Social Anthropology

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Open Access
Is it Worth the shot? Ontario Women's Negotiations of Risk, Gender and the Human Papillomavirous(HPV) Vaccine
(2014-07-09) Wyndham-West, Catherine Michelle; Adelson, Naomi
This research project has been an endeavor in understanding how Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy became gendered in Canada, how women in Ontario negotiated the concepts of “risk” and “gender” deployed in pharmaceutical marketing and public health programming, and how they folded these mediations into decision making about the vaccine. Eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork revealed that the federal and Ontario governments developed HPV vaccine policy by using gender based analyses frames, based on the parameters of Merck Frosst’s gender-based marketing. This case study of the HPV vaccine highlights how corporations and governments work hand and hand to set public health policy in the neoliberal era of public health. However, these sales/governance strategies and the gendered at-risk subject formation they created and circulated were not passively integrated by women into their daily lives. The women interviewed – mothers of daughters affected by the grade eight school vaccination program, women university students and patients at a hospital vaccine clinic – demonstrated that the concepts of “risk” and “gender” are productive and movable ontological modes of being, which shift in and out of focus depending upon the context. Mothers were intensely focused on gender and doing mothering, students were doing gender politics and intermittent risk, and patients were living with risk. What sales/governance strategies had tried to “fix,” women continually unfixed. These accounts of situated risk and gender demonstrated that when assembled, women’s experiences helped transform their ethical being or sense of self. This knowledge of the self then informed vaccination decisions. Thus, decision making was not a discrete event or a linear, cost-benefit analysis. Instead it was an inherently social and cultural process, which was embedded in women’s experiences of finding meaning in their efforts to be good mothers, strong young women emerging into adulthood and pre-cancerous patients seeking respite amid the anxiety of protracted medical procedures. Women’s ontological decision making provides an analytical framework through which to tie together risk- and gender-related theory, individual accounts of risk encounters and the social, political, historical and economic context in which these mediations occur.
Open Access
Places, Memories and Religious Identity: Muslim Places of Worship in Badakhshan Region of Tajikistan
(2015-01-26) Oshurbekov, Sharaf; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This study examines the ways in which the Ismailis of the Badakhshan region of Tajikistan understand and relate to their sacred sites. It explores the sacred sites of Badakhshan within the framework of anthropological literature on space and place. Using the concept of chronotope, this study shows that the sacred sites disrupt the materialist and historiographic understanding of and relation to the spaces and places. Through the stories of the miracles of the saints, sacred sites validate and confirm the presence of the transcendent in the lived environment of the people. Beyond the legends about the miracles of the saints, sacred sites are chronotopes that evoke the memory of the Soviet campaigns against these places. Through the retrospective narratives about the Soviet past, people allocate the responsibility for the destruction and desecration of these sites at that period to members of their communities. Although these retrospective narratives are about recent events, they include transcendent intervention; that is, they show how these sites punished those that were involved in the Soviet campaigns against them. Moreover, through these discources and through their visitations to the sacred sites, people unconsciously attribute certain agency to them, which emerges in the relationship between people and these places. People seek the help of these sites to grant their wishes. In most cases, these wishes are about curing the seriously ill family member or curing infertility problems. In that sense, sacred sites help people to recapture the sense of agency in situations where they experience its loss. Therefore, sacred sites are chronotopes, the physical sites in the inhabited space of the community that incorporate and evoke the legends about the miracles of the saints, the stories about the recent Soviet past of these sites and the discourses about their current status in the life of the community. The stories and discources associated with the sacred sites affect and shape people’s perceptions and articulations of their inhabited spaces and places.
