Environmental Studies

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Open Access
A Politics of Dwelling: Local Knowledge and Linked Communities on the Lake Superior North Shore
(2015-08-28) Steiner, Edith Maria; Timmerman, Peter
This dissertation explores how stakeholders of working-class communities and First Nations in Northwestern Ontario along the Lake Superior north shore express a politics of dwelling and their own sense of place in regard to their social and natural environments. The work stresses the importance of local knowledge as a means of community building and knowledge production, and strives to map how the land and landscapes are valued by those who live and work in this region. My methodological approach combines visual methods with autoethnography, since as the researcher, I have a formative and long-term family history in the locations of my study, as well as an ongoing practice of producing personal creative projects and artworks in and about the north shore region. The dissertation’s material structure is presented as a dual construction: this written thesis and a 44 minute documentary film, Conversations on the Lake. My prior history as an independent filmmaker and lens-based visual artist has shaped my scholarly practice, so that my research findings are best expressed using a combination of textual and audio/visual methods. My primary research tool in undertaking the qualitative research interviews that support this dissertation is the camera. Following transcription and analysis, the filmed interview material was organized into the following themes: the role of class in rural northern resource-based communities, the dualisms and tensions between conservation and extraction of natural resources, the intersections of local, regional, and global politics affecting environmental themes in the area of my study, and the local landscape as a unique and relevant character in the culture of Northwestern Ontario. What my research and filmed interviews in the communities of the Lake Superior north shore region have unveiled are an evolving sense of place and belonging, as experienced by actors living and working there. Since beginning this work, new ecological and social themes have continually emerged as stories for investigation and exploration. The shifting progression of my narrative enquiry is a web of interconnected stories along a mobile, transformative geography.
Open Access
A Post-Colonial Era? Bridging Ml'kmaq and Irish Experiences of Colonialism
(2022-03-03) Alderson, Aedan; Gilbert, Liette
This dissertation explores the links between the past and present impacts of colonization in Ireland and colonization in Mikmaki (the unceded territories of the Mi'kmaq Confederacy known to Canadians as the Maritimes provinces). It asks how might deepening our understandings of these potential links inform accountable and decolonial relationships between the Irish and the Mikmaq? In doing so, it argues that comparatively examining Irish and Mikmaq experiences of colonialism can offer concrete insights not only into the way that the Irish and the Mikmaq have an interwoven past, but also the way that the legacies of colonialism are permeating everyday life in the present in both regions. Refusing colonial representations of Mi'kma'ki and recentering Mi'kmaq worldviews throughout this comparison, this dissertation presents Mi'kma'ki as a discrete and sovereign (occupied) territory. The dissertation begins by providing an overview of the geographical and sociopolitical context of Ireland and Mi'kma'ki while introducing some of the links that have caused community members in both nations to call for this type of comparative research to be completed. The second chapter explores key historical moments in Irish and Mi'kmaq history which serve not just as a foundation for understanding the historical context of current experiences of colonialism in both regions, but also highlights the way that Ireland and Mi'kma'ki have had their pasts interwoven by British colonialism and the Irish diaspora. Drawing on oral life histories gathered in the bordertowns between County Donegal and Derry/Londonderry in Ireland, as well as Eskasoni First Nation in Unama'ki (Cape Breton) in Mi'kma'ki, the third and fourth chapters respectively explore the way that Irish and Mi'kmaq community members are currently experiencing the impacts of the legacies of British colonialism in everyday life. Finally, the dissertation concludes by reiterating the main insights shared by community members around the current state of colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization in both regions, before briefly discussing the postdoctoral research (and other areas of inquiry) that are expanding the inquiry of this project further while highlighting how the Irish and Lnuk might use the insights from the project to increase their collaborations and support one another.
Open Access
Abyssal Ideology and the Amerindians of Guyana: An Eco-Crimes Analysis of Power, Discourse and Cognitive Injustice
(2018-03-01) Omrow, Delon Alain; de Costa, Ravindra
Cognitive injustice- that is, the failure to recognize the plurality of epistemologies and the manner in which people across the globe provide meaning to their existence- should be the subject of critical criminological inquiry because it is directly linked to both environmental and social injustice. This dissertation presents a comparative and critical analysis of the discourses surrounding the indigenous peoples of Guyana, the Amerindians. Massaging the parameters of green criminology and the eco-crimes framework, I synthesize Norman Faircloughs methodology known as critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos theoretical framework of Abyssal Thinking in order to capture the Amerindian experience from the dawn of colonialism to recent conservation efforts, such as the countrys very first community-owned conservation area (C.O.C.A.). In my attempt to unmask cognitive injustice via discourse, I also demonstrate how the experiences and speech of the Amerindians can challenge this injustice by exercising what Santos refers to as Post-Abyssal Thinking.
