Sociology

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Open Access
She's Got Game: An Exploration of the Athletic, Academic, and Social Experiences of Black Canadian Female U.S. Athletic Scholarship Recipients
(2023-03-28) George, Rhonda Crystal Nadia; James, Carl Everton
Much has been said about the academic, social, and athletic experiences of Black males, but very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the axis of gender, intersecting with race and class creates very specific experiences. Therefore, using Social Reproduction, Critical Race, and Black Feminist theories, this study explores the specific athletic, educational, and social experiences of Black female basketball athletes from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who have received U.S. athletic scholarships. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with Black Canadian female scholarship recipients, between the ages 25 and 35, this study analyzes how they navigate athletic, academic, and social life to obtain U.S. athletic scholarships. Firstly, I find that the participants were socialized into the U.S. athletic scholarship pathway through a number of factors including social, familial, peer, and media influences. In addition, scholarship aspirations were also informed by negative schooling experiences and motivations like the avoidance of school debt and heightened athletic possibilities. Secondly, I find that once the participants were immersed in basketball, they relied on informal networks/communities of support to develop and share knowledge about scholarship opportunities to co-create complex and sometimes challenging pathways to American universities. Thirdly, I find that throughout this navigation, the participants endured, navigated, and resisted racial and gender stereotyping, identity projections, and gender and race-based barriers that were distinct from their non-Black female and Black male counterparts. Lastly, I highlight how while all the athletes successfully obtained athletic scholarships to American universities and benefitted from their experiences athletically and socioeconomically, their pathways were often arduous and precarious, rife with numerous drawbacks, risks, and sacrifices. In addition, I found that creating fulfilling and enriching academic and athletic opportunities and experiences was often perceived as unavailable and inaccessible in the Canadian context, resulting in the need for emigration. Therefore, I argue that it is not that Black youth lack the economic, social, and cultural capital to be successful athletically and academically, but that the rate of exchange for their capital shaped by historical scripts, systemically devalues the abundance of capitals they do possess and reproduces existing inequalities, failing to address the systemic nature of their exclusion.
Open Access
The Gender Confidence Gap: A Life Course and Intersectional Approach
(2023-03-28) Ong, Joanne; Wu, Cary
The confidence gap is the well-documented phenomenon that women are less self-confident than men. I consider the patterns of the gap across the life course and social categories of race to test theories of the gap. I adopt an intersectional and life course approach to test nature versus nurture theories of the gap. Analyzing data from the three-wave MIDUS, I provide evidence that the gap remains consistent across the life course (age groups) and race categories. I show that the gap is most significant among working-age groups and that education has a positive impact on self- confidence that is more significant for females. These findings suggest that self-confidence is not simply driven by genetics. The significant effects of age, race, and the interplay between race and the life course suggest it is created by cultural socialization and experiences. I discuss how the gap exacerbates the wage gap and mental health gap.
Open Access
The Social Organization of Opioid Use for Chronic Pain
(2023-03-28) Comer, Leigha April; Mykhalovskiy, Eric
This dissertation is an institutional ethnography of the social organization of opioid use for chronic pain management in Ontario, Canada. Within the context of the contemporary ‘opioid crisis,’ people with chronic pain have found their access to prescription opioids restricted as physicians rapidly taper patients’ doses, adopt ‘no narcotics policies,’ and bar people with chronic pain who use opioids from their practices. These changes in physicians’ work of prescribing opioids have had significant impacts on the lives of people with chronic pain. To explicate these abrupt changes in patients’ access to opioids, I conducted interviews with people with chronic pain and with health care practitioners, as well as analyses of texts including prescribing guidelines. I found that physicians have changed their opioid prescribing practices since the late aughts as the medical profession has come to be targeted as responsible for increases in opioid-related harms in North America. While previous panics around drug use targeted people who use drugs and attempted to change their behaviour, recent shifts in medico-legal conceptions of opioids have meant that opioid users have emerged in the public imaginary as blameless victims of unscrupulous physicians. Strategies to resolve the ‘epidemic’ of opioid-related harms have focused on changing physicians’ prescribing practices through new forms of opioid pharmacovigilance, surveillance, and punishment. In response to these modes of surveillance and punishment, physicians have responded by adopting work practices that demonstrate their compliance with and accountability to these regimes of ruling. These include tapering patients’ doses and refusing to prescribe opioids to any patients ‘tainted’ by social determinants of health such as poverty or racialization. While people with chronic pain are not directly targeted by interventions to end the opioid crisis, they are impacted by these policies as physicians change their opioid prescribing practices in response to heightened surveillance and risk of penalties such as losing their license to practice or public shaming.
