary history and theory on the formation of psychoanalytic associations and radical party politics to substantiate the claim that while both owe their existence to capitalism, capitalism could owe to them its destruction.
Open Access
Living Within Hyphenated Paradoxes - The Canadian Adolescent Refugee Experience
(2020-11-13) Noori, Sofia; Visano, Livy A.
In 2018, the Canadian government admitted 46,500 refugees. This followed a remarkable record resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada from 201517, with just under half aged 17 or younger. This dissertation addresses how adolescent refugees negotiate the issues and aftermath of living in civil unrest, war, migration, transitory states, refugee camps, and resettlement. I analyze published memoirs and vlogs by Canadians who were adolescent refugees when they arrived in this country. By highlighting the life stories of ten Canadians who experienced varying degrees of refugee-ness, I argue that these asylum seekers contend with paradoxical claims to their subjectivities. While witnessing conflicts and camps traumatizes these young people, they successfully achieve independence and greater stability after settling in Canada. Shifting cultural practices informed by their native and host countries are factors that influence refugees sense of identity liminalities: being too young, too old, not westernized enough, not native enough, lacking schooling and wanting academic accolades. Readings of their narratives informed by psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory show that young refugees employ ancestral coping mechanisms, intellectualization, and sublimation to make meaning from their experienced losses and grief. Fanons and Saids theories address the violent colonial context of exile and alienation. Anna Freud and Winnicott explain the internal mechanisms of resistance. In the native land, children inherit epistemologies of coping to survive and make sense of the atrocities they witness. During escape plans, young asylum seekers come to face their greatest fear and reality of losing their loved ones and voices. The disorganized and inhumane conditions of refugee camps further develop an inferiority complex. For the fortunate ones who make it to Canada, they must navigate through refugee boards, schools, and formalities that position them as outsiders. Ultimately this dissertation provides a platform for the various socio-political complexities and challenges (acculturation, enculturation, racism, sexism, relationships, learning) that adolescent refugees must bring to a functional cohesion as they form a sense of self and stability from the chaotic marginal world they are emerging from.
Open Access
Machiavelli on the art of the state and the true way
Sayer, David Andrew; Jurdjevic, Mark; Newman, Stephen; Walsh, Philip
"This monograph reopens a central and contentious question about Machiavelli's thought: how does he understand the relation between morality and politics? In the twentieth century, three of the most influential answers were those of Benedetto Croce, Leo Strauss and Isaiah Berlin. In 1925, Croce argued that Machiavelli values morality and thus discovered the ""autonomy of politics"" with bitterness. In 1958, Strauss argued that Machiavelli is both ""an evil man"" and ""a teacher of evil."" And in 1972, Berlin argued that Machiavelli's political philosophy is moral-but based on a ""pagan morality."" My dissertation reexamines the question of Machiavelli through a close reading that analyzes his political vision in both its historical and intellectual context. I argue that Machiavelli esteems the moral virtues but insists that to be a successful ruler one must know how to act against them, when necessary. Throughout his writings, he takes for granted that the state's security is a necessity without which virtue, honour and greatness are themselves not possible; thus he argues that the necessity of security overrides moral considerations when the two come into conflict. Further, since expansion increases security, expansion itself is necessary. This is a far-reaching argument. First, it means that the struggle for power is inherent in affairs of state, not only due to avarice and ambition but also due to the desire for security itself; second, since expansion is necessary for security, the argument that rulers may violate moral norms for the end of security extends to expansion. At the same time, Machiavelli' s realist mode of analysis also puts limits on ambition, avarice and expansion, though they derive largely from a prudent understanding of necessity, the limits of power and the indignation aroused by injustice. When it comes to the art of the state, for Machiavelli, the true way is to be in accord with necessity. Necessity resolves the conflict between politics and morality and subordinates the orthodox notion of the true way-whether associated with Christianity, the middle way or both-to the true way revealed by necessity."
Open Access
Mere Sources of Error: Workers, Patients, and the Reductive Logic of Rationalized Healthcare
(2015-08-28) Norys, Marnina Margaret Ann; Antze, Paul G.
