Social & Political Thought

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Open Access
The Univocity of Attention: ADHD and the Case for a Renewed Self-Advocacy
(2023-03-28) Brown, Andrew Ivan; Martin, Aryn
This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography and socio-philosophical analysis to answer the following questions: What is the current state of ADHD’s onto-epistemological status in contemporary discourse? Is an equivalent to critical autism studies possible for ADHD? Specifically, is it possible to refigure ADHD’s ontology as an affirmative difference rather than a deficit? Drawing from my own experiences living with ADHD, as well as anecdotal and ethnographic accounts from my engagement with ADHD self-advocacy communities, I put various critical social scientific theories “to the test,” including Hacking’s looping effects, structuralist-functionalist’s medicalization and social control, Foucault’s and Rose’s theories of subjectification and governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, the fold and related antipsychiatry approaches (e.g., in mad studies literature), and historical materialist theories of the pathologies of late-stage capitalism. My findings indicate that there is something specific about ADHD’s symptoms that pushes back against the often-totalizing nature of these critical theories. I also draw from science and technology studies to conduct an ethnographic study of an ADHD clinic in Japan, to explore how this specificity of ADHD “travels” in cross-cultural contexts without being reduced to biology or culture. The results of my research indicate that the ontological legitimacy of ADHD (what qualifies it as existing, and what it means for it to exist) in contemporary discourse has little to do with its purported neurobiological or genetic underpinnings. Instead, popular ontological beliefs appear to “swing” between two poles of what I call the “dialectic of medicalization”: in one direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of identity (a disease entity, human kind, brain type, medical label, and so on); in the other direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of individual variation (neurobiological diversity, “human distress,” statistically-associated symptoms, genetic correlates, and so on). I show how this dialectic keeps ADHD in conceptual purgatory, helps to explain the history and current state of ADHD discourse, and contributes to ADHD misrecognition and harm. Borrowing from Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (1994), I call for a renewed ADHD self-advocacy that breaks free from this dialectic by reformulating ontologies of ADHD in terms of its “difference in itself.” My dissertation arrives at a position compatible with critical disability studies and critical autism studies, though in a way that speaks to the specificity of ADHD’s affirmative differences rather than reducing them to the generality of neurodiversity.
Open Access
The Esoteric, the Islamicate, and 20th Century World Literature
(2023-03-28) Amoui Kalareh, Kurosh; Boon, Marcus B.
By exploring the intersections of the esoteric and the islamicate in a series of 20th century literary works from disparate global locations, this dissertation maps out a constellation of countercultural world literature as a model for further advancing the study of literature and esotericism in a planetary context. Chapters are focused on literary works of Iranian Sādeq Hedāyat (1903-1951), Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and the cut-up collaborations of American William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and British-Canadian Brion Gysin (1916-1986). Using the statement 'writing is magic and labour,' I argue that these four authors yearned to attain ‘magic’ in their creative writing, while each had their own distinct definition and understanding of what this ‘magic’ would be. These definitions and understandings have been largely shaped by each author’s particular encounters with esoteric and islamicate discourses; they are also products of their ‘labour’—practices and strategies of writing and research affected by the social and political power dynamics of the fields of global cultural production and circulation. Hedāyat’s conception of magic, formed through encounters with European, Islamic, and Zoroastrian esoteric discourses, chiefly refers to practices and texts associated with the ancient magus (Zoroastrian priestly class) that through centuries of religious conflict have transfigured into something distant and incomprehensible. This magic becomes the subject of extensive folklore research for Hedāyat, and is further used and invoked in his works of fiction. For Borges, magic refers to the unexplainable quality of the aesthetic events that flees rational justification. His explorations in pantheism that expand to a range of esoteric currents such as Kabbalah and Gnosticism, find in the islamicate a culture that has grappled with questions on the nature of divinity and on writing being sacred and magical. In the cut-up collaborations of Burroughs-Gysin, the magic of writing is in the randomness of the process as well as the speech act of language, while its labour is primarily dependent on using scissors instead of conventional instruments of writing. Inspired by the islamicate milieu of post-war Tangier, Burroughs-Gysin opened up new possibilities for writing and for human-machine collaborations that are still influencing the electronic literature of the 21st century.