Open Access
Killing Matters: Canadian War Remembrance and the Ghosts of Ortona
(2015-08-12) Cosh, David Ian; Yon, Daniel Arthur
This dissertation combines critical discourse analysis with person-centred ethnography to examine the dissonant relationships between Canadian war veterans' narratives and the national discourse of Canadian war remembrance. The dissertation analyses Canadian war remembrance as a ritualized discourse (named Remembrance) that is produced in commemorative rituals, symbols, poetry, monuments, pilgrimages, artwork, history-writing, political speeches, government documents, media reports, and the design of the Canadian War Museum. This Remembrance discourse foregrounds and valorizes the suffering of soldiers and makes the soldier's act of dying the central issue of war. In doing so, Remembrance suppresses the significance of the soldier's act of killing and attributes this orientational framework to veterans themselves, as if it is consistent with their experiences. The dissertation problematizes this Remembrance framing of war through an analysis of WWII veterans' narratives drawn from ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted in western Canada with 23 veterans of the WWII battle of Ortona, Italy. The fieldwork consisted of life-story interviews that focused on veterans' combat experiences, supplemented by archival research and a study of the Ortona Christmas reconciliation dinner with former enemy soldiers. Through psychoanalytically-informed discourse analysis, the narratives are interpreted in terms of hidden meanings and trauma signals associated with the issue of killing. The analysis shows that many of these veterans were strongly affected by killing even when they did not know if they had killed and even though most of them tried to suppress their dissonant affects. In sum, these Ortona veterans' narratives constitute dissonant acts of remembrance that unsettle the limited moral frame within which Canadians imagine war.
Open Access
The Making of Political Forests in the Cittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: The State, Development and Indigeneity
(2015-08-28) Chowdhury, Md Khairul Islam; Gururani, Shubhra
This dissertation offers an anthropological and genealogical account of forests and social forestry, in particular the way they came to be constituted over time in one particular social-ecological context of Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork to examine how discourses of forest and forest relations in CHT since British rule have changed and shaped agrarian relations of the hill peoples and their relations to power. As such, this dissertation explores forest history in relation to an ‘ethnically’ different and ‘small group’ of population living within a nation-state so as to understand how nature/environment is constituted as a terrain of governmental power, subject formation, and state building. The analysis is informed by Michel Foucault’s ideas of discourse, power and knowledge; Peter Vandergeest’s and Nancy Peluso’s theory of territorialization and political forests; K. Sivaramakrishnan’s critical work on the production of colonial state, society, and knowledge in a forested region of colonial Bengal, and Tania Li’s and Arun Agrawal’s theoretical and ethnographic work on governmentality, indigenous communities, and resource struggles. The chapters of this dissertation are organized around the political regimes of Britain, Pakistan and Bangladesh, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the making and remaking of political forests. Throughout the chapters, there run several underlying themes: opposition to jhum cultivation; development; environmental change; and social forestry. These overlapping themes take distinct forms in relation to the discourse of political forests at each conjuncture of a particular historical development. Through this analysis, this dissertation argues that the ethnic conflicts in CHT are rooted in the policies and practices of political forests, in particular industrialization of forest resources that resulted in the dispossession and marginalization of hill peoples. However, the persistence of the conflict is primarily due to counter-insurgency developments, especially ‘social forestry.’ The dissertation illustrates how hill peoples’ political opposition to the state and forestry programs through insurgency and alternative development have, in fact, helped to create and expand political forests. While many scholars write accurately but too generally about the land issue as the crux of the prolem ethnic conflict and insurgecy in CHT, this dissertation explains not just that land is problem, but why and how land is problem. In sum, this dissertation contributes to the rich scholarship in South Asian historical political ecology, with a focus on Bangladesh and the emerging field ‘Zomia Studies.’ The dissertation aims to deepen our understanding of the relations between violence, forests and development in CHT and addresses the absence of ethnographic research on ethnic conflict in the CHT in general, and on issues of its forests and lands in particular in Bangladesh.
Open Access
The Effects of the Mobile Phone on Social Etiquette: A Study Pertaining to the Guyanese Baby Boom Generation
(2015-12-16) Ibrahim, Faarah Natalia; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This thesis explores the relationship between technology and society in North America through an ethnographic case-study study of six participants between the ages of 45 and 60, all of whom are of Guyanese ethnicity, and a number of whom are members of my own extended family network. My research took place between August 2014 and October 2014 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My position in this ethnographic study was that of insider anthropologist. I was able to conduct a series of semi-structured interviews. My ethnography focuses on how mobile phones are affecting my interlocutors’ everyday human social interactions and the extent to which their mobile phone use is refashioning their social etiquette. The key themes identified are absence-presence, convenience, connection, tendency, anthropology of interaction, addiction, and family time. This study supports the interconnection between technology and society, as there is a clear need to be connected with others through the mobile phone.