Open Access
ON THE BUSINESS OF SOCIALITY: A FIGURATIONAL EXPLORATION OF THE ETIQUETTE INDUSTRY IN POST-REFORM CHINA
(2022-12-14) Zhao, Yikun; Walsh, Philip D.
This research analyzes the rise of the etiquette industry and its auxiliaries in post-reform China. Methodologically, it adopts an Eliasian figurational approach and combines archival research with six months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each of the four analytical chapters analyzes a sub- phenomenon, to explore how etiquette was transformed into commodities with market value amid two streams of figurational changes that began since the early 20th century and in the post- reform era, respectively. The first two chapters are situated in the figurational developments along China’s modernization process that has been recharting the relationship between the individual, society, and the state. The state-led “civilizing” initiatives for embodying civility to produce modern citizens are discussed in Chapter One by comparing the official doctrines from the New Life Movement (1934-1949) and public propaganda posters found in Chinese cities and towns during my fieldwork. Chapter Two furthers this line of investigation by following an etiquette business headquartered in Shanghai to explore profit opportunities in the top-down “civilizing” process, through strategically creating what I termed as culture scissors. The next two chapters analyze how etiquette-related businesses strive to carve out opportunities in the social stratification process in the post-reform era, by centering on two new professional roles. The first of these chapters (Chapter Three) presents a portrait of the new professional type of modern butler for China’s High Net Worth Households. Its characteristic performativeness is interpreted figurationally by relating to the new economic elites’ pursuit of social status. The second (Chapter Four) examines the particular functional role of etiquette professionals as advertised experts for self-betterment in the mainland. The features of functional integration and cultural differentiation observed in this sub-field are analyzed by identifying and comparing their projected images of the ideal self, situated within the background of China’s path to individualization. Overall, this research showcases how figurational changes and the resultant tension with the one-party system were turned into a source of valuation by the etiquette industry and its auxiliaries in post-reform China through profiting from established sociocultural hierarchies founded upon the tensile equilibrium of power balances, risking reinforcing these hierarchical inequalities.
Open Access
Fattening up Health Care: Exploring the Ways Fat Women Navigate Health Care Services in Canada
(2022-12-14) Ioannoni, Kelsey Ann; Hanson, Barbara Gail
This dissertation explores and documents how fat women in Canada experience fatphobia in health care settings, focusing largely on primary care. This study, which is based on interviews and focus groups with fat women, asks broadly: How does fatness act as a barrier to accessing health care services for fat women in Canada? To answer this question, I explore the following four sub questions: (1) How has fatness come to be socially constructed as a moral panic of an ‘obesity epidemic’, resulting in the medicalization of fatness?; (2) How does the framing of fatness as an ‘obesity epidemic’ impact the relationship fat women have with their bodies and themselves?; (3) With a focus on primary care physicians, how does the advice of medical professionals’ impact fat women’s perceptions of their bodies and their health?; and (4) How does the categorization of obesity as a disease by Obesity Canada, in the 2020 Canadian Adult Obesity Clinical Practice Guidelines, further entrench fatphobia in health care practice? Working at the intersections of fat studies, sociology of health, and feminist standpoint epistemology, I argue that fatness is a barrier to accessing health care services in Canada. Through the experiences of my participants, I find that the framing of fatness as an ‘obesity epidemic’ has resulted in fat women having antagonistic relationships with their bodies, understanding their bodies as moral failures. These feelings carry over to health care spaces where practitioners often hold anti-fat bias, resulting in weight-based discrimination and experiences of fatphobia in health care. Finally, despite an abundance of research calling for health care professionals to re-consider and re-frame their approaches to fatness in health care settings, health care professionals are ignoring the research on anti-fat bias and instead are doubling down on obesity as disease.
Open Access
Turn On, Tune In, and Heal Together: Culture, Interaction Rituals, and Collective Self-Transformation in Psychedelic-Assisted Group Therapy with Individuals with Treatment-Resistant Mental Distress
(2022-12-14) Rose, Jarrett Robert; Walsh, Philip D.