Open Access
The Open City: A Grammatology of Migrant-Rights Movements and the Logic of Sovereignty
(2023-03-28) Correia, Tyler; Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
In the following work I apply a grammatological method of analysis to the concomitant objects of a logic of sovereignty and migrant-rights politics. Drawing on the analytical tools of genealogy, etymology and pragmatics outlined by Jacques Derrida, I argue that a portable grammar of emplaced possibility generated by migrant-rights movements situated in cities (sanctuary politics in Toronto, Canada, the sans-papier in Paris, and Sheffield UK’s “Cities of Sanctuary” movement) give rise to novel and significant changes in political discourse, generating articulations of a democracy of strangers, common right, solidarity beyond citizenship, and an unprecedented notion of freedom. Using this unorthodox method, I find that a history of Western logocentrism is constituted by an economy of translations not exclusive to its privileged subject or territorial boundary—especially involving circuits of meaning and tracing encounters with pre-Hellenic and Arabic cultures. In turn, the traditio or ‘official tradition’ of an interiorized ‘West’ passed down from Greece to Rome to the vernacular present is the product of a logic of sovereignty through which the repetition of questions that already imply internally homogeneous community against their ‘exteriors’ also generate assumptions around the author and authority of that community from Plato onward. From this vantage point, an international system of nation-states is understood to compulsively give rise to emergent technologies of border enforcement and extra-territorialization, detention, deportation and encampment. In departure from this logic, and signaling the possibilia of radically new institutional frameworks, attention to migrant-rights movements supports a distinct grammar of cosmopolitan democracy not yet captured by scholars, including a research project uncovering genealogies of cities as already plural and interdependent, etymologies of sanctuary, hospitality and civic refuge, and prefiguring institutions of welcome within a globalized world (in particular, parliaments of unrepresented subjects, universities as everyday critical sites of public engagement, and technological networks of vigilant anticipation of the arrival of newcomers). The amalgam of these theoretical and practical elements I refer to as the open city.
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.
Open Access
THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING TO BLACK CANADA(S)
(2022-12-14) Mohammed, Ola; Sanders, Leslie; Kempadoo, Kamala
This dissertation, Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s) develops the concept, Black Nowheres, and its two registers—now here and know here—to understand how the pervasive conditions of anti-Blackness structure the world and can be registered in everyday sound and sonic practices. I employ a range of unsettled listening practices to sonically think and grapple with the dynamics of Black being and Blackness in Canada—particularly how Black people are treated by the Canadian Nation State—given the Nation’s complex relationship to Blackness and Black people. This dissertation also registers how, in spite of the violence that establishes Black nowheres, Black people assert generative sonic practices that insist on knowing Black life on different terms. This dissertation is thematically organized by key tropes that are persistent in both Black Studies and Sound Studies: Noise, Voice, and Soundscape. While these tropes thematically organize the chapters/tracks of the dissertation, I engage in practices of thinking about—as well as thinking with and through—Black sonic practices to register the nuances of Black sociality in Canada. As such, each chapter registers the nuanced dynamics of what I name Black nowheres to understand how Black life “is constituted through vulnerability to the overwhelming force of anti-blackness and white supremacy, and yet not capitulating to only [sic] be known by these same forces […]” (Campt, 2017, p. 23). In shifting the focus from fixed readings of sounds and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada to listening to what sounds, and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada, do, this dissertation shifts our relation from one of total mastery and legibility of Black Canada(s) to insisting we unfold and reveal the intricacies of Black being and Blackness in Canada without limit.
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
Turning Japanese: Japanization Anxiety, Japan-Bashing, and Reactionary White American Heteropatriarchy in Reagan-Bush Era Hollywood Cinema
(2022-10-04) Urie, Andrew William; Forsyth, James Scott
Envisioned as a contribution to American Studies or, as it is now so often termed, American Cultural Studies, this dissertation examines how popular Hollywood films of the Reagan-Bush era registered prominent US anxieties about Japan's then burgeoning economic empowerment and the shifting cultural currents of a globalizing and socioeconomically transforming America. Focusing specifically on the films Gung Ho (dir. Ron Howard, 1986), Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988), Black Rain (dir. Ridley Scott, 1989), Mr. Baseball (dir. Fred Schepisi, 1992), and Rising Sun (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1993), I explore how these films articulated "Japan-bashing" practices and "Japanization anxieties" of the era in alignment with reactionary white heteropatriarchal backlash politics, which surged as white men found their socioeconomic hegemony and privilege challenged by globalization, affirmative action, and the rise of the professional career woman. Arguing that these films constitute rich cultural-historical repositories of a pivotal period in American history, I demonstrate how they registered reactionary white heteronormative fears of being "Japanized" via emasculating succumbence to economic conquest, thereby yielding fecund insights into the psychosocial zeitgeist of a reactionary Reagan-Bush era that continues to resonate with us today. Inspired by the theoretical methodologies of neo-Gramscianism and neo-Orientalism, my dissertation is ultimately best defined as a work of American cultural history that is oriented towards an overarching cultural political economy approach.
