Geography

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Open Access
Turbulence Structure and Riffle-Pool Morphology in Coarse-Grained Channels: A Field Study of the Rouge River, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
(2014-07-09) Arnett, Joshua Matthew John; Robert, Andre
Riffle-pool sequences play a crucial role in the fluid-sediment interactions that control bed scour, sediment transfer and deposition in rivers. Areas in rivers that experience changes in depth or width cause areas of differing flow acceleration and deceleration. Differing flow regimes strongly impact the turbulence structure and associated sediment transport processes. Past research has focused largely on the maintenance of riffle-pool sequences, specifically in the context of stage dependant velocity reversal hypotheses. However, little research has been completed on the three dimensional flow structures of these sequences and how this affects the depth of scour in pools and deposition height in riffles. Critical knowledge is lacking with respect to how these properties change or differ in straight versus meandering channels. Turbulence structure and sediment transport processes experience higher complexity in meandering reaches than straight reaches. Secondary circulations around meander bends create an asymmetrical profile that influences lateral sediment transport, thus leading to the occurrence of deep scour in pools. The primary objective of this study was to assess the turbulence structure and scour in riffle-pool sequences in both straight and meandering channel sections of the Rouge River, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The purpose was to assess the controlling factors that influence riffle height and depth of scour in pools and also how these factors differ in straight versus meandering reaches. The spatial and temporal variability of the turbulence structure and sediment transport will also be observed by comparing the responses to varying flow stages. This study was comprised of a field-based project using an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV). Sediment sorting and transport patterns were observed by using a combination of painted tracer particles, permanent bedload traps and handheld bedload samplers. Results indicated that turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) and momentum exchange was typically observed 5 – 10 cm above the bed. Time series data indicated that the degree of curvature likely influenced secondary circulation and hence sediment transport and channel form. It was evident that riffle height and depth of scour in pools was strongly linked to channel morphology as well as micro scale bed variably.
Open Access
Ecologies of Rule and Resistance: Making Knowledge, Borders and Environmental Governance at the Salween River, Thailand
(2014-07-09) Lamb, Vanessa Ann; Vandergeest, Peter
This dissertation examines the making and mobilizing of ecological knowledge at the Salween River as part of the Himalayan Uplands in Southeast Asia. The profusion of interest in “knowing” this river has captured local and international attention, particularly in the context of regional energy development. Plans have been made for 16 large dams along the Salween, the longest free flowing river in Southeast Asia. I examine the unfolding processes of planning and governance of the first dam to go ahead, the Hatgyi hydroelectric project. My research questions query how ecological knowledges are made, and by whom, and how they circulate in the context of cross-border dam development and with what implications for ecologies, residents, and governance. My approach to addressing these questions brings together work in political ecology, political geography, science studies, and area studies. I focus on the ways that political geographical concepts including territories, nations, and political borders are made through – and even require – the practices and performances of residents in their everyday life. This includes the efforts to produce ecological knowledge. In addressing my research questions, I specifically argue that residents play significant roles alongside institutions to make and remake the conditions for development, and are as much involved in producing environmental rule as they are in producing the more expected projects of resistance. This runs in contrast to analyses which envision residents and local resistance subsumed in development projects. It also contributes to literature on the study of upland minority groups, whose residents and ecologies are described as “peripheral” or even as “evading” states. While residents at the Salween are highlighted within this study, I also emphasize the roles and practices of a variety of other actors including environmental consultants, government officials, and activists.
Open Access
Boundaries, Narrative Frames, and the Politics of Place in Public Housing Redevelopment: Exploring Toronto's Don Mount Court/Rivertowne
(2014-07-09) Mair, David Graeme; Caulfield, Jon; Young, Douglas
Toronto’s Rivertowne (formerly Don Mount Court) is Canada’s first fully completed experiment with redeveloping post-war public housing developments into newly built mixed-income neighbourhoods (a combination of public housing and private condominiums). Originally built at the end of Toronto’s urban renewal era, Don Mount Court consisted of 232 public housing units until the City’s public housing authority decided to tear the buildings down in 2003. Five years later, former residents, along with newcomers, moved into rows of townhouses under its new name, Rivertowne. Proponents of this project believed this would transform an isolated, stigmatized environment into a thriving and integrated community. This thesis explores redevelopment as a mechanism that has profound and intricate impacts on space, place-identity and social dynamics between residents. Drawing on interviews with residents, I argue that the way proponents envision redevelopment is overly idealistic and overshadows a number of problems produced by the project.