This doctoral study has been concerned with psychedelic (psilocybin) culture, its therapeutic application on group-based retreats, and its impact upon the subjective healing and self-transformation of individuals with treatment-resistant mental distress. While clinical trials suggest psychedelic-assisted therapy can be efficacious in resolving various mental health troubles, and psychedelic retreats advertise the transformative potential of psychedelics, less understood is the role that intersubjectivity plays in therapeutic outcomes. In this study, retreats were framed as a type of therapeutic community, in which culture, interaction, emotions, collective effervescence, and social connection were investigated as aides to the psychedelic-therapeutic process. This research used in-depth interviews combined with autoethnographic, participant observation data to consider how psychedelic-assisted therapy, in conjunction with intersubjectivity and a therapeutic culture in retreat settings, impacted the lives of people struggling with treatment-resistant forms of mental distress and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The range of sociocultural phenomena associated with psychedelic therapy retreats were examined using micro-sociological frameworks, especially Interaction Ritual Chain (IRC) theory (Collins 2004). The research question for this study was: How are “healing” and self-transformation defined and achieved in psychedelic therapy culture, and to what extent are they impacted by intersubjective dynamics? This dissertation found that the efficacy of psychedelic therapy can be enhanced by intersubjective dynamics, and these dynamics can be analyzed by using a Symbolic Interactionist—namely an IRC—framework. The therapeutic outcomes of group-based psychedelic-assisted healing retreats were not solely attributable to the causal powers of psychedelics themselves; also crucial were the sociocultural, psychological, and emotional 3 factors allied with the overarching retreat environment, each of which impacted upon psychedelic consciousness and post-retreat “integration” practices. These factors—such as the evolution of a community (between guests), therapeutic alliance (between therapists and guests), compassionate “emotion culture” that paid deference to cultural/symbolic objects (self-transformation and healing, the collective, and psilocybin rituals), and “cultural set and setting”—operated in unification with using psychedelic mushrooms as a tool of introspection, autognosis, and self-healing. In this sense, self-transformation and healing in psychedelic-assisted group therapy was achieved collectively. This research adds to scientific knowledge in three principal areas. First, sociologists have largely neglected studying psychedelics in the 21st century, whether as cultural, subcultural, or countercultural social phenomena, or as a therapeutic modality. This dissertation thus contributes to a nascent sociology of psychedelic culture/s and therapy. Secondly, this social scientific research complements psychedelic science and psychedelic studies by investigating the sociocultural aspects attendant to psychedelic healing and self-transformation. Most research on psychedelic therapy is clinical in nature, takes place in laboratories, and is predominantly positivistic, quantitative, and focused on individual outcomes. Distinctly, this study is the first of its kind to contribute qualitative, naturalistic, and intersubjective approaches to psychedelic therapy. Thirdly, rarely has IRC theory been employed in mental health research or research on therapeutic communities. This study advances this theoretical framework by applying it to the micro-dynamics of everyday life on psychedelic retreats, the latter of which are framed as therapeutic communities. In so doing, this research underscores both the ongoing value and the limitations of IRC theory.
Open Access
Theorizing Sustained Solidarity: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement in Toronto
(2022-08-08) Sukarieh, Rana; Wood, Lesley Julia
This dissertation seeks to understand the multiscalar dynamics that led to the fragmentation of the once relatively unified Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Toronto. The dissertation analyzes the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors shaping the trajectory of the BDS movement in Toronto. These dynamics are informed by ontological (political imaginaries), temporal (intergenerational), institutional (community institutions), and agonistic (counter-movements) logics. Locating this project within an analysis of settler colonialism allow us to understand the particular contexts that shape solidarity. Both Israel and Canada share similar logics of settler colonialism that eliminate and/or racialize the native populations, and deploy various interconnected tools to keep the silencing dissident voices. The research is an activist-research, in which I employed triangulation as a methodological strategy, by combining in-depth interviews, archival work, and participant observation. Deploying Bourdieu’s theory of practice and its concepts of field, habitus, and capital, this dissertation contributes to theorize the multilayered and multiscalar variables that shape transnational movements. These dynamics are manifested in distinct political imaginaries oscillate between reviving the anti-colonial Third World Internationalism or adopting a pragmatic rights-based approach; collaborating with others with converging political projects versus avoiding those with diverging political visions; (un)intentionally reproducing colonial formations or attempting to decolonize. The dissertation also integrates a temporal analysis that accounts for the variations of the political contexts, the birth of the “War on Terror” generation after 9/11, and the resurge in the demonization of the Arab, Muslim, and other people of color. Through an intergenerational lens, and by incorporating Mbembe’s entangled temporality, the dissertation challenges the assumed total rupture created by transformative events that are associated with the formation of new political generations, and illuminates the internalized values and ideas that the “War on Terror” generation inherited from the previous generations, thereby contesting the reified boundaries that activists themselves have build between generations. The continuity of the solidarity with the BDS is contingent on its ability to confront, adapt, and strategize against the multilayered and relatively unified Zionist counter-movements both in Toronto and transnationally. Moreover, the dissertation discusses the paradox facing social movements between institutionalization and grassrootedness.