Open Access
Anticolonialism, Nationalism, and State Formation: The Rise of Pakistan
(2020-11-13) Tirmizey, Kasim Ali; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
There is ongoing popular and scholarly debate about the rise of Pakistan as a nation-state. Much of this literature frames the emergence either in cultural terms as a territorial expression of transhistorical Muslim nationhood, or in a liberal framing as the outcome of the political mobilization of the Muslim community against Hindu domination. This dissertation makes a corrective by examining the constitutive role of radical anticolonialism in the rise of Pakistan, with a focus on the province of Punjab in British India from 1880 to 1947. I argue that the formation of the Pakistani nation-state entailed the condensation of multiple political struggles over rescaling empire. Muslim nationalism reified struggles over land, food, womens bodies, and access to the colonial state as ethnic struggles between Muslims and Hindus, thus codifying class, caste and religion in essentialist terms. Despite popular energies of agrarian classes against Hindu Bania (moneylender caste) were redirected into radical anticolonialism by the Ghadar Party in the 1910s, the demand for Pakistan subsequently shifted the scale of anti-Bania antagonisms among agrarian classes onto claims for a Muslim national space. The materialization of a Muslim national space (Pakistan) and Hindu national space (India) cannot be understood in the absence of the repression of radical anticolonial movements such as the Ghadar Party, the Kirti Kisan Party, and communist organizing. When Muslim landlords foresaw that independence was inevitable and joined the Pakistan movement, those formerly associated with the Unionist Party projected their pro-landlord and pro-imperialist politics within a framework of Muslim nationalism defined by the Muslim League. The false character of decolonization in British India amounted to a passive revolution which restored and modernized imperial rule by reorganizing social hierarchies, structures of domination, and scales. This dissertation denaturalizes the scale of the nation by arguing how it is not some pre-given or transhistorical entity, but its emergence in the case of Pakistan was the outcome of the balance of forces between radical anticolonial initiatives and their repression and absorption into a restored imperial order. Passive revolution entails rescaling processes that reconfigure the vertical relationship among household, village, nation, and empire.
Open Access
Assessing Agroecological Principles at the Intervale in Burlington, Vermont: A Case Study and Multimethod Research with a Participatory Approach in a Peri-Urban Socioecological System
(2022-03-03) Juncos, Maria Alicia; Gilbert, Liette
The emerging field of urban agroecology promises to mend the prevalent unsustainable rupture between rural and urban/peri-urban agri-food endeavors since global industrial conglomerates took power. My research contributes to the efforts of mending this rupture by, first, advancing the academic discussion on how to fill an evidence-based gap on the use of the much theorized multidimensional and cross-disciplinary principles of agroecology to assess community-based agri-food systems beyond the farm level. To do so, my research uses the fifteen principles of agroecology proposed by the non-profit Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité (CIDSE, 2018). Second, my research expands the understanding of how these agroecological principles may be put into practice in different cases and scenarios, especially in urbanized environments. This investigation uses a single significant case study methodology to share a place-based experience as a possible example of urban agroecology. The case study is a 340-acre information-rich peri-urban organic agroecosystem in Burlington, Vermont, owned and managed by the Intervale Center. My research investigates how the Intervale, a non-profit organization and socioecological system, may be practicing agroecology and consider opportunities to strengthen such practices. My investigation involves a principles-focused and context-sensitive baseline assessment (inspired by Patton, 2018) using a qualitative multimethod framework and a participatory action research (PAR) approach. The multimethod framework triangulates a 'practical' PAR stream of inquiry for the co-creation of knowledge with a purposive sample of participants (semi-structured interviews with visual tools such as CIDSEs agroecological principles infographic, site mapping, and photovoicing) and a 'theoretical' stream where the researcher connects theory to practice (participatory observation, photo-documentation, and document analysis) for an integrated analysis. According to observations and participants' responses, the Intervale follows agroecological principles. The collective practices related to the agroecological principles of strengthening local food producers and community and nourishing biodiversity and soils are most prevalent at the Intervale. The organization also plays a noticeable role under the principle of enhancing the power of the local market and building on a social and solidarity economy. There are also some specific areas of intervention in the organizations operations to achieve higher levels of agroecological transformation, especially under the principles of fostering more diversity and solidarity, encouraging stronger participation of food producers, and promoting more farmer-to-farmer exchanges. Conclusively, this research reduces the evidence-based gap between the theory supporting a set of agroecological principles and their application beyond the farm level and in an urbanized setting. The comprehensive methodology and the results illuminate how the Intervale's placed-based practices could serve as an example to advance urban agroecology in North America and even other regions.