Open Access
Maps of Belonging: Muslims in Halifax
(2014-07-28) Mclean, Donald James; Wood, Patricia Katharine
With a growing Muslim population in Canada, questions about their integration are typically framed in terms of a problem of national belonging most often directed at the larger communities found in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. This does not address where, when and how belonging takes place: through complicated personal, social, cultural and spiritual negotiations in the locally grounded everyday life of cities. My research analyzes the alternative maps of Halifax, Nova Scotia produced by a diverse group of twenty Muslim men and women through auto-photography and photo-elicitation interviews. I highlight the complex, diverse and multiple ways in which Muslims negotiate a sense of place and belonging in the city. I examine why understanding the different objectives, motivations, challenges and approaches of participants that make up ‘participant methodologies’ is critical for analyzing the meanings of and relationships between place and belonging. I replace one-dimensional representations of Muslims with narratives of a racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse group of Muslim converts, Canadian-born Muslims, and foreign-born Muslims whose different roots/routes to Islam and Halifax produce different maps of belonging. Muslims negotiate multiple and simultaneous belongings through the experiences and practices of intersectional identities and through the use and creation of ‘halal’ space in the city. I argue that participants’ embodied practices as well as their social and cultural frameworks produce a complicated terrain of connections and disconnections through which participants negotiate everyday life in ‘Halalifax’: a city made congruent with Islamic practices and Muslim belonging. I map the challenges of fostering a sense of ‘ummah’ or community against the internal divisions of the Muslim community to reveal a complex cartography of the politics of belonging. I demonstrate how faith spaces are fought for and created and address the promise and politics of UMMAH Masjid, the city’s newest mosque under construction in Halifax. Mapping the city in these ways demonstrates not only the diverse and complex histories and politics of Muslims and Muslim community in the smaller city of Halifax, but also the efforts to create a sense of place and belonging despite them.
Open Access
The Introduced Plants Present in the Churchill Manitoba Region in 2013 and Possible Environmental and Human Factors that Can Explain the Reduction in Species Diversity from the Last Survey in 1989
(2015-01-26) Kent, Alexander Michael; Drezner Gelfand, Taly Dawn
The number of introduced plants species in Churchill Manitoba has fallen from 104 to 36 between the sampling periods of 1989 and 2013 despite continued climate warming which is predicted by theory to allow for easier establishment of new species in harsh environments. My work suggests that introduced plants are, in general, favouring warmer, ameliorated sites, with higher average soil nutrition that have been disturbed by human activities. This work has found two novel and important differences from the 1989 survey in that continuous disturbance is no longer required for introduced species to persist, and one introduced plant, Taraxacum officinale, has begun growing in two undisturbed locations. Climate warming as well as the invasional meltdown hypothesis can explain these two new observations. The decline in introduced species diversity can in large part be explained by the removal of barley from grain shipments to the Churchill grain elevator, although the study was confounded by a low precipitation summer which could have impacted the number of introduced species that germinated and grew in 2013. The drop in introduced species diversity despite a warming climate is evidence that many of the plants recorded as occurring in Churchill were ecologically doomed populations only kept in existence through constant seed subsidies from the grain elevator.
Open Access
Disrupting the Food Desert/Oasis Binary: Ethnic Grocery Retailers and Perceptions of Food Access in Humbermede, Toronto
(2015-01-26) Chrobok, Michael William; Lo, Lucia P.