Open Access
Refusing Internment, Reclaiming Vitality, and Moving Past the Bargain Of Recognition: The Case of a Muslim Creative Counterpublic
(2022-08-08) Ali, Nadiya Nur; Kyriakides, Christopher
The overarching goal of my project is to investigate the tactics of resistance and self-making available and picked up by those living on the receiving end of overbearing racializing structures. Actively listening to the formation and operation of a Muslim creative counterpublic called the Muslim Writers Collective (MWC) demonstrates that the analytics of self/social transformation available to racialized actors cannot simply be limited to ‘resistance’, understood as antagonist-oppositionality, and ‘transformation’, understood through the frame of recognition politics. The study of MWC draws on an ethnographic full-participant observation of two chapters - located in Toronto and New York City - in addition to 30 conversational interviews of performers, organizers, and attendees. For MWC regulars, comprised of racialized actors fielded to perpetually remain in quarantine and internment, expansion, revelation and mundanification emerge as powerful acts of refusal. Through communal storytelling, improvisation, and congregational experimentation, the altar of whiteness comes to be decentered, and a refusal of abjecthood and subalternity is collectively embodied. MWC fosters a space in which generative acts of refusal operate to engender an analytics of resistance and transformation prioritizing vitality and subjectivity. In consequence, actively rejecting the static, unidimensional, and reductive constructs of Muslimhood circulated in dominant racializing public(s). Hence, in contrast to the re-inscribing role of the corrective curations antagonist-recognition politics demands, MWC locates self/social transformation in the hazardous horizontal work of bearing witness to internal difference, in all its contradictions, incoherencies, and divergences, in order to ignite vitality as a congregation, as a Jama’ah.
Open Access
The Price of Knowledge: An Exploration of Student Demographics between Regulated and First-Degree Professional Programs in Ontario
(2022-08-08) Barakat, Grace Marana; Spotton Visano, Brenda
In recent decades, we have seen various governing bodies reduce their economic support for the publicly funded post-secondary education (PSE) system in Canada. This trend is one of the neoliberal measures which seeks to reorganize the structures and distribution patterns of public goods and services. Through the process of neoliberalization, the lack of public financing has created a funding gap for universities and colleges, which has been increasingly filled by relying on private sources of funding, primarily in the form of tuition fees. This shift has led to a rapid increase, and at times, deregulation of PSE tuition fees. In 2006, tuition differentiation assigned professional programs higher tuition fees than regulated program, revealing a new, reconstructed version of tuition deregulation. This study seeks to explore the differences between student demographics of first-degree (undergraduate) professional and regulated programs in Ontario. A secondary data analysis using the 2018 National Graduates Survey (NGS) is conducted. Logistic regression models are used to predict the likelihood of professional or regulated program enrollment controlling for social markers such as source of funding, race/ethnicity, SES, gender, etc. An analysis of student debt is also performed to investigate the management of large PSE student loans. Findings reveal that students from more privileged and affluent backgrounds are more likely to be enrolled in first-degree professional programs, both nationally and in Ontario. The odds of enrollment for professional programs are higher for self-funded (not relying on student loans), non-racialized, Canadian-born-citizens, males, with high levels of parental education in Ontario. Additionally, students from marginalized groups are more likely to accrue high levels of student debt ($25,000 or more), take longer to repay their loans, and struggle with debt repayment. There is evidence to suggest that tuition differentiation may be functioning as an exclusionary policy that reproduces social inequities and class disparities. First-degree professional programs, which have higher tuition fees than regulated programs, are largely populated with students from affluent backgrounds. When examined cumulatively, these findings have implications for PSE policy and the ability of PSE to function as a great equalizer. Since professional programs tend to lead to more affluent employment positions and higher wages, the cycle of economic marginalization may be reproducing itself through PSE.