This project represents a sustained critique of the reductive logic of rationalized healthcare delivery systems which reduces the individuality of both workers and patients to little more than problems for the system itself. Drawing on social theory and ethnographic data, I show that wherever clients’ needs or the caregiver’s empathic responses to those needs threaten the efficient working of the system, both are taken as aberrant, as “mere sources of error”. In contrast to this systemic dismissal of workers’ empathic responses to the personal needs of patients, I consider the basis in moral philosophy for the view that workers’ caring impulses ground morality writ large and are essential in the provision of humane care. Hence, I argue, such feelings should be carefully heeded and cultivated rather than ignored and controlled. I also argue – in distinct opposition to modern managerial logic – that there are strong grounds, both moral and managerial, for less systemic control over caregivers’ time and practices. A reduction in central control is important not only because adequate care is time-consuming, but because unstructured time and space are necessary for the development of the sort of caring attitude that is essential for humane caregiving practices. Time and space are also key for the cultivation of phronēsis, a form of wisdom that enables one to discern when a system, not a person, has gone wrong, and when efficiency must be sacrificed in the name of humanity. While such reflections apply to healthcare delivery systems generally speaking, the development of morally wise and caring workers is especially crucial for work done with persons suffering from severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI). Because such persons have been thoroughly marginalized in society, drawing them back into a community of care is essential to meeting their needs. Based on my own ethnographic observations, I contend that the ethos of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) represents a refreshing departure from the rationalized treatment modalities that prevail in modern psychiatric facilities. The program, however, is becoming increasingly rationalized as it enters the mainstream, bringing pressure for more detailed management of workers’ activities. The encroachments that are likely to follow from this intensification of management may well erode some of the most morally valuable aspects of ACT work.
Open Access
Nature, History and the Dialectic of Negativity: The Category of Nature in Marx's Writings
(2018-03-01) Araujo, Chris Duarte; Winslow, Edward G.
The following dissertation examines Marxs conception of nature, including the relationship between that conception and his social theory, political philosophy, and critique of political economy. It offers an erudite defence of a novel interpretation of Marxs philosophy of nature while interrogating both historical and contemporary readings. The first portion of the interpretative thesis considers his early philosophical development, especially in relation to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer. It defends the interpretation that, during this phase in his intellectual development, Marx developed his materialist conception of history in conjunction with an historical conception of nature and the human relation to it. Part I demonstrates that this integral connection between philosophy of nature and his vision of human nature is a lasting feature of his thought, one which links his ontology to his anthropology even in his later writings. The second part of the dissertation examines Marxs middle and late writings, and it analyzes the theory of the metabolism which he elaborated during those periods in his intellectual development. Part II of the dissertation identifies important, but as of yet unacknowledged, points of connection between his theory of the metabolism and his description of precapitalist social life, account of the history of primitive accumulation, analysis of the formation of capitalist relations, demystification of political economy, growing ecological awareness, and philosophical conception of the dialectic of negativity. The final portion of the paper assumes the form of an anti-critique. It defends the interpretation that, in both the early and late writings, Marxs conception of nature is not susceptible to Frankfurt critiques of instrumental rationality and the ecological domination associated with it. While criticizing the readings offered by Schmidt and Marcuse, the final chapters of the dissertation elaborate a wholly original and deeply insightful interpretation of Marxs conception of the relationship between natural necessity and human freedom.
Open Access
No sovereign remedy: distress, madness, and mental health care in Guyana
(2022-12-14) Persaud, Savitri; Kempadoo, Kamala
This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of how mental distress is read and understood in Guyana. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews, site observations, media analysis, and document analysis (primary, secondary, tertiary, and grey literature), this research investigates (i) competing and complementary discourses and etiologies of distress; (ii) diverse care pathways and practices utilized by Guyanese to address and ease distress; (iii) and the histories, legacy of empire, and socio-politico-economic factors that inform and spring from this exploration. This research commenced in response to deaths and incidents of violence against women and girls who were labelled “mad”, “mentally ill”, and “demon possessed” in Guyanese news reports. These cases signalled the polyvalent, intersectional, and fluid ways in which Guyanese make sense of and respond to mental distress; thereby prompting research questions on belief systems, modalities of care, and the social relations that are produced, organized, and practiced as Guyanese attend to mental distress on their own terms. Interviews were conducted in Guyana with 37 helping practitioners, inclusive of medical doctors, nurses, social service agents, civil society/NGO actors, government officials at Guyana’s Ministry of Health, and religious/spiritual practitioners belonging to various faiths. Observations were carried out at the country’s National Psychiatric Hospital – informally known as the “Madhouse”. Participants emphasized how mental distress is colloquially and primarily perceived through the stigmatized and meaning-centred language of “madness”. They reported that the general public seldom uses the clinical terms “mental illness”/“mental disorder”, which reference the dominant, Western biomedical model of psychiatry. Instead, participants revealed how mental distress is expressed through an array of perceived explanatory models: biomedical; socio-economic/structural; (inter)personal; and supernatural. A major point of consensus among all 37 participants is how perceived supernatural causality is viewed as an intelligible landscape for understanding distress among the public; therefore, there is a propensity for religious/spiritual practitioners to act as first responders. Per participant accounts, Guyanese appear to embrace plurality and refuse either/or models of care. Consequently, these findings present crucial implications for theory, research, policy, and practice aimed at addressing and reducing mental distress experienced by Guyanese and fostering safe, comprehensive, responsive, and accountable public health systems.