Contemporary studies of food accessibility often disregard ‘ethnic’ grocery retailers as sources of food or assume them to be attractive to all individuals. This body of research also frequently frames access as an issue of spatial proximity to grocery stores. Drawing on thirty interviews I conducted with residents of Humbermede, Toronto, I explore how food accessibility is perceived and experienced in a culturally-diverse neighbourhood where the only grocery retailers present are ethnic in nature. I argue that identity-related factors (food preferences, ethnic identification, language, and attitudes towards difference) and aspects of one’s life circumstances (purchasing power, mobility, and location or length of residence) – not merely distance – coalesce to influence understandings of one’s food retail environment and one’s store patronage decisions. These findings suggest that food shoppers are not homogenous, that all retailers are not equally attractive to all consumers, and that food accessibility has critical socio-cultural, economic, and spatiotemporal components.
Open Access
Spaces of Corporate Control in Agriculture: A Critical Study of Contract Farming in the Indian State of Punjab
(2015-01-26) Shrimali, Ritika; Das, Raju J.
The dissertation is about the corporate control over agricultural production through contract farming. In contract farming, farmers sell a certain quantity of farm products to an industrial company at a predetermined price. In this process, and in principle, the industrial company has a secure access to the raw material it needs, and the farmers have a secure market. Contract farming is a world-wide phenomenon. The dissertation studies contract farming in the Indian context. The main thesis of the dissertation is that there is an increasing corporatisation of Indian agriculture, and that this process is mediated by the state institutions at the national and provincial scales, with certain ‘developmental’ consequences. Contract farming as an agrarian accumulation process has four aspects. It is, first of all, a structure of relations of production and exchange involving productive capital (both in agriculture and industry), mercantile capital, and finance capital; so contract farming is more than just the market-contract between farmers and industrial companies. It is a way to increase productive consumption of technologies in rural areas produced by agri-input corporations. Secondly, as a structure of multiple relations of production and exchange and as a mode of accumulation as associated with these relations, CF has an important condition of existence: the state. CF is internally related to the state. The capitalist Indian state has been creating conditions for ‘neoliberal agriculture’ that are conducive to contract farming. The state has been doing this, more or less, in the interest of big business (domestic and foreign), ideologically justifying its actions in the name of national development. Thirdly, CF as a relatively new political-economic project is distinctively contradictory: while CF has become a conduit through which several modern mechanical and biological technologies have been introduced, such introduction of new technologies exhibits a class bias. Finally, the logic of the operation of the CF unequally affects the conditions of working peasants who are subjected to the pressure of class differentiation, as well as the wage-workers, who are subjected heightened level of exploitation which is necessary for contract companies to make large profits.
Open Access
Jamaica "Home of Community Tourism": An Analysis of Authenticity and Women's Everyday Geographies
(2015-01-26) Price, Zakiya; Peake, Linda Joyce
This research explores Countrystyle Community Tourism (CTT) operating in the rural communities of Beeston Spring and Treasure Beach, Jamaica. Data were collected over the summer of 2013 from semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The findings of this research concluded that CCT operates within the structure of capitalism and it has created a niche by promoting its tourism product as an authentic Jamaican experience. Additionally, I argue that the expansion of CCT in the formation of the Villages as Businesses program is one of the creative moments in the neoliberalization of Jamaica. An examination of women’s everyday geographies reveals that class divides deepen and result in limited socio-economic mobility of working-class women. I also examined how the landscape and culture of each community are objectified as authentic representations of Jamaican culture. However, findings reveal that CCT creates positive affective geographies through residents’ emotions of hope and pride.
Open Access
Not just Clowning Around: Clown Characters and the Transgressive Transformation of Urban Space
(2015-08-28) Mclean, Dylann Marguerita; Bain, Alison L.