Open Access
The Hegelian-Marxian Machinery of History: Cedric J. Robinson, Unilinearity and the Dialectic Project of Liberation
(2022-08-08) Khan, Salmaan Abdul Hamid; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
Through his life’s work Cedric J. Robinson had developed a historiographic and theoretical critique of Marxism that exposed it as reductive, Eurocentric, and built upon idealistic positions that did not reflect the concrete conditions of reality itself. However, his critical intervention has been largely ignored and where it has been addressed, it was dismissed as having engaged in a misreading or reductive engagement with Marxism which is otherwise signified as a much more dynamic and reflexive philosophy. The basic intention of this dissertation then has been to defend one aspect of Robinson’s critique of Marxism – his characterization of it as Eurocentric– through both drawing on Robinson’s work itself and through supporting his conclusions by way of my own intervention into debates concerning Marx’s Eurocentricity and the limitations that thus spring from this characterization. This supportive aspect has been carried out through two sections: 1.) through a contextualization of Marxian philosophy in its appropriation of the Eurocentric Hegelian philosophical and historical system, and 2.) through critical engagements with contemporary literature that seeks to disprove the claim that Marxism is in fact Eurocentric. The combined sections of this dissertation go beyond the intended defense of Robinson’s criticisms of Marxian philosophy and carry implications for past and ongoing debates concerning the efficacy of Marxism as a theory of liberation for those people and populations that fall outside of its otherwise restrictive parameters. This dissertation encourages the reader to conclude with the sense that: ‘Robinson was indeed right. Marxism really is inherently antagonistic to both an anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. And I would like to read more of what he had to say’.
Open Access
Power on the Plantation Complex: Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics
(2022-08-08) Michelakos, Jason Michael; Leps, Marie-Christine
This study examines how planters in Barbados, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, exercised three modes of power (sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality) in the management of those enslaved. The first part of this dissertation examines how the capture, incarceration, transportation, and sale of enslaved Africans and those subjugated under regimes of unfree labour, were carried out by Imperial agents, slave-traders, and planters, through the geo-economic/political ordering of sovereign power. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate how practices of surveillance, slave-labour, punishment, and resistance realized a shift in the dominant mode of power being exercised on the plantation from sovereignty to discipline. The third, and final part of this dissertation, reveals how planters initiated pro-natalist policies through the deployment of an incentive structure, and how physicians and slave managers coordinated this governmental strategy. Throughout this work I explore how the slave vessel, colonial marketplace, and institutions of confinement, connect the economic, juridical, and political dimensions of plantation slavery as a dispositif of capitalist exploitation. These zones of exchange exhibit how the organizational synergy of Barbadian plantations shaped them into a complex biopolitical and thanatopolitical regime of racism, punishment, and managerialism.
Open Access
The Kleinian Subject in the Anthropocene: Posthumanism, Narration of Crisis, and the Ethics of Reparative Care
(2022-03-03) Ritchie, Nicole Anne; Cavanagh, Sheila L.