Open Access
Assessing the Benefits, Challenges and Scientific Value of Community Science Programs: A Case Study Using Bumble Bee Watch
(2022-03-03) MacPhail, Victoria Joy; Colla, Sheila R.
We are experiencing a biodiversity crisis but resources to help species are limited. Scientists are turning to community science to complement traditional scientific methods. Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are important pollinators in temperate regions, but many are in decline, and more information is needed to conserve them. The Bumble Bee Watch (BBW) program collects this through photos submitted by volunteers and identified by experts. Yet many community science programs struggle. Chapter 2 reviews common successes and challenges, offering best practices for developing and running programs. To determine whether BBW is filling knowledge gaps, Chapter 3 compares its data to the Bumble Bees of North America database (BBNA) over all years and 2010-2020. BBW recorded 41 species (BBNA had 48) from all parts of the continental US and Canada, confirmed persistence, and provided novel locations for species outside of and within the known extent of occurrence. BBW showed its greatest impact from 2010-2020 by contributing 25% of all records, 28% of all unique locations, and 32% new plant forage genera. BBW does not replace traditional surveys, but does complement them. Chapter 4 shows that B. pensylvanicus is critically endangered in Canada according to IUCN Red List criteria. BBW provided 20% of all B. pensylvanicus records and 36% of its sites over the 2007-2016 period assessed, and thus provided important information on its current abundance and distribution. No experience is required to participate in BBW, but having participants able to accurately identify species is beneficial. Chapter 5 explores the percent agreement and veracity of participant species identifications compared to experts, with the average being 53% and 56%, respectively. With better educational resources, participants may be better trained to identify species more accurately. Understanding the motivations and insights of community science participants is important. Chapter 6 discusses the results of a BBW user and expert survey: participants want to contribute to science and save the bees, and report an increase in knowledge and skills after participating. Although areas for improvement are noted, BBW is an important tool for Bombus researchers, and demonstrates the value that community science has for species conservation.
Open Access
At Home in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg: Racialized Long-Time Residents' Perspectives on Urban Development and Social Mix Planning
(2020-11-13) Chamberlain, Julie Hume; Haritaworn, Jinthana K.
After decades of stigmatization, the historically working class and immigrant neighbourhood of Wilhelmsburg, in Hamburg, Germany, is experiencing a flurry of planning and development attention from the city-state. The city evaluates neighbourhood change mainly by tracking demographics, and in particular the attraction of the white, German middle class to the island. Little is known about the qualitative experiences of long-time residents, however, and even less about the experiences of racialized people. This is consistent with the pattern of inattention to racialization in German urban research, which has led Black scholars and scholars of colour to call for more scholarship that takes seriously the role of structural and systemic racism in the production of urban space. A public ethnography informed by an intersectional, anti-racist methodology, this study responds to this call by exploring the perspectives of racialized long-time residents of Wilhelmsburg on recent developments on the island and investigating how racialized people figure in local planning. Through ethnographic interviews with nineteen residents and eight planners and politicians, as well as archival research, photography and participant sensing, the study illuminates a complex picture of development in Wilhelmsburg past and present. This dissertation draws on and extends theories of racial capitalism, the legacies of colonialism in Hamburg, racism and migration in Germany, and social mix planning and gentrification. It finds that Wilhelmsburg has a long history of devaluation as a space associated with waste and migrant labour. In contrast, the interviewed racialized residents value the island differently, as a Heimat: a place of warmth and belonging in a context that otherwise excludes them. It further finds that the citys recent social mix policies and projects in Wilhelmsburg rely upon treatment of racialized people as more displaceable under the law, and that the citys planning strategies represent a threat to racialized belonging in the neighbourhood as a result. The interviewed residents challenge the dominant planning narrative with their assessments of the effects of advancing gentrification on the neighbourhoods most vulnerable, and contest the meaning of mix with interpretations that value the islands longstanding diversity and support their hopes for a more convivial future.