The dissertation considers the transformative potential of clowns within urban space and examines the becomings of space, human-bodies and clown-bodies through movement (folding) and gesture. I focus specifically on theatrical clowns who have undergone clown through mask training in the Pochinko style and who maintain connections to the clown community of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Throughout it is argued that the clown is an inherently affective being that is ideally placed to transformatively transgress space(s) through processes of folding and turning. The theoretical contributions of this dissertation are twofold. First, this dissertation considers the position of affects within the discipline of human geography and contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary research on theories of affect. Second, it contributes to discussions of how knowledge is produced through the fold (or origami) and to how multiplicity is experienced for individual-clown subjects. I consider the affective potential of the clown by looking at how the clown folds itself, the audience and space together and then turns space, thereby disrupting power dynamics and affects and (re)configuring spaces as it does so. I also consider the latent affects of individuals and clown performance by focusing on the legacy of the late Richard Pochinko (1946-1989) and the continued influence of the Pochinko clown through mask technique for clown training. By drawing on Deleuzian affect theory (Deleuze and Guattari 1998) and, to a lesser extent, Jungian psychology this dissertation considers the clown and its relationships to individuals, subjectivities, and individual and collective networked agency with particular attention to transformation (alchemy), transgression, power and the red nosed mask. Empirically, the research project is structured around three research questions: (1) How can spaces be conceptualized as dynamic processes rather than grounded objects? (2) What can human and clown bodies do in and to physical and material space? (3) How can the placement of affects be theorized? Invoking one of the functions of the modern clown—to mirror cult ure back to itself—I mirror my research questions with the insertion of clown: (1) ¿sǝɔɐds ɯɹoɟsuɐɹʇ suʍoןɔ op ʍoɥ (2) ¿ǝɔɐds ןɐɔıɥdɐɹƃoǝƃ oʇ puɐ uı op sǝıpoq uʍoןɔ uɐɔ ʇɐɥʍ (3) ¿pǝzıɹoǝɥʇ puɐ pǝɔɐןd ǝq sʇɔǝɟɟɐ uʍoןɔ uɐɔ ʍoɥ. To address my research questions I take inspiration from the Deleuzian rhizome and use nodes of methodological engagement (e.g., interviews, observations, stop-motion photography) to adequately capture the affects of both humans and clowns. The research methods speak not only to the specifics of this project—research on clowns—but also to the challenges associated with conducting affect based inquiry using standard social science research methods. The dissertation concludes by offering insights into the rhizome of interconnections that affects (and makes affective) the clown-subjects as they (un)fold and are (un)folded into space.
Open Access
Using Field Measured Parameters with the SWAT Hydrological Model to Quantify Runoff at the Sub-watershed Level
(2015-08-28) David, Yuestas Tharmeegan; Remmel, Tarmo; Robert, Andre
The SWAT hydrological model is a semi-distributed physically based model. As a physically based model, parameters are measurable in the field and can be implemented in the model. This study aims to evaluate the potential of integrating field data ( hydraulic conductivity, bulk density, and canopy storage) into SWAT, and investigates its benefits for a Canadian watershed. SWAT can run based on the empirically based Curve Number (CN) or the physically based Green and Ampt (GA) runoff method, both of which are evaluated with and without field data. Without calibration or validation, adding field data improved performance of the GA method for both the calibration and validation years, but the CN method only improved for the validation year. The CN calibrated or validated model did not benefit from field data, but the GA model significantly improved for the calibrated years and showed no improvement for the validated period.
Open Access
Global Game, Local Identity: The Social Production of Football Space in Liverpool
(2015-08-28) Evans, Daniel Kelsey; Norcliffe, Glen B.
This thesis sets out the situation of the globalized English Premier League and its consequences for football in Liverpool. I am looking at both the reliance on and resistance to a tourist based consumption of the game. Using a Lefebvrian theoretical framework I analyze how football space is created in Liverpool and how the supporters’ groups of different teams in the city work to both globalize and glocalize the football culture of the city, and are looking to reshape their relationship with football’s current economic and cultural space. As Liverpool increasingly relies on a tourist-based economy with sport as its focus, it is altering the relationship between supporters and their clubs. The monitoring of fan performances by both authorities and other fans can be considered through Foucauldian conceptions of power to continuously shift the dynamics between different groups of supporters.