This dissertation utilizes psychoanalytic theory to understand the anxieties that construct narrations of and demand intervention into the Anthropocene, a period marked by crises associated with human impact. I specifically bring Melanie Klein's theory of object relations to this contemporary sociopolitical context by analyzing the role of subjectivity in posthumanist theorizing, focusing on new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In response to feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical race concerns for the intersectional human within the posthumanities, this research questions the sociopolitical impact of human desires, fears, and defences on conceptions of repair in anthropocentric crisis and subsequent calls for care-taking in our more-than-human world. First, I explore how the foundational arguments of the posthumanities resonate with the anxieties of Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and the subsequent defence mechanism of manic reparation. I humanize the drive of posthumanist theorizing through Klein's subject and its constitutive formation around a fear of annihilation, positioning the desire to be posthuman as a collective negotiation of threat and security in the face of crisis. Next, I discuss Klein's conception of non-manic reparation and the sociopolitical import of reparative aspirations for the Anthropocene. I specifically focus on the nature of reparative desires in the face of ecological crisis and climate change and argue for the critical necessity of reconciling with reality's ambivalence. Finally, I speculate on the how the individuated conceptualization of Kleinian subjectivity can be brought to notions of collective care in the context of the Anthropocene. I provide a close reading of reparation as a matter of care, politicizing Klein for this contemporary sociopolitical moment and contemplating both the psychic life of engaging in ethical obligations of care for ecological crisis and the critical role of narration in fostering care. Throughout, I illustrate the sociopolitical consequences of calls for caretaking in the Anthropocene through reference to museology as an exemplary realm for the public interpretation and curation of narratives of external reality. I analyze how storytelling practices are tethered to ontological conditions and consider how the perception of crisis impacts the activation of different capacities for engagement or intervention into crisis.
Open Access
Relations and States
(2022-03-03) Bukan, Yasar; Visano, Livy A
This dissertation attempts to re-interpret the concept of relations as such and examines their actualization in relation to the relations of states. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines past interpretations of the concept of relations and provides a different understanding of the concept. It argues that relations should not be perceived solely as that which occurs either as an extension of things or as between things, rather that relations are such phenomena that can also actualize as autonomous existents alongside of other existents that constitute reality. Furthermore, it argues that to adequately understand relations as such one must study conditions such as de-relationism, arelationism, and not-relating, conditions that are not necessarily the binary opposites of relations but forms of realities that coexist with relations as such. It further aims to develop a relational way, a method per se, that can best be utilized in the relatal analysis of relations, in the ways in which relations exist, and in the ways in which relations relate and un-relate. In the second part, the dissertation primarily focuses on certain broad categories of the relations of states and of the world. For instance, it examines the concept of the world, the current state of the relations of the world, the concepts of relations of states, inter-state relations, as well as categories such as the state of incompleteness, uncertainty, and relations that are oriented towards the future.
Open Access
Orientalism and its Challenges: Feminist Critiques of Orientalist Knowledge Production
(2021-07-06) Alghamdi, Sameha Gaber; Agathangelou, Anna M.
Orientalism has shaped conventional Euro-American epistemologies and approaches towards non-US/European people. Orientalism, as a set of epistemologies has enabled the co-production of multiple violence and imperial domination. The production of Orientalist knowledge is not only an archive; but rather it is still inscribed and alive in much of the knowledges produced about a notion of the Arab world. Problematic portrayals and representations of Arab and Muslim women are inscribed in contemporary knowledge systems. This thesis aims to examine how can feminist critiques of the concept/notion of epistemes and approaches about the other of Orientalism open up new ways of understanding knowledge production. In what ways do such insights contribute toward decolonizing the dynamics of Eurocentric knowledge and power relations in literature and representation? This dissertation grapples with a number of feminist critiques of Orientalism in order to theorize notions of female agency and problematize depictions of passivity, sexuality and dominant gendered systems. Analytically, I concentrate on the work of Edward Said. I draw extensively on different feminist critiques of his work and show how orientalist knowledges and understandings co-construct Orientalism and Eurocentric genealogies of knowledge and power. Feminists have problematized Said's literal inattention to the role of sexuality and gender in Orientalist discourses. However, Said's work has contributed to the discussions about the human of modernity by arguing that this human is a man whose masculinity has been pivotal in domination of others and the other women. Ultimately, I produce a feminist analytic by stretching Said's Orientalism through a reading that points to how Orientalism is a set of complex relations between knowledge (i.e., representations) and power and has concrete material implications on how we understand and organize subjects to challenge the representation of Arab and Muslim women as passive or exotic some representations that have come to be universalized.