Open Access
Back-to-the-Land: Analyzing Rural Anarchist Practice in Relation to Anarchist Theories of Community-Building: A Case Study of the Dragonfly and Black Fly Land Collectives
(2018-11-21) Adamiak, Joanna Maria; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
This dissertation problematizes the idea of the rural as a backwards and reactionary place and addresses the theoretical and practical contributions of anarchism to reconsidering the rural as a site of revolutionary community-building and an alternative to capitalism and state formations. I argue that anarchist theories offer a sophisticated vision of rural space because they think more concretely about the rural as an inhabited or inhabitable place informing more radical understanding of alternative community and political structures. I explore the history of intentional communities in North America and Ontario, specifically, to demonstrate the persistence of community-building experiments in rural settings and to document their alternative history. Using an empirical case study of two anarchist intentional communities located in Hastings County, Ontario, this dissertation examines how specific experiments of alternative community-building have operated in practice in relation to their anarchist principles. I situate the two collectives in the colonial history and the history of alternative communities in the area. The goals of creating anti-capitalist and decolonized communities are confronted with the geographic and political realities of land ownership. Some themes that emerged in this dissertation are private property relationships, settler relations, and ecological stewardship. While participants demonstrate a desire to move beyond private property relationships, they continue to see their responsibilities to Indigenous peoples and the environment in property terms. The anarchist ethical commitment to self-reflection opens up the importance of continually working to unlearn property and colonial relationships.
Open Access
Beyond the Colonial Divide: African Diasporic and Indigenous Youth Alliance Building for HIV Prevention
(2016-09-20) Wilson, Ciann Larose; Flicker, Sarah
This dissertation examines the history of and potential for solidarity building approaches in HIV prevention between Aboriginal and African, Caribbean and Black (ACB) - Canadian communities, through the utilization of arts-based research approaches. Colonization, conquest and slavery have and continue to shape the experiences of discrimination that are embodied and expressed in the health of these communities. This is exemplified by the disproportionate rates of HIV within both Aboriginal and ACB communities. In unpacking this complicated socio-historical embodied health issue, data was collected from two focus groups and a two-day mural-making workshop. Black and Aboriginal youth leaders were encouraged to think about and artistically express the possibilities for, and challenges to, HIV prevention and health promotion through cross-community collaboration. The analysis offered here situates these discussions in the history of social, political, and colonial relations between African diasporic and Indigenous communities in the Americas. It interrogates the possibilities for health promotion activism and HIV prevention that incorporates the arts as a communicative medium for honouring the lived experience of embodied health ills a direct opposition to Western, top-down, bio-medicalized and individualized explorations of health disparities. This dissertation includes an introduction chapter, three core chapters written in manuscript format, and a concluding chapter. In the introduction, I outline my dissertation, providing context for my inquiry and situating it at the intersections of HIV, public health, critical theory and arts- and community-based research. Each of the three core chapters are written from different perspectives. Chapter 2 is intended to highlight the large breadth of scholarship that informs my work. As such, it examines the history of racial formation and anti-colonial and anti-racist aims as they contribute to Indigenous-Black relations in the Americas. Chapter 3 is a reflective paper, written as a first person account of how I reconciled my personal history, world views, and community commitments with my engagement with different qualitative arts- and community-based methods. Chapter 4 highlights the voices of the youth participants and examines the empirical findings of my arts-based approach to engaging Black and Indigenous youth in a cross-community HIV focused health promotion intervention. Lastly, I conclude with the implications of my work for theory, practice and social mobilizing between African diasporic and Indigenous communities in envisioning possible futures.
Open Access
Beyond the End or the Means: Co-Theorizing Engagement for HIV Programming and Service Provision
(2019-03-05) Switzer, Sarah Lynne; Flicker, Sarah
Within health, community engagement is positioned as either a means, or an end. It is often framed as an apolitical, linear, and/or individualistic process, thus eschewing the relational or socio-structural factors that inform it. Although the rhetoric of engagement can be found across multiple policy, program and funding documents, the ways in which engagement is understood (or enacted) are rarely explored. As a fuzzy concept, it regularly morphs across contexts, leading many including those working in the HIV sector to note that engagement is undertheorized. Picturing Participation: Exploring Engagement in HIV Programming, Service Provision and Care is a community-based participatory research project, co-led by a team of community members, staff and academic researchers. It uses case study design and photovoice to explore how stakeholders conceptualize engagement within and across different HIV organizational sites: an AIDS service organization, a youth HIV prevention program and a sub-acute HIV hospital. This dissertation is nested in this larger project; it contains several sole and co-authored elements, including: an introduction, a community-report that provides an overview of key project findings, three stand-alone manuscripts, poetry, photography and installations. The first co-authored manuscript explores how participants use of journey metaphors illustrates their understandings of engagement as relational, temporal, and informed by organizational contexts and stakeholder roles. In the second manuscript, I put youths narratives of non-participation in conversation with decolonial and critical scholarship on the politics of refusal, neoliberalism, will, and the call to participate. This reading demonstrates how not participating can be productively read as a self-determined form of resistance. The last two chapters explore what new conditions of possibility are created for (co)-theorizing engagement if engagement is approached as a beyond. The third manuscript explores how my theoretical conceptions as a researcher/facilitator inevitably shaped the design and implementation of the methods used. I explore the methodological opportunities of bridging photovoice with site-specific installations, and working with the crafted-nature of images. The discussion proposes a new way of theorizing engagement as a dynamic, affective and pedagogical (and thus relational and ethical) process. It shares a researcher-produced installation as a site to reflect on the opportunities and tensions of doing collaborative, interdisciplinary doctoral work.