Open Access
Characterizing the Spatial Patterns and Spatially Explicit Probabilities of Post-Fire Vegetation residual patches in Boreal Wildfire Scars
(2015-08-28) Araya, Yikalo Hayelom; Remmel, Tarmo
Wildfire is one of the main natural disturbances that consume a substantial amount of forest cover, influencing and reshaping the landscape mosaic of boreal forests. Wildfires do not burn the entire landscape; they rather create a complex mosaic of post-fire landscape structure with different degrees of burn severity. The resulting spatial mosaic includes fully burned, partially burned, and unburned areas. Even though the most visible components of a fire disturbed landscape are the completely burned areas, a considerable number of residual patches of various size, shape, and composition are retained following a fire. The residual patches refer to remnants of the pre-fire forest ecosystem that left completely unaltered within the fire footprint. Improved understanding of the patterns and characteristics of wildfire residuals provides insights for investigating the effects of fire disturbances, emulating forest disturbances in harvesting operations, and improving forest management planning. Knowledge about the post-fire residuals relies on how well we measure the patterns and characteristics of post-fire residuals, determine the factors that explain their occurrence and patterns, and what consistent measurement framework we use to understand the patterns and predict their likely occurrence. In this study, the patterns and characteristics of post-fire residuals was initially examined based on eleven boreal wildfire events within northwestern Ontario; each ignited by lightning and never suppressed. The wildfire events were occurred in ecoregion 2W during the fire seasons of 2002 and 2003. In order to design a consistent and repeatable method for measuring the patterns of residuals, an integrate approach has been designed. This involves assessing the spatial patterns where the composition, configuration, and fragmentation of residual patches were assessed based on selected spatial metrics; examining the importance of predictor variables that explain residuals and their marginal effects on residual patch occurrence using Random Forest (RF) ensemble method; and developing a spatially explicit predictive model using the RF method where the combined effects of the variables were examined. Finally, the three approaches are applied and evaluated using a recent and independent data from the extensive RED084 wildfire event that occurred in 2011 within the adjacent ecoregion (3S). The effects of analytical scale (i.e., spatial resolution) on characterizing the spatial patterns, determining the relative variable importance, and predicted probabilities of residual patches are assessed. The results show that the composition and configuration of wildfire residuals vary as a function of measurement, spatial resolutions, and fire event sizes, suggesting the variation in fire intensity and severity across the fire events. The patterns of wildfire residuals are also sensitive to changing scale, but the responses of the spatial metrics to changing spatial resolutions are grouped into three categories: monotonic change and predictable response in which three shape related metrics (LSI, MSI, and FRAC) show a predictable responsible; monotonic change with no simple scaling rule; and non-monotonic change with erratic response. The results also reveal that the factors that are incorporated in this study interactively affect the occurrence and distribution of residual patches, but natural firebreak features (e.g., wetlands and surface water) were among the most important predictors to explain wildfire residuals. Furthermore, the model implemented to predict residual patches has a reasonable or high predictive performance (‘marginal’ to ‘strong’ model performance) when it was applied in wildfire events that occurred in the same ecoregion. However, the predictive power of the model is low for the independent fire event (RED084). The overall findings of this dissertation reveal that the 1) predictive model based on RF is robust enough to determine the relative importance of the predictors and their marginal effect; 2) the model was flexible enough to identify areas where wildfire residuals are likely to occur; and 3) there is a repeatable, robust measurement framework for characterizing residual patches and understanding their variability across different wildfire events.
Open Access
Building a Mineral Nation? The Oyu Tolgoi Copper-Gold Mine and Contested Infrastructure Development in Mongolia
(2015-08-28) Jackson, Sara Lindsay; Lunstrum, Elizabeth M.