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
The Affectivity of White Nation-Making: National Belonging, Human Recognition and the Mournability of Black Muslim Women
(2021-03-08) Mendes, Jan-Therese; Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
Drawing Canadian and Swedish national imaginaries into comparative dialogue, this dissertation considers how ideals of liberal, anti-racism paradoxically persist alongside white supremacist investments in the sanctity and authenticity of a white citizenry as well as the terror of Black and Muslim subjects. A sense of fear, threat and vulnerability are examined as useful bad feelings nurtured for the ends of white nation-making; while, the contingencies for assimilation reveal how ideals of racial tolerance can simultaneously be retained. Engaging with tropes of rescue-ability this dissertation proposes that the Muslim woman who performs witnessable acts of assimilation and possession can allay the terror of Islam that she otherwise represents. A death by honour-killing however is what signifies her most triumphant assimilatory act and greatest prospect for national and human belongings. White liberal solidarities solidify through a collective mourning and horror over her brutal death and thus fear of violent, unassimilable Muslims can persists. Contemplating the refusal of Black humanity, the unremarkableness of Black death, the dread of Black reproduction, and the fetishization of Black womens pain this dissertation questions whether assimilatory futures and mournable human life are equally available to Black Muslim women. Analyzing case studies from Canadian and Swedish media, I argue that Black Muslim women must figuratively kill their Black and Muslim selves for the possibility of being re-born into the grievability of Canadian or Swedish whiteness. Even so, the narratives of Afro-Swedish Muslim women reveals how one might trespass on the dictates of assimilation by refusing to wholly surrender the antagonist parts of the self. Women become slippery subjects who are unpredictable in their acculturation. Public humiliation, however, is wielded as a painful pedagogy to discipline she who troubles the matrices of assimilation. Finally, by analyzing representations of the Black Muslim female figure in Canadian performance and visual art, this dissertation explores what it might mean to release desires for national and human belonging by choosing to embody the alien or the monster. In this way, women are visually displayed as releasing the demands of assimilation as they willfully inhabit the non-human.
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
Revisiting Adam Smith and the Politics of Commercial Societies
(2020-08-28) Levy-Tessier, Maxime Alexandre; Breaugh, Martin
The following dissertation investigates the connection between the division of labour, political subjection and the psychology of authority in Adam Smiths body of work to further his analysis of commercial societies. By shedding light on this connection, I endeavour to examine what Smith under-theorizes: how power relations are organized in commercial societies to account for their historical specificity. Although this dissertation focuses on what remains under-theorized in Smiths account of commercial societies, it proceeds through an internal critique of his system of thought. In other words, I use what Smith says about commercial societies as a springboard to say something new about them on his terms. In so doing, I aim to show that there are still unexplored avenues to Smiths conceptual framing of commercial societies that provide relevant insights on how societies organize power in the age of manufacturing and the free-market. Although recent scholarship is amenable to reading Smith as a multidisciplinary thinker, his reflections on the division of labour, political subjection and the psychology of authority are still treated separately within his political theory. Typically, Smiths account of the division of labour in Wealth of Nations is used to discuss his economic theory. It seldom connects to his politics and where it does, the discussion is usually limited to Smiths ideas on government expenditure as a mitigating force against the worst moral and economic excesses of commercial societies. This has fuelled the widespread and false impression that Smiths politics rarely go beyond the role of the State in economic affairs. For its part, Smiths principles of government in Lectures on Jurisprudence (from which his ideas on political subjection derive) are usually referenced to challenge this false impression by emphasizing his engagement with the latest political debates of his time. This separates Smiths politics from his economics even further by emphasizing their distinction and thus, discourages any exploration of how the negative social effects of the division of labour prepare political subjection in commercial societies. The same can be said for Smiths psychological account of authority in Theory of Moral Sentiments: while it is sometimes broached alongside his principles of government, its relationship to the organization of labour in commercial societies is never fully developed. By bringing these themes together, I intend to engage in a more comprehensive discussion of Smiths politics to better account for the organization and distribution of power in commercial societies.