Open Access
Worker Cooperatives: Strategies and Tactics for Interstitial Transformation
(2022-08-08) Hax, Heather Anne; Wood, Lesley Julia
The number of worker cooperatives in the United States has grown substantially in recent decades, as has a robust cooperative movement dedicated to advancing worker-ownership. Many of these individual cooperatives, as well as the movement that incubates and supports them, critique capitalist workplace relations and aim to disrupt them. This dissertation addresses the claim that worker cooperatives, workplaces owned and operated by their employees, prefigure post-capitalist workplace arrangements and ultimately, a post-capitalist economy. While there is substantial literature that outlines the role of worker cooperatives as a strategy to disrupt exploitative and alienating capitalist labor relations, very little attention has been paid in the academic literature to the resources and strategies necessary to start a cooperative as well as the complex ways in which workplace democracy unfolds in practice. Additionally, this research evaluates the claim that worker cooperatives are a means to democratize wealth on a large scale. Erik Olin Wrights (2010) concept of interstitial transformation is used to understand the process by which small changes to the political economy can accumulate to large-scale systemic shifts. This research is based on a case study of cooperatives in Baltimore from 2014-2021 and identifies three structural conditions necessary for the growth of cooperatives: access to non-extractive capital and high-touch technical support, building a culture of worker ownership, and political advocacy/legislation that supports both worker ownership and wealth redistribution. This dissertation outlines the ways in which cooperatives have already realized their potential for interstitial transformation and the challenges that lay ahead.
Open Access
It Takes a Whole Community: A Pragmatic, Strength-based Needs Assessment of Programs and Services Addressing Youth Homelessness in Bruce and Grey Counties, Ontario, Canada
(2022-08-08) Walker, Hart James; Pupo-Barkans, Norene J.
This dissertation focuses on the problem of rural youth homelessness in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Traditionally, homelessness has been characterized as an urban problem, but over the last 15 years a growing amount of research has shown that, while urban environments are far more populous and homelessness far more visible in these areas, the problem is equally pervasive in rural and remote regions, however differently it might manifest itself. Only a handful of studies exist in Canada on rural youth homelessness, and currently there are none that explore solutions to this problem in a rural context. The study presented here was conducted in Bruce and Grey Counties, Ontario, Canada, between 2017-19, and has been divided into two parts based on two different phases of research. The first part presents the results of a homeless enumeration consisting of a period prevalence count (PPC) conducted across both counties between April 23-27, 2018 in order to provide a demographic snapshot of the region's homeless population. This study was the first of its kind to be conducted in this region. The second part presents the results of a strength-based community needs assessment that was conducted following the enumeration to determine the extent and quality of programs and services addressing youth homelessness in the two counties. Using theoretical principles borrowed from American pragmatism, and a grounded approach to methodology, I argue that emergency housing for youth and mental health services should be the focus of systems change in the Counties, and offer ways that this can be done that build on the cultural assets possessed by rural communities.
Open Access
Working for Citizenship in the Liminal Space: Social Reproduction in the Emergency Family Shelter System
(2022-03-03) Webb, Jason Michael; Gazso, Amber M.
Family homelessness remains an endemic social problem in Canada. Parents residing in the family shelter system must continue raising their children, although they lack the means afforded by housed and employed parents. Despite government efforts to enact anti-poverty strategies such as affordable housing and social welfare, free market hegemony has contributed to the neoliberalization of social policy. The historical development of the current welfare state regime shows that the residual nature of social welfare in Canada depends on a high degree of familialization. The purpose of this exploratory research is two-fold: an exploration of how the political economy of social welfare shapes the lived experiences of parents practicing social reproduction in the family shelter system and how these parents' social rights are configured within the Canadian welfare state. I answer my research questions by adopting a narrative analysis of interviews with 23 homeless parents in the Greater Toronto Area. I apply life course theory to show how the respondents' narratives of their lived experiences in the family shelter system uncover linkages between their social reproduction activities and the political context that structures them. I conceptualize the Family Residence as a liminal space and the Residence clients as liminal citizens, defined as those in receipt of social welfare and subjected to state surveillance. The analysis of the interviews uncovers three findings. First, homelessness results from compounding deprivations as a result of market-based poverty that subsequently leads to extreme social exclusion. Second, the difference between housed and homeless parents is that homeless parents face a triple burden in that they are expected to fulfill their responsibilities as clients in the family shelter system, obtain housing to transition out of the shelter, and carry out social reproduction. Third, social rights remain deeply familialized and therefore contribute to intensified social exclusion for homeless parents without adequate state support. The research concludes with a policy recommendation that embraces the housing as a right framework to inform a robust anti-poverty strategy. This research yields two major contributions. First, my findings complement the literature that centres citizenship in liberal welfare states as an analytical framework in the study of modern poverty. Second, I conclude that the Canadian welfare state commits to familialization rather than universalism in order to uphold liberalized capital markets.