This dissertation investigates mining as a contested nation-building project through the development of mining-related infrastructure for the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, located in Mongolia’s South Gobi province. Oyu Tolgoi is expected to contribute over 30 percent of Mongolia’s GDP in the coming decades and has become a symbol of the promise of national development through mineral extraction. At the same time, the material effects of mining-related infrastructure challenge these promises of nation-building. I argue that controversies over Oyu Tolgoi provide a lens onto the complexities of mining as a nation-building project, revealing how the state both facilitates and inhibits mining and how people living in mining-affected areas perceive the impacts of mining on their livelihoods, futures, and belonging to the nation. Specifically, I examine how Oyu Tolgoi and its parent corporations contribute to rebuilding Mongolia as a ‘mineral nation;’ how the privatization of water resource access creates new visions of the nation at the cost of pre-existing visions; how road dust brings local residents into intimate contact with contradictions of mining as a nation-building project; and how fiction can reveal alternative understandings of nature, mining, and nation. At the core of contestations over infrastructure development are questions of who has the power to define the direction of the nation, how the materiality of mining channels the possibilities of local and national development, and what are the costs to both local livelihoods and the nation. By focusing attention on mining-related infrastructure, this dissertation contributes to calls for more research on how infrastructure enables, channels, and delimits future possibilities of not only governance and territory, but also, I argue the nation.
Open Access
Rupununi Imaginaries
(2015-08-28) Macdonald, Katherine Louise; Peake, Linda Joyce
Migration activity across the Guyanese-Brazilian border has increased considerably recently, and is impacting both the peoples and the environments of the Rupununi. The activities resulting from these migration movements threaten to increase pressures on Indigenous territories within Guyana, resulting in the annexation of traditional ancestral lands, leading to potential losses of subsistence and livelihood practices. By examining these movements through the lens of relations between the Indigenous Makushi and Wapishana peoples of the Rupununi and place-making, this dissertation aims to identify how accepting Indigenous ontologies as one of many perspectives of the world(s) helps in understanding places as multiple. Through this understanding and acceptance of multiplicities, these ontologies also contribute to new ways of imagining future(s). This ethnographic study was conducted through sixteen months of fieldwork within five Rupununi villages - Aishalton, Annai Central, Karasabai, St. Ignatius, and Shulinab - researching together with the Makushi and Wapishana peoples of the region who collectively live within the forest-savannah ecotone, mostly maintaining subsistence based lifestyles. By exploring personal histories, environments, and cosmologies, the possibilities for different, multiple, imaginaries-as-realities of the Rupununi are presented. In doing so, this study finds that Makushi and Wapishana ontologies are counter-imagining places, lands, and territories by re-engaging with the imaginaries of their ancestors, producing a complex set of alternate geographies. In using these imaginaries to produce different visions of place, Rupununi peoples are empowering themselves to create positive change within their lives in terms of how they want to build and develop their communities, livelihoods, environments, and cultural and political institutions.
Open Access
In and Out of Place: Islamic Domestic Extremism and the Case of the "Toronto 18"
(2015-08-28) Kowalski, Jeremy David; Jenkins, William M.
In the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001 a veritable cornucopia of formal, practical, and popular materials have emerged that offer analyses of various dimensions of the phenomenon of Islamitic extremism. Unfortunately, despite the voluminous amount of analytical capital and resources expended, significant advances in our collective understanding of this phenomenon continue to be elusive. This situation is certainly evident when one surveys the current literature available that focuses on the processes of Islamitic extremization. To date, the predominant focus of this important research has been on the micro social relations and structures that make the development of particular subjectivities probable. Although this mode of inquiry is valuable, there is a danger in overly subjectivizing the process of extremization. As demonstrated through an analysis of the so-called Toronto 18—a group of Islamitic social actors apprehended in June, 2006, for activities that contravened the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA)—macro social relations and structures served a significant function in creating the conditions through which the process of extremization becomes probable. In the context of this analysis, the macro social relations and structures that made the ideological conditioning and political transformation of these Islamitic social actors probable include, what is referred to as, the following spheres of influence: Transnational, State, and Group. In effect, these spheres of influence formed a network of scales that converged and condensed in the place-specific context of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and facilitated the transgression of some of the actors involved from a Dominant to a Subversive discursive formation and concomitant field of action and practice. However, to develop a greater appreciation for the context within which these processes took place required not only a re-evaluation of the conceptual and terminological tools used to apprehend this phenomenon, but an analysis of the historical processes and forces that made the emergence of particular discursive formations possible. If a comprehensive understanding of the processes of extremization are to be reached and effective counter- terrorism policies developed, the macro social relations and structures that make the emergence of particular extremist subjectivities probable need to be given greater consideration. Ignoring these relations and structures will potentially result in the continuation of counter-productive anti-terrorism policies and counter-terrorism practices which contribute to the oxygen of violence rather than facilitating the de-escalation of extremist activities.