Open Access
Uncertain Grounds: Key Moves in the Making of Modernity, from Tudor England to the Globalized Present
(2020-05-11) Miceli, Vanessa Nathalie; Canefe, Nergis
Which historical lens and what scope can capture modernitys complex social, political, economic, and epistemic permutations? Using an historical interpretive lens to explore contingent moments in its making, this work seeks to describe a core dynamic within modernity. In modernity, the assertion of freedom from rooted systems of meaning ushers in radical uncertainty. In response, new certainties are constructed for guiding human action, but being grounded upon indeterminacy these are necessarily provisional and open ended. Uncertainty thus grows in proportion to the expansion of freedom and the abstraction of foundations, making the drives to know and to control insatiable. To narrate a history of this dynamic, I frame it as a series of strategies for grounding upon groundlessness: surveying and mapping, enclosing and improving; risking and insuring. This narrative is largely set in the particular soil of British history, where the discourses surrounding efforts to ground property and knowledge upon new certainties uncovers the contingent nature of truth and legitimacy in modernity. In the Tudor period customary knowledge of the land was delegitimized as estate surveyors began to measure and represent land from the distanced perspective of geometry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the discourse of improvement legitimized the practice of enclosure as the means of securing certainty of ownership in order to cultivate endless growth, while Baconian science pursued a parallel strategy. In the eighteenth century, risk was objectified in probability theory and traded in insurance and investment markets. Since the nineteenth century risk management has been applied to populations and has become the guarantor of security and the means of governing societies across the globe. But perpetual efforts to know and contain risks have only generated more insecurity. I conclude that while founded upon freedom, modernity is a compulsion that draws us ever further from the soil of particularity. Using an historical interpretive approach and drawing on the histories of science, capitalism and insurance, as well as theories of modernity, property and risk, this project is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the making of key dynamics within modernity.
Open Access
"One of these days I'm going to get Organiz-ized": Insomnia as the Arrhythmic Experience of Modernity
(2020-05-11) Meadows, Craig; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
The proliferation of insomnia and related discourses since the 1970s has produced an expanding moral economy of sleep. The discursive field of sleep has been defined by the production of biological assumptions of the nature of sleep in the sleep sciences, their distribution through clinical modes of hygienic and pharmacological intervention into disturbed sleep, and their popularization in media discourses of risk, suffering and management. My research begins by identifying the situation of sleep as a discursive object in the sleep sciences, which I contrast with experiential representations of insomnia in the film Withnail and I (1987). The purpose is to dislodge insomnia pathology and instead to understand it as an arrhythmic modality. What emerges in this discourse, however, is a romanticized notion of the discordant body unable to integrate to the rhythms of capital. I then examine the role of sleeplessness in the production of white masculine suffering in neoliberal capitalism through Taxi Driver (1976) and Fight Club (1999). In contrast to this privileged form of androcentric insomnia, I then turn to biographical accounts of insomnia by Gayle Greene and Patricia Morrisoe, who narrate the effects of sleeplessness and their gendered movements through consumer culture and clinical spaces in their attempts to restore what they understand to be natural sleep. The limitations of this embrace of natural sleep as an object of desire is then opened in examining the epistemological foundations of the sleep sciences. The objectification of sleep in the sleep sciences proffered a means of accessing a biological substratum that would define the proper expression of sleep. Rejecting this notion of a discrete substratum, and the attendant notion of sleep debt, I close with a chapter on the way in which the spatio-temporal disciplinary apparatuses of the milieu and the functionalized day served to consolidate sleep rhythms and thus the claims of the sleep sciences. The purpose of the dissertation is to call into question the role of the social sciences in furthering discourses of insomnia as friction between bodies and the bureaucratic-functional ordering of the day. Instead I develop sleep as a biopolitical object of intervention and management, one based on the occlusion of the structuring agencies of sleep.
Open Access
QTBIPOC Interventions in Fibromyalgic Presents: Critically Exploring Gendered, Racial and Neoliberal Regimes of Knowledge in Medical Understandings of Fibromyalgia
(2019-11-22) Moussa, Ghaida; Kempadoo, Kamala; Gorman, Rachel
This dissertation asks how fibromyalgia, a chronic illness that is admittedly unknown, unknowable, and undetectable by medical knowledge and technologies comes to be known as fibromyalgia by the medical system. By prioritizing critical theory and the experiences and knowledges of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (QTBIPOC), I explore the ways that gendered, racial and neoliberal regimes of knowledge are central to medical understandings of a chronic illness that largely impacts marginalized people. The interventions that I make ask us to rethink the relationship between race and health/illness, to be attentive to the presence of past violences in fibromyalgic presents, and to deeply question the role of the medical system in scientifically legitimizing and sustaining systems of power. I interrogate how the reverence of medical and scientific knowledge provides the medical system the epistemological power to participate in institutional gaslighting and in producing what I call good neuroliberal subjects, all justified through the association it makes between irrational bodies and irrational minds. Above all, this dissertation asks us to take QTBIPOC seriously as theorists in their own right, and to recognize their leadership in disability and healing justice as generative of theory and practice that demands us not to rehabilitate sick bodies, nor to reform the medical system, but instead to dismantle the medical system and reach for notions of healing that resist rather than uphold systems of power.
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.