Open Access
What are they gabbin about?: A relational realist approach to small stories (re)told on Gab
(2022-03-03) Fraser, Xylia Nichole; Wood, Lesley Julia
Informed by Tilly's (2005) and Tilly and Tarrow's (2007) work on the use of storytelling as a tool for the (re)construction of collective identities and boundary formation, Alexander's (2006) work on the civil sphere and its civil/anti-civil symbolic codes and discourses of liberty and repression, and Georgakopoulou's (2013) concept of 'small stories,' I conducted a narrative analysis focused on the 'small stores' that Gab users (re)told to produce an understanding of alt-right pillars of identity. In this paper, I detail many 'small stories' about political correctness, censorship, affirmative action, 'invasions,' and the dissolution of the traditional white, nuclear family that transform into one big story of the so-called '(((communists')))' plot to manufacture a 'white genocide.'
Open Access
Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging
(2022-03-03) Tecle, Samuel; James, Carl Everton
Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging examines Blackness and difference from my perspective having come to Canada as part of the wave of Ethiopians and Eritreans that migrated to the West in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this dissertation, I make sense of growing up and living Black in Canada alongside and among other Black communities who have already settled and have been living in Canada for generations. This moment in the 80s and 90s and the emerging diaspora from the Horn of Africa coming to the West encountering Black communities already living here from previous waves of Black migration grounds the dissertation. Black Grammars opens by analyzing Black and East African student groups in university as one site of this encounter of Black diasporas but also as a point of departure from which to examine how Black difference is thought and engaged in academic study. I draw on my own experiences growing up and attending school and university in Toronto. This project begins by analyzing Black and East African student groups in universities in Canada, and examines the space between these two identities and identifications that our presence opens up for theorization and analysis. I demonstrate how the limits of the conceptual terrain and the constraints represented by and between those two student groups come to be reproduced across Black Studies literature and normative research done on East African diasporas. This conceptual space forms the terrain and point of departure for this study. As part of the method of this dissertation, I lay out a set of Scenes that lay out how Blackness and Black difference gets taken up in social and communal settings among Black people and how that same Black(ness) difference gets taken up in academic study. I cite incongruities, shortcomings and gaps that are left wanting. I conclude that Blackness and Black difference is taken up in much more engaging and complex ways amongst Black people in the everyday than academic study has heretofore been able to account for. Put differently, the ways Black Studies and African Diaspora Studies come to be constituted form the terrain on which the need and space for a concept like Black Grammars emerges. Attentive to this conceptual terrain and prevailing constraints, I posit Black Grammars as a theory of relationality that attempts to bring Black diasporas into sociality and conversation with each other. The central question Black Grammars engages: how might we think Black difference otherwise? How do we account for and attend to the multiplicities of Blackness made ever more complex by the various trajectories that make up the fullness of the Black diaspora? Black Grammars is an analytic that attends to these gaps and inconsistencies and also centers ways Black people relate to each other in everyday contexts that is rooted in Black Diasporic Sociality. As a heuristic device, Black Grammars centers Blackness and Black difference and posits a theory of Black relationality that is anchored in the ways Black people play, politic and perform difference amidst and amongst themselves.
Open Access
Marriage for Refuge? Syrian Refugee Womens Resettlement Experiences in Egypt
(2022-03-03) Taha, Dina; Kyriakides, Christopher
Women navigating forced displacement are often confronted by gendered norms and expectations. The practices that they initiate in response remain under-explored. For Syrian women who settled in Egypt during the 'Syrian refugee crisis,' one such practice is marriage to Egyptian men. Many such marriages have been unregistered or polygamous and have been criticized by some feminist advocacy groups and media platforms as exploitative. By focusing on this case study, I aim to transcend interpretations that situate such marriages within the domains of sexual and gender-based violence and child and forced marriage. I instead ask: How might marriage be a strategy for resettlement? And how might it further our understanding of refugee womens decisions, experiences, and subjectivities? In the summer of 2017, I conducted forty in-depth interviews in two major Egyptian cities, Cairo and Alexandria, with Muslim Syrian refugee women, their husbands and family members who took part in these marriage arrangements, a practice which I refer to as 'marriage for refuge.' Using a decolonizing intersectional theoretical framework, I argue that by seeking marriage, these women are not simply complying with socially ascribed gender roles. Instead, they are making a calculated decision to forge their own resettlement trajectories. I found that, despite elements of victimization stemming from displacement and patriarchy, intersectional factors including gender, ethnicity, and displacement were resources that some respondents leveraged to enhance their autonomy and to challenge norms. The narratives underscore how displacement and marriage are connected, in that exile has led to the reconstruction of the meaning and purpose of marriage. In turn, marriage has come to be perceived as a means to overcome the precarity of displacement. To explain this, I attend to social conceptions such as sanad (social capital or support) and sutra (protection or sheltering) and social practices such as polygamy and customary marriage. I position marriage for refuge as a phenomenon that expands understandings of intersectional, gendered and Othered refugee experiences. In so doing, I highlight two decolonizing analytical strategies: rejecting binaries (e.g., agent/victim) and decoupling associations (e.g., agency=resistance), and draw attention to concepts such as moral agency, creative leveraging, and social capital.