Open Access
New Relationships on the Northwest Frontier: Episodes in the Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en Encounter with Colonial Power
(2015-08-28) McCreary, Tyler Allan; Wood, Patricia Katharine
This dissertation examines relationships between colonialism and Indigenous peoples that shape the development of extractive resources in Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en territories in Northwest British Columbia, Canada. I argue colonialism and Indigeneity are co-constituted. Theoretically, this dissertation brings an analysis of colonialism into conversation with Foucauldian understandings of sovereign, disciplinary, and governmental power. I begin by situating the relationship between colonialism and the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en people historically, then transition to examine in greater detail the contemporary relations unfolding through the courts, traditional knowledge studies, resource governance, and education. I argue the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en assertions of territory and jurisdiction in the Delgamuukw litigation exposed Indigenous traditions to new forms of colonial discipline and debasement but also induced new regimes of recognition and doctrines of reconciliation. Subsequently, Aboriginal traditional knowledge studies integrated recognition of Indigeneity within the governmental regulation of resource development. However, such recognition has been constrained. Witsuwit’en resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project highlights the ongoing emergence of Indigenous politics in excess of regulatory integration as traditional. This excess is continually reincorporated into colonial governance processes to resecure development, through not only techniques aimed at protecting Indigenous traditions but also training regimes designed to incorporate Indigenous labour within the industrial economy. Through the dissertation, I demonstrate the entanglement of resource development with a continuous cycle moving through moments of Indigenous contestation, colonial response, and subsequent Indigenous challenges. This cycle has relied on the exercise of sovereignty, disciplinarity, and governmentality as distinct yet interpenetrated modalities of colonial power. Colonial sovereignty operates to suspend the political excess of Indigenous political claims, discipline works to enframe Indigeneity, and government minimally regulates to protect and foster Indigenous being. However, on the basis that Indigenous forms of territory and subjectivity remain unreconciled with colonial regimes of discipline and governmentality, Indigenous authorities perpetually advance new jurisdictional claims that problematize those of the colonial sovereign, and reopen spaces of negotiation. I suggest the movement between moments of resistance and reconciliation remains necessarily open and indeterminate. These multiple trajectories of the encounter between Indigenous peoples and colonialism, I argue, continually unfold to constitute the colonial present.
Open Access
For the Homeland: Transnational Diasporic Nationalism and the Eurovision Song Contest
(2015-08-28) Mijatovic, Slavisa; Jenkins, William M.
This project examines the extent to which the Eurovision Song Contest can effectively perpetuate discourses of national identity and belonging for diasporic communities. This is done through a detailed performance analysis of former Yugoslav countries’ participations in the contest, along with in-depth interviews with diasporic people from the former Yugoslavia in Malmö, Sweden. The analysis of national symbolism in the performances shows how national representations can be useful for the promotion of the state in a reputational sense, while engaging a short-term sense of national pride and nationalism for the audiences. More importantly, the interviews with the former Yugoslav diaspora affirm Eurovision’s capacity for the long-term promotion of the ‘idea of Europe’ and European diversities as an asset, in spite of the history of conflict within the Yugoslav communities. This makes the contest especially relevant in a time of rising right-wing ideologies based on nationalism, xenophobia and racism.