Open Access
"Bologna is a School of Activism": TransFeministQueer Autonomy and Urban Spatial Praxis
(2023-03-28) Patrick, Darren Joseph; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
“‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” is an activist ethnography of the Bologna-based transfeminist and queer autonomous collective Laboratorio Smaschieramenti (Laboratory of/for Demasculinization/Unmasking) and a history of Atlantide, the occupied and self-managed space that was its home from 1998 to 2015. The dissertation presents the Laboratorio’s distinctive approach to autonomy and argues that its praxes comprise a queer urban ecology of autonomous praxis. Positioned as an intervention into urban political ecology and queer geographies, I adopt a transversal and translational understanding of both autonomous social movements and the spatio-political praxes that sustain non-institutional knowledge production. The dissertation’s multi-method approach integrates activist archive-making, life-historical and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, media analysis, translation, and auto-inchiesta––or, collective self-inquiry––a method rooted in the Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Across six chapters, I describe the evolution of the Laboratorio and Atlantide and develop the notion of ecologies of praxis to situate the place-based production of radical theory. Chapter 1, “Towards Ecologies of TransFeministQueer Autonomous Praxis,” reviews the literatures of urban political ecology, feminist and queer ecologies, geographies of sexuality, and feminist/queer geographies, and presents a critique of the disciplinary divergence of queer from feminist geographies by way of the former field’s appeal to queer of color scholarship and intersectional analysis. Chapters 2 and 3 build on the work of collective activist archive-making both to describe the epistemopolitics of transfeministqueer knowledge production and to situate Atlantide as a distinctive kind of space in which the traditions of autonomous Marxism have been actively recomposed. Chapter 4 details the evolution of the Laboratorio and describes its four main areas of political praxis. Chapters 5 and 6 tell the story of the Laboratorio’s and Atlantide’s engagements with the municipal government of Bologna and detail the circumstances that led to the eviction of Atlantide in 2015. As a whole, “‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” argues for an ecological understanding of the intersectionality of political struggles.
Open Access
Chemical Intimacies and Toxic Publics
(2017-07-27) Hobbs, Peter David; Sandilands, Cate
In this dissertation, I detail how capitalism has turned pollution into a generally accepted form of violence perpetuated in the name of economic health. Complete with a corps of risk managers and environmental consultants, neoliberal capitalism has fashioned pollution into a universal standard that functions as an ambient form of socialization. Pollution, I contend, serves as a social apparatus, an atmospheric example of what Jacques Rancire refers to as distributing the sensible (2004). Instead of being simply a by-product or unavoidable consequence, pollution serves as a constant reminder of the production/flow of capital and of modernitys dependency on heavy industries. But beyond its obvious emissions, spills, dumps, and tailing ponds, much of the fallout of pollution remains hidden. Thus, in mapping the social significance of pollution, the dissertation stresses these two conflicting principles: pollution is constantly present but also invisible. Pollution exists in the form of microscopic particles that travel on the wind and in waterways, penetrating ecosystems, neighbourhoods, homes, and bodies so that people are exposed to its poisons as a matter of fact, as a condition of the everyday, as an emblem of ones modernity. To counter this general acceptance of pollution, I engage in an ecological storytelling that utilizes comic book imagery, along with a mixture of archival and everyday material (government reports, tourist guides, newspaper clippings, postcards, and childrens drawings), to situate the specific harm done by the ambient toxins, chemicals emitted from specific polluting industries and imposed on specific people and ecologies. I concentrate on two ethnographic sites and two polluting industries, as half of the dissertation examines the politics of lead in Toronto (tracing its historical influence and public acceptance in two working class neighbourhoods), while the other half focuses on a massive petrochemical corridor that is located in and around the small city of Sarnia (in southwestern Ontario) and immediately adjacent to the First Nation of Aamjiwnaang. In addition to the more traditional ethnographic methods adopted in the textual chapters, the comics provide a stream of countermemories that refute neoliberal capitalism and its demand for more of the same.
Open Access
Chinese International School Students Discuss Sustainability: A Mixed Methods Study in Guangdong, China
(2018-11-21) Thomas, Carly Elizabeth; Fawcett, Leesa K.