Open Access
The Divine Light of Anarchy: A Socio-Political Analysis of Conflicting Sikh Historical Narratives
(2022-03-03) Pannu, Santbir Singh; Nijhawan, Michael
Utilizing a hermeneutical narrative analysis, this thesis is the study of two texts. The analysis, or exegesis as I label it, is focused on exploring whether there are anarchist principles inherent in the texts in question. The first text is Rattan Sigh Bhangu's Sri Gur Panth Prakash, an early 19th century poetic, epic, narrative history of the Sikhs. I explore Bhangu's conception of Sikh political legitimacy, the sovereignty of the Khalsa and the self-governance models and principles that 18th century Sikhs utilized. The second text is a series of essays by 19th century German philologist Ernest Trumpp who was commissioned by the East India Company to write a translation of the Sikh scripture. Trumpp's history of the Gurus is centred on the idea that they did not have a unique or divinely inspired message, rather their teachings were generally incoherent and that the message of the earliest Guru was corrupted by later Gurus. Studying these texts in juxtaposition offers us insights into the difference between pre-colonial and colonial conceptions of Sikhi. My main assertion is the existence of what I label Anarcha-Sikhi. I discern that this form of anarchism is inherent within Sikh principles and practices and are directly inspired by Sikh scriptures. This form of anarchism is unique in several important ways; including the Sikh conception of monarchy, the warrior tradition in Sikhi and Sikh governance models. Anarchist texts, especially works by anarchist sociologists, are utilized throughout the thesis to ground this work in the larger discussion of anarchism.
Open Access
Tourism Representations, Imaginaries, and Encounters on the Maltese Islands
(2021-11-15) Spiteri, Suzanne; Cohen, Rina
This research explores the ethnosexual tourism of women to the Maltese islands by considering the politics of tourism representations and tourism imaginaries about the Maltese islands, and their effects on touristic experiences and encounters in Malta. It examines the link between the historical and contemporary discourses surrounding the Maltese islands and their role in shaping how the space and its inhabitants are engaged with, physically and socially, tourist women from Northern Europe. This dissertation aims to highlight the role and influences of tourist geographical imaginaries on spaces, places, touristic practices. Utilizing a postcolonial perspective that explores Orientalism and Exoticism in tourism representations, this dissertation contributes to tourism scholarship by examining the interconnected nature of history, discourse, and the politics of representation, and their impact on contemporary travel and touristic practices. In arguing that the ethnosexual encounters that occur amongst tourist women and Maltese men must be understood as firmly situated within the historical, political and postcolonial contexts from which they arise, this research uses ethnographic and interview data to reveal that the language and imageries used to promote and describe the Maltese islands, depends on an Orientalist and exoticized discourse, which is strongly reminiscent of the representations of the Maltese islands that permeated colonial era discourse about the region. The women who participated in this study, imagined, and experienced the Maltese islands using two distinct categories, the changed and the unchanged, the modern and the ancient, and the advancing and the decaying. The narratives of the tourist women involved in this study demonstrated a desire by tourists to experience a spatiotemporal displacement. Driven by (colonial) nostalgia, and the liminoid desires to shed the constraints of modernity, these women desired a space outside of modernity, and participation in heterosexual relationships with men who embodied their sense of the unchanged satisfied that desire.