Open Access
The Politics of Intimacy: An Ethnography of Illegalized Migrant Women and Their Undocumented Children in Tel Aviv, Israel
(2016-04-07) Shapiro, Maya
This study of migrant women and their undocumented children in Tel Aviv, Israel is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork spanning 2009 to 2011. It draws upon participant observation, as well as interviews and informal conversations, in order to describe and analyze the social and political patterns that emerged when migrant women from the Global South, who were employed as caregivers for the elderly through Israel's Foreign Worker Program, chose to become pregnant, give birth and settle in the city to which they migrated as so-called temporary workers. Using a public debate over the proposed deportation of 1,200 Israeli-born, but undocumented, children of migrant workers as a point of departure for this investigation, I asked how illegalized migrant women and their children were situated in political, economic and cultural terms in Tel Aviv despite the fact that they were never supposed to permanently live there. I found that far from existing on the margins of Israeli policies, laws, bureaucratic practices and social expectations, as may be assumed of people without legal status, illegalized migrant women and their undocumented children were, in fact, embedded in their very core. I use the term "politics of intimacy" to describe the daily interactions of illegalized women and their children with Israeli government offices, medical facilities, social and legal welfare institutions, employment agencies, popular media and individual citizens, arguing that intimacy is not just an interpersonal condition, but a socio-political one that encompasses the possibilities ofboth empowerment and exploitation. Following from Stoler's observation of the "tense and tender ties" (Stoler 2001) of colonial rule, I describe the paradoxical conditions that are generated when marginalized individuals are brought into an intimate relationship with the structures and ideologies of the place in which they live. Specifically, illegalized migrant women and their undocumented children in Tel Aviv live in states of "permanent temporariness", "visible invisibility'' and "inclusive exclusion" as they come to constitute a "privileged underclass" that is simultaneously dependent on, and vulnerable to, intimate engagements with Israeli society.
Open Access
"You Owe It to Yourself": Discourses of Hope and Work in Brain Injured Individuals' Experiences With Brain Training Games
(2016-09-20) Cagliostro, Elaine; MacDonald, Margaret
Brain training is a multi-million dollar market, with products that boast claims to enhance cognitive functions through the power of neuroplasticity. In this MA research I explore the experiences of individuals with an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) who use brain training in an attempt to regain past identities or to create new and improved ones. The concept of neuroplasticity embedded in brain training programs represented hope to brain injured individuals: hope that they could regain skills that they have lost because of their injury. Brain training programs are also part of a larger theme of self-rehabilitation, in which individuals who were either neglected by the healthcare system or who wanted additional care turned to at-home treatments and programs. Finally, I argue that brain training fits with the dominant cultural imperative of health in North American society in which individuals must work to exercise self control and better themselves and their health in order to contribute to society.
Open Access
Anarchism in the Boonies: Place-Making, Technology and Resistance in Rural Canada
(2016-09-20) Malenfant, Jayne; Alexandrakis, Othon
Looking at various locations around Canada, this thesis aims to better understand the ways in which modern Canadian anarchists are reimagining spaces in both rural and urban contexts. Through focusing on the use of technology and Do-It-Yourself ethics, this research demonstrates the unique ways this "scene" creates new forms of rural living and political opportunities outside of urban activism. In addition, this builds on existing ideas of how new media and technology can be tinkered with in politically meaningful ways--in this case melding aspects of punk, anarchist and "traditional" rural aesthetics and ethics to create fluid spaces of possibility.
Open Access
Speaking Together: Exploring Discourses of 'Dutchness' in Language Learning, Voluntarism, and Active Citizenship
(2016-09-20) Mosher, Rhiannon Michelle; Winland, Daphne Naomi
My dissertation examines everyday understandings of citizenship as expressed by voluntary Dutch language coaches in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic research, the primary methods used in this study were in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation. These methods were complemented by archival research examining policy documents, key discussions in mainstream Dutch media, and promotional materials developed by the voluntary organizations studied. Adopting a Foucauldian approach to governmentality informed by the work of Tania Li, Mitchell Dean, Ann Laura Stoler, and Aihwa Ong, this study considers how volunteer Dutch language coaches both reproduce and challenge contemporary discourses around citizenship and belonging in Dutch society. Since the 1990s, in the Netherlands and across the European Union, concerns over increasing cultural diversity and diminishing social cohesion have centred on marginalized, non-Western (Muslim) newcomers and their descendants. These concerns have developed concurrently with neoliberal interventions that have included the downloading of social service provision including immigrant integration to lower levels of government, private and not-for-profit civil society organizations, and individual citizens as volunteers. Cross-cutting historical, colonial calculations of Dutchness and more recent expressions of neoliberal active citizenship (Ong 1996; Muehlebach 2012), the Dutch language has emerged as a key symbol of belonging, and technique for teaching the technology of government to newcomers. In this context I argue that Amsterdams Dutch language coaching volunteers fill an important role as front-line citizenship educators, offering a unique perspective through which to study citizenship. Alongside teaching newcomers the language skills required to naturalize, coaches convey their own ideas of citizenship and belonging as an everyday ethic and practice of community building. Through their voluntary work and expressions of meaningful social integration and citizenship, these research participants consent to and extend the reach of government into the private lives of (potential) citizens. The tensions, practices, and contradictions around belonging revealed by these participants underscore the awkward continuities (Dean 2010:57) with the powerful grammar of difference and Dutchness developed through the experience of empire, and how entangled discourses of cultural difference and neoliberal active citizenship shape state and everyday notions of morally and culturally attuned citizenship practice.
