Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

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Open Access
Athletic Labour, Spectatorship, and Social Reproduction in the World of Professional Hockey
(2016-09-20) Kalman-Lamb, Nathan; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
Existing literature in the sociology of sport largely omits any discussion of the relation between the spectator and athlete in professional and high performance sport. This dissertation explores that relation, demonstrating that exploitation in athletic labour and the enduring allure of sport as spectacle are inextricably linked as part of a broader political economy. The labour of professional athletes is theorized as a form of social reproductive labour that offers affective/subjective renewal for fans. Spectators who experience isolation and alienation in their day-to-day lives as capitalist subjects come to sport seeking a sense of meaning, connection, and community. Athletic labour in professional sport provides this to them and enables them to continue to function as productive capitalist subjects by serving as an armature upon which an imagined athletic community of fans can be built. However, for social reproduction to occur for fans, athletes must sacrifice their bodies completely in the performance of their labour. It is only through this sacrifice that the imagined athletic community becomes concretized as something tangible and real and spectators become willing to spend their money on sports fandom. This theoretical understanding of athletic labour and spectatorship is explored through semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight former professional hockey players and eight spectators of sport. The testimony of former players consistently links the political economy of professional sport and the harm and exploitation they experienced in the course of their work. The testimony of spectators, on the other hand, typically fails to acknowledge that the meaning and pleasure derived from watching professional sport is predicated on the destruction of athletic bodies. This study ultimately suggests that a form of alienation exists between athletes and spectators. The spectator grasps for an elusive sense of community within a society structured to deny that form of connection by placing vicarious investment in the bodies of athletes. Yet, this act of investment instrumentalizes and commodifies the athlete. Athletes understand this process as it occurs because it denies them their humanity by transforming them into something both more (the heroic vessel) and less (the abject failure) than human.
Open Access
Colonial Theology: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin and the Emergence of the Colonial-Capitalist World System, 1500-1900
(2016-09-20) Kolia, Zahir Yasser; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
My dissertation examines the relationship between the theological political and temporality in the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. World systems and postcolonial approaches to colonial expansion have often reduced questions of theology to a discursive feature of producing difference through the binary frame of self/other in order to justify a will to power, territory, and capital accumulation. My dissertation argues that the theocentric epistemic tradition of commensurability and resemblances structured by theological temporal formations have played a large role in colonial expansion, and can be better understood by applying the decolonial concept of coloniality to illustrate how theology, political economy and philosophy form plural points of enunciation for the constitution of the colonial-capitalist world system. What is distinctive about this project is that I bring together world systems theory, postcolonial theory and theological political perspectives under a decolonial approach in order to highlight the importance of epistemology in the establishment of a global hierarchical system that produces and locates Western knowledge, cosmology and spirituality over non-Western forms. This dissertation, therefore, outlines a methodological trajectory that does not instrumentalize the theological to a materialist rendition of capitalist accumulation, colonial expansion and conquest. Rather, I will seek to characterize how capital, colonialism and theology were entwined, negotiated and expressed in often contradictory ways through the writings of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin. In doing so, I examine the material inscriptions and historical particularity regarding the entangled secular and theological forms of reasoning, knowledge traditions, and temporalities that emerged in relation to the contingencies of coloniality.
Open Access
Effect of Mindfulness Bibliotherapy on Kinesiology Students
(2019-11-22) Shahabi, Kamran; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
This project explores the perceived effect of mindfulness bibliotherapy and discuss the possible underlying reasons behind those effects on college students. We used audiobook version of Zen Mind Beginner's written by Shunryu Suzuki in order to simplify the bibliotherapy process and decrease the burden of participation. In this research students were provided with the bibliotherapy content and were instructed to study the material within seven days. Fourteen to twenty one days after finishing the book, a semi- structured interviews were conducted with five participants (two male and three female) who were in the fourth and final year of their education as undergraduate students. The objective of this Thematic analysis of the data highlighted four main effects that enabled the participation to deal with stress and anxiety.
Open Access
Eurocentric Archival Knowledge Production and Decolonizing Archival Theory
(2015-08-28) Gordon, Aaron Andrew; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
This dissertation is interested in how archival theory—the theoretical work of archiving produced by archivists and, to a lesser extent, the modes of doing archival research deployed by researchers—tackles the colonial roots and routes of archives, archivists and archival theories and practices. At the base of this examination of archival theory is the assumption that theory produces the object it evaluates. Thus, as opposed to interrogating a pre-existing archive, archival theory produces imaginative and material archival spaces in which archivists and researchers labour. In this dissertation, then, I examine the ways in which Eurocentric intellectual frameworks continue to frame archival theory and, thus, delimit how archivists and researchers produce knowledge about and through archives. In particular, this dissertation is interested in how the Eurocentrism underwriting archival theory as much shapes archivists’ understanding of colonialism and colonial archives by establishing the archive’s and archival theory’s geography, history and future trajectory as covers over the archives’ and archival theory’s colonial history. With an eye to the work of contemporary archivists and theorists who critically interrogate the ways archives and archivists reproduce unequal social relations of power, the following chapters negotiate the tension within these critiques between developing more democratic, socially just and postcolonial archives and archival theory, and the Eurocentric intellectual frameworks that reiterate the divisions between West and non-West, modern societies and traditional communities, literate and oral, and between reason and feeling. The works of Canadian archivists and scholars figure prominently in my dissertation as they both shape my analyses of the effects of Eurocentrism and continuing settler colonial relations on archives, archiving and archival research, and also become objects of analysis through which I trace out the discourses that work to secure and trouble settler title and entitlement to Aboriginal land by erasing or nullifying Indigenous sovereignty in and through Canada’s archives. The aim of my dissertation is to propose modes of archival knowledge production that trouble, if not displace, these Eurocentric and settler frameworks to decolonize archives and archival theory.
Open Access
Tell Dem Wagwan Fanon: On [Colonial] Violence and Prison Labour in Canada
(2024-11-07) Batelaan, Krystal Alisha; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
In this dissertation, I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concepts of cultural imposition and collective catharsis to examine how the colonized subject, like the incarcerated Black worker, undergoes a double process of dehumanization wherein they are perceived as both an invisible and hypervisible subject. I argue that the colonized subject is invisible insofar as they are subjected to various forms of dehumanization such as physiological and psychological abuse, lack of access to resources, and neglect. However, they are also perceived as hypervisible because they are viewed as existing in excess as hypersexual, hyper deviant, and hyper criminal creatures and therefore deserving of the treatment they endure. Similarly, the incarcerated worker is viewed as invisible and hypervisible because they are viewed as unskilled and subhuman beings undeserving of adequate pay and protections but are also perceived as best suited to work in poor conditions doing less skilled, undervalued, low-paying work. By tracing how this relationship between race, racialization and labour is underpinned by whiteness both historically and in a contemporary sense, I demonstrate how the use of prison labour within a Canadian multicultural context must necessarily be read through a normalizing white gaze, under the guise of public safety and rehabilitation; here the prison functions as a disciplinary site wherein Black and racialized prisoners are constructed as inferior beings in need of heightened control through labour. In doing so, I argue that the use of prison labour in Canadian prisons is a form of colonial violence that reproduces inferior and superior colonial identities.

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Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by Author "Abdel-Shehid, Gamal"

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