Open Access
Cease and Desist/Cease or Resist? Civil Suits and Sexual Violence
(2021-11-15) Gray, Mandi Melissa; Glasbeek, Amanda
Within the last several years, there is evidence to suggest that there is a growing trend of men accused of sexual violence initiating civil legal action against their accusers along with anyone who attempts to hold them to account for their actions. This dissertation critically examines these lawsuits within a critical feminist socio-legal framework. I place these lawsuits within a larger social and historical context to explore the inherently gendered underpinnings of defamation law along with anti-feminist backlash to attempts to hold men accountable for sexual violence. The dissertation is based on interviews with seventeen people that I refer to as "silence breakers" who have been sued or threatened with legal action by men accused of sexual violence or organizations that have failed to respond to reports or disclosures of sexual violence. I use their narratives to examine the individual consequences of being sued or threatened with a lawsuit for speech relating to sexual violence. I also rely on media reports of lawsuits initiated by men accused of sexual violence and case law to demonstrate the scope of the issue to demonstrate that there are both individual and societal consequences of these lawsuits. I argue that these lawsuits ought to be recognized as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). I argue that these lawsuits are SLAPPs because even the threat of a lawsuit is enough to silence sexual violence discourse and discourage people from reporting sexual violence. I establish that sexual violence discourse is a matter of public interest and therefore all speech about sexual violence including reports and disclosures should be protected from silencing lawsuits. I argue that if these lawsuits continue, we risk witnessing the re-privatization of sexual violence which will disproportionately impact women because they are statistically more likely to experience sexual violence.
Open Access
Trade Union Decline and Renewal: A Case Study of Precariousness, Labour Standards, and Union Responses in Ontario's Unionized Supermarket Sector
(2021-07-06) Rogers, Sarah; Pupo-Barkans, Norene J.
There is now a vast scholarship that explores union decline and renewal in various economic sectors and workplaces. To date, however, there is little understanding of how union decline has impacted unionized retail environments in Canada. Using a feminist political economy framework, this dissertation explores dynamics of union decline and renewal through a case study of labour standards in Ontarios unionized supermarket sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 28 union representatives and an analysis of collective agreements, this study examines the decline and trajectory of labour standards in unionized supermarkets, explores the unions perspectives and responses to changing standards, assesses how changing labour standards reflects the problem of union decline, and assesses how the case of Ontarios unionized supermarkets informs union renewal research and strategy. Findings suggest that the decline and trajectory of labour standards in Ontarios unionized supermarkets reflects a shift towards increasing precariousness in this sector. While there have been some wins for supermarket workers, unions have been largely unable to secure substantial improvements through collective bargaining. The precariousness associated with supermarket work is both contractually negotiated, as evidenced by provisions in collective agreements that ensure low wages and minimal and infrequent wage increases, demanding availability requirements, and limitations to the number of hours of work, as well as experiential, as indicated in workplace dynamics such as competition between workers, high turnover, and reduced health and safety measures. During the period under study, several factors have contributed to the increase in precariousness in this sector. While unions have implemented a variety of strategies in an effort to mitigate precariousness in unionized supermarkets, the persistence of deeply ingrained business union cultures and practices make improving labour standards through collective bargaining difficult. Continued precariousness in unionized supermarkets and the persistence of business unionism point to the need for an interrogation of the cultures and practices within unions that may contribute to the ongoing precariousness in unionized supermarkets and the challenges facing unions in this sector. The complex nature of union decline in this sector also suggests that multiple forms of union action are required to improve labour standards in unionized supermarkets and the strength of unions more broadly.
Open Access
The Young Cosmopolitans: Young People's Intercultural Work in an International School
(2021-07-06) Rondinelli, Elisabeth Eleanor; Kurasawa, Fuyuki
This dissertation examines the cultural world of a group of young students who are navigating their late teenage years at Highland, an international boarding school in northern Europe, living and studying alongside many different kinds of people, both familiar and unfamiliar. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine three interrelated phenomena. First, I analyze the formation of cosmopolitan practice in a school in which young people have sustained contact with one another under the aegis of strong institutional norms of intercultural understanding. The school has an overarching intercultural ethos, but little is known about the patterns of practice that emerge in schools that adopt such projects. Second, I examine how everyday cosmopolitanism coexists with everyday social division. This task is important because it involves looking at cosmopolitan practice as involving the development of a pragmatic orientation to life in diversity, rather than a commitment to abstract ideals of intercultural harmony. Third, I track the intercultural work that young people do, which highlights the specific norms, justifications, and practices that young people coming of age in diversity rely on and creatively produce. With a focus on meaning-making processes that young people participate in and produce, I argue that the relationships that take shape at Highland reveal the unevenly distributed labour and rewards of cosmopolitan practice.