This mixed-method study was conducted at an international school near Guangzhou, China and included a total of 40 Likert-scale questionnaires, a focus group and nine individual interviews with the 100% Han Chinese student population. Significant results demonstrated that many of the ideas about sustainability shared by students were interconnected and could not easily be separated, that students felt that awareness was an important first step to acting sustainably, that despite moving around students were connected to special places and that this student population was able to internalize seemingly contradictory ideas about sustainability. While this study focuses on a specific student population, several strategies for teachers are proposed, which may prove effective in any classroom around the world. Including the inclusion of humans in ecological models, as assignments designed to help students see the hidden consequences of their choices and how a big impact is made through many small impacts.
Open Access
Climate Justice: Its Meanings, Its Struggles, and Its Prospects Under Liberal Democracy and Capitalism
(2018-03-01) Saad, Aaron Imran; Perkins, Patricia Elaine
The term climate justice, despite wide usage, defies easy definition. I argue that in order to appreciate it in its full complexity, climate justice is best understood as a moral framework with 2 facets. Facet 1 allows us to identify the various moral wrongs or concerns that are either causing, caused by, or raised by climate change while facet 2 allows us to understand how struggles to win responses to climate change that address those moral concerns are being organized. It is this second facet that I explore at length in this dissertation by identifying different fronts in the struggle for climate justice. A first front I refer to as (a) climate justice as climate ethics, in which rigorous moral philosophical reasoning is deployed to shape the creation of a just global agreement governing the distribution of climate burdens and benefits among nations. A second front is (b) the climate justice of the climate movement, which uses several prominent social movement strategies to attempt to make governing elites democratically accountable to moral demands for climate action. However, progress on both of these fronts is constrained by the logics of capitalism and liberal representative democracy (liberalism or the liberal order), which together filter out all but a narrow range of climate responses. I therefore argue that it is necessary to turn to a third front, (c) climate justice as just society, which seeks to disrupt liberalisms ideological hold in order to justify alternative institutional arrangements that can form the basis of a society that is simultaneously more just and better able to respond to the climate crisis. I identify political projects in the Leap Manifesto and in a capabilities approach to justice that can potentially make progress on this third front.
Open Access
Common Health: The Role of Non-Profit Organizations in Supporting Community Action for Health Equity and Justice
(2020-05-11) Fursova, Yulia; Gilbert, Liette
This dissertation explores the ways in which reporting requirements, evaluations, management decisions and other metrics and processes contribute to a growing gap between community development goals of community health centres and their practice. My argument is that there is a gap between the community development mandate of non-profit organizations and their practices, which is increasingly shaped toward direct service-delivery and steered away from the advocacy and community development pillars of their mandates. As a result, the capacity of non-profit organizations to support equitable community participation is curbed. Such a gap is largely facilitated through funding relations that prioritise functional accountability and results-based performance measurement that are consistent with extractivist capitalism. Extractivist goals of neoliberal capitalism imposed on non-profits undermine the goals of equity and social justice in urban community development. The purpose of this research is a careful examination and explication of power relations in everyday work of practitioners in the non-profit sector. I examine non-profit organizations as civil society actors, situated in the broader context of neoliberal capitalism where some actors are subordinate to others, and where subordination results from unequal access to and distribution of resources. I employ institutional ethnography and participatory action research as a methodology. I collected data from two community health centres and one inter-organizational network located in Torontos priority neighbourhoods and interviewed community volunteers, frontline workers, management staff and funders. I also reviewed documents such as reporting requirements and templates, evaluation frameworks and reports. In order to capture the ways in which reporting and functional accountability systems normalize extractivist processes in the non-profit sector, I constructed maps and diagrams to make such processes explicit. My research analyses how the role of non-profit organizations in regard to community action is shaped within capitalist power relations. To counteract and resists extractivist processes, I propose directions for strengthening the role of non-profit organizations as partners in collaborative processes involving co-production with community members.