Open Access
The Urban Politics of Settler-Colonialism: Articulations of the Colonial Relation in Postwar Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1945-1975 (AND BEYOND)
(2015-12-16) Hugill, David Warren; Wood, Patricia Katharine
This dissertation documents some of the ways that colonial practices and mentalities have shaped relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the historical and material conjuncture of Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a focus on the period 1945 to 1975. Building on political and geographical literature concerned with the enduring effects of settler-colonization in North American urban environments, my inquiry starts from the premise that the “colonial relation” retains a persistent structural trace in Minneapolis, manifesting through a series of practices and dynamics that operate to enforce particular forms of social, economic, and territorial domination. I begin by demonstrating that Indigenous peoples in the area were territorially and economically displaced in the construction of the newcomer settlement that became Minneapolis, which I describe by looking critically at the life of one of the city’s early “city builders,” Thomas Barlow Walker. I then expand this discussion by developing a series of arguments that demonstrate how the “colonial relation” has articulated in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, which, for a variety of reasons, emerged as a site of significant Indigenous residential concentration and congregation in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, I consider how colonial practices and mentalities hastened Indigenous migration to the inner-city, constrained the knowledge practices of non-Indigenous advocacy organizations interested in alleviating urban forms of Indigenous marginalization, and shaped a culture of inner-city “racialized policing.” I then conclude with a brief and speculative look at the colonial relation in present-day Minneapolis, examining some of the ways that both Indigenous marginality and economic prosperity are bound up with broader deployments of state violence, particularly through the activities of local weapons manufacturers. Throughout, I argue that to make sense of the distinct patterns of group differentiated insecurity that disproportionately plagued Indigenous migrants to Minneapolis in the postwar period and the decades that followed, we need to think beyond the immediacy of the present and pay close heed to the ways in which colonially-inflected legacies, material distributions, and knowledge practices continue to have distinct effects.
Open Access
The Effects of Grain Size on Morphological Patterns and Land Cover Within Boreal Wildfire Residual Patches
(2015-12-16) Singh, Budhendra Oudesh; Remmel, Tarmo
The post-fire conditions comprise a matrix of burned, partially burned, and unburned patches that are ecologically and financially important. Studying the unburned patches helps planners assess the effectiveness of emulating natural disturbance patterns. MSPA quantifies spatial patterns in terms of their geometry and connectivity of landscape features. The morphological elements were identified for residual patches extracted from the RED-084 fire. Grain size coarsening and parameterizations were measured to find if they altered the frequency of morphologies within 10 land cover classes. Conifers and water classes were the most abundant and significantly different from other classes across most morphologies. Connectivity and transition changes had significant effects on islets and edges respectively. Edge width had a significant effect on cores, perforations, edges, and branches across all grain sizes. These findings can assist in developing a set of rules on the composition and configuration of land cover and morphologies left behind after harvesting.
Open Access
To Build a Home: The Material Cultures, Gender Relations and the Cultivation of Meaning by Karen Refugees From Burma
(2015-12-16) Smith, Ei Phyu; Roth, Robin J.
This dissertation seeks to trouble the concept of home being rooted in one place by further understanding how refugees create a sense of belonging across their sites of displacement and settlement. Their mobility and flows consist of punctuated starts and stops and often a history of violence. It is from this past experience that they make new meanings in a new place of residence. Since the late 1980s Karen refugees from Burma have been seeking refuge along the Thai-Burma border region. They flee persecution and gendered violence at the hands of the central Burmese armed forces to be protected legally by international regulations and materially by international aid organizations. Though Thailand is not a signatory member of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to Refugees that would recognize these individuals as Convention refugees, the Thai State does allow them to live in camps with limited freedoms and rights. It is within this context that Karen refugees make a home through their material cultures and relationship to food. These practices are influenced by their power negotiations with various stakeholders and by gender relations. I argue that by analyzing these embodied practices on a smaller scale, we can glean new meanings of home, including the resistance to existing structural regulations, nuances and richness of everyday life while being displaced. It is precisely through the mundane rhythms of living that we learn of how issues such as loss, citizenship, renewal and dissatisfaction all participate in creating a place, a home, that is not rooted to a singular location but rather constructed and deconstructed through life and space.