Open Access
Communicating Climate Change: An Examination of Narrative Intuition, Transmedia Acumen, and Emotional Intelligence in the Presentation of the Transmedia Emotional Engagement Storytelling (TREES) Model
(2022-08-08) Osborne, Neil Stuart; Etcheverry, Jose
This dissertation contextualizes a new model to help design more effective communication campaigns aimed at addressing the climate emergency. My multi-pronged research approach led me to discover three key competencies, or abilities—(1) Narrative Intuition, (2) Transmedia Acumen, and (3) Emotional Intelligence—that can be combined to bring about deeper and lasting emotional engagement with climate change storyworlds. The public is inundated with climate change discourse unlike ever before, yet most of us remain superficially engaged with solutions to the crisis because of a multifaceted set of challenges that are unique to climate change communications. To this end, climate change communicators should consider the efficacy of narrative affect—or how affective experiences result in varying levels of emotional engagement and ultimately influence how people live out their lives. To transport people into climate change storyworlds, this dissertation asserts that transmedia storytelling, or the worldbuilding process, can place a renewed emphasis on the affective dimensions of our engagement with climate change. Across five chapters, I use a transmedial econarratological lens to answer two core research questions: (1) How is a successful transmedia storytelling climate change campaign structured? (2) What does a novel transmedia storytelling model for the modern climate change campaign comprise? In Chapter 1, I affirm that narrative building can serve as an effective strategy for climate change campaigns. Chapter 2 is divided into four parts that explore the prevailing challenges that surround climate change communications, as well as, theories of narrative, transmedial narrative, and engagement, and in parallel, the Degree of Narrativity, Degree of Transmediality, and Degree of Engagement—the main branches of the TREES Model I present in Chapter 5. In Chapter 3, I highlight the ethnographic methodological lens I used to conduct my research. In Chapter 4, I examine the structure and best practices of two exemplary transmedia storytelling campaigns. Finally, in Chapter 5, I elaborate on the origins of my TREES Model to introduce three key competencies used in the production of a storyworld that evokes emotional engagement with audiences. This document concludes with a summary of recommendations to inspire additional research.
Open Access
Contexts, Conditions and Methods Conducive to Knowledge Co-Production: Three Case Studies Involving Scientific and Community Perspectives in Arctic Wildlife Research
(2019-03-05) McCarney, Paul C. M.; Thiemann, Gregory
Decision-makers require current and robust information to address the effects of social-ecological changes facing ecosystems, wildlife, and humans; however, research defined by single disciplines and knowledge systems is often challenged in fully representing the complexity of such problems. There is a recognized need to include the perspectives of academic and local knowledge holders in research as evidence argues this can produce more robust knowledge and lead to greater public acceptance of policy. Knowledge co-production has been proposed as a research approach that can include academic and non-academic actors in addressing complex problems that transcend disciplinary and epistemological boundaries and have societal and scientific significance. While knowledge co-production has gained attention in environmental research in many regions, its application has not been extensively explored in the Arctic. This research used a case study approach to examine the contexts, conditions, and methods that support knowledge co-production on wildlife issues with Canadian Arctic communities. Three cases were selected to examine knowledge co-production in the context of a past research study, an ongoing study, and to consider the pre-conditions necessary for knowledge co-production to benefit future research. Data collection included semi-structured interviews, workshops, and participant observation with scientists and Inuit community members involved in ringed seal research in Kugaaruk and Iqaluit and fisheries research in Pangnirtung, Nunavut. Results indicate that Arctic wildlife research can benefit from knowledge co-production. There are particular structural and process conditions that help facilitate successful knowledge co-production and establishing these conditions requires deliberate work on the part of researchers and community members involved. Establishing shared goals and problem definitions, creating the space to identify and share positionalities and perspectives on issues, and clarifying roles of academic and community actors all emerged as important conditions in the cases. Further, results suggest that semi-structured interviews and purposefully designed and facilitated thematic workshops provide the flexibility to create the time and space needed for participants to learn about and engage with one anothers values, perspectives, and priorities. This research shows that when effort is made to establish the necessary conditions for knowledge co-production early on in the research process, projects can produce knowledge that is perceived as more credible, salient, and legitimate by all involved.
Open Access
Economics from the Top Down: Does Hierarchy Unify Economic Theory
(2018-11-21) Fix, Blair Armand; Perkins, Patricia Elaine
What is the unit of analysis in economics? The prevailing orthodoxy in mainstream economic theory is that the individual is the ultimate unit of analysis. The implicit goal of mainstream economics is to root macro-level social structure in the micro-level actions of individuals. But there is a simple problem with this approach: our knowledge of human behavior is hopelessly inadequate for the task at hand. Faced with real-world complexities, economists are forced to make bold (and seldom tested) assumptions about human behavior in order to make models tractable. The result is theory that has little to do with the real world. This dissertation investigates an alternative approach to economics that I call economics from the top down. This approach begins with the following question: what happens when we take the analytical focus off of individuals and put it into social hierarchy? The effect of this analytical shift is that we are forced to deal with the realities of concentrated power. The focus on hierarchy leads to some surprising discoveries. First, I find evidence that hierarchical organization has a biophysical basis. I show that institution size (firms and governments) is strongly correlated with rates of energy consumption, and that the growth of institutions can be interpreted as the growth of social hierarchy. Second, I find that hierarchy plays an important role in shaping income and income distribution. I find that income scales strongly with hierarchical power (defined as the number of subordinates under ones control), and that hierarchical power affects income more strongly than any other factor measured. Lastly, using an empirically informed model of the hierarchical structure of US firms, I find that hierarchy plays a dominant role in shaping the income distribution tail. These results hint that hierarchy can be used to unify the study of economic growth (understood in biophysical terms) and income distribution. I conclude by making the first prediction of how the concentration of hierarchical power should relate to the growth of energy consumption. This prediction sheds new light on the origin of inequality. While this top down approach to economics is in its infancy, the results are encouraging. Focusing on hierarchy gives fresh insight into many of the important questions facing society insight that cannot be obtained by focusing on individuals.
Open Access
Expanding the Praxis of Indigenous Rights: Alternatives to Colonial Relations in the Regional Land Use Planning Process of the Mushkegowuk Cree
(2018-05-28) Bowie, Ryan Leslie David; Costa, Ravindra de
This research examines the conflict between provincial and Indigenous land use planning approaches in northern Ontario that involve the traditional territories of the Mushkegowuk Cree. Specifically, I examine how the politics of resurgence were evident in the Mushkegowuk Regional Land Use Planning initiative (2008-2015) in ways that challenged or broadened the conception of rights reconciliation envisioned in the Ontario governments Far North Act (2010). Significant tensions often exist between the goals of state directed environmental governance and management initiatives, and the needs and aspirations of Indigenous communities. Therefore, Indigenous communities in some instances have unilaterally developed their own initiatives, shifting the praxis of rights from participation in the institutions of the state, towards autonomous nation-building exercises. The Mushkegowuk Land Use Planning initiative is representative of this shift in rights praxis where Indigenous driven environmental governance and management processes potentially provide for more robust foundations to realize community goals, and for negotiating with state governments and other interests. The dissertation explores how a politics of resurgence might transcend the sphere of culture to support self-determination in the governance and management of Indigenous homelands. It does so by first developing a theory of resurgent rights praxis by examining Indigenist thinking on the subjects of self-determination and cultural resurgence. Second, the institutional development of land use planning in northern Ontario is tracked, with specific attention to the Far North Initiative and development of the Far North Act. Third, the Mushkegowuk Regional Land Use Planning initiative is examined, focusing on the process captured by documentation and meeting minutes. Lastly, interviews with several people involved with planning at the Mushkegowuk Council and First Nations community levels are analyzed to interrogate the goals, the role of cultural and political traditions in planning, and how Omushkego relationships with their lands are defined and made relevant to land use planning in the Mushkegowuk initiative.
Open Access
Flooding in Benue State (Nigeria): A Profile of Institutional Neglect
(2021-03-08) Agada, Susan; Ali, Syed Harris
With progressively devastating consequences, flooding has become increasingly common in Nigeria, particularly in Benue State. In studying repeated flood disaster situations in this state, a discernable pattern may be identified in regard to the inadequate and sometimes complete absence of institutional response and recovery strategies. Despite the continued impacts flood disasters have on both humans and the environment in Nigeria, little research has explored in detail the social and political circumstances that foster these disaster situations. Earlier conceptualization of disasters as purely scientific events in disaster research, has since the early 1960s been replaced by a perspective which views disasters as systematic events having deep institutional roots with social catalysts that have incubated over long periods of time. This premise forms the basis of the social vulnerability approach, which asserts that in the assessment of hazards and disaster risks, the consideration of social vulnerability must be given equal importance as the purely physical or scientific criteria in evaluation. In adopting the social vulnerability approach, this research seeks to analyze the political and socio-economic circumstances within which flooding in Nigeria regularly occurs. The study takes as its point of departure, the 2012 flooding event. While the social vulnerability approach identifies the factors that engender vulnerable social circumstances, it does not analyze how these factors are created. This gap in the existing research creates a methodological challenge for those striving to link their empirical work to the conceptual work that is currently available. My research addresses this limitation in the existing disaster research literature by identifying and analyzing Institutional Neglect as the root of social vulnerability. Based on a case study methodology, the research adopts various qualitative methods including questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and personal observations to understand how flooding disasters in Nigeria result from forms of social vulnerability that are rooted in Institutional Neglect. In this light, this research adopts a critical interdisciplinary orientation, especially in its engagement with Development Studies. This is because, ultimately, Institutional Neglect is a problem of development. As such, the introduction and conclusion chapters address the flooding within the context of development.