Open Access
Spiritual Economies of Evangelical Worship: Technology, Stewardship and Experience
(2016-09-20) Baker, Laurie Mae; Schrauwers, Albert
The present work explores how American evangelicals have learned to use and think about performance technology, such as professional audio, video and lighting technologies as they endeavour to craft worship environments. I track the discourses from trade publications, like Technologies for Worship Magazine (TFWM) and Worship Facilities Magazine and Church Production, in their devotion to bridge the divide between religion and technology to create a house of worship market. Both TFWM and Church Production participate in conferences where they offer education on technology use. Technologies for Worship Magazine is the educational basis for the TFW Pavilion and Worship Facilities and Church Production for an event called Worship Facilities Expo (WFX). Ethnographic research at these events reveals that evangelical worship technicians learn to cultivate dispositions towards stewardship and technical mastery through attending these technology exhibitions and conferences, by taking offered educational seminars. Training at the TFW Pavilion and WFX focussed on two main areas: first, how to use professional performance technologies, like audio amplification and control devices, lighting configurations, and video capture, production and broadcast systems. Second, training addressed the importance for church technicians to use technologies to create excellent and relevant worship experiences. By excellent, trainers meant worship practice that uses performance technologies seamlessly to create immersive experiences. Churches who strive for technological excellence embody the belief that the relevance of the church and its message among believers and non-believers is coupled with the use of technology to enhance the affective potential of the message delivered by the pastor. Yet, as church technicianslike audio or lighting engineersreflect on technology use, they reveal the ways that technology troubles contemporary worship practice as much as it augments the creation of poignant, immersive experiences.
Open Access
Creating Imagined Homelands and the Politics Behind the Balikbbayan Identity
(2016-09-20) Humilde, Angeli Grace; Holmes, J. Teresa
Balikbayan is a Filipino term used to describe Filipinos who have left the homeland, and have returned for temporary visits. Due to the large economic contribution of balikbayans in the past, the Philippine state has hailed those who occupy this status as Heroes of the Nation. In the recent years, balikbayans have been targeted by real estate development companies as sources of capital due to the widely held belief by Filipinos that balikbayans are very wealthy. Many development companies specifically look to target balikbayans to purchase luxury enclave development properties in the Philippines as investment properties. Using data that I had gathered from my fieldwork in the Philippines in the summer of 2014, I will examine what role these luxury properties and consumer consumption have in displaying the balikbayan identity, why it is such a desired subject position by Filipinos, and the discrepancies between the state definition of balikbayan, versus on the ground definition of balikbayan.
Open Access
Surviving Oncology: Living With Cancer in the Wake of Integrative Care
(2016-09-20) Atkinson-Graham, Melissa Rose; Myers, Natasha
This dissertation analyzes the emerging medical field of integrative oncology, attending to how this approach to cancer treatment unsettles and reconfigures existing biomedical ideas about bodies and cancer. Informed by twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in the state of California, it examines the attempts made by integrative practitioners to provide whole patient care by incorporating complementary medicines such as Ayurveda and Chinese medicine into conventional oncology. I suggest that this approach enacts a kind of sensitivity for how cancer is lived as a disease conditioned by emotional, psychological, social, and environmental factors, requiring treatments attentive to these dimensions. Throughout this study I grapple with the intentions of integrative oncologists and the realities of the political economy of medicine and insurance in the United States that leaves integrative care out of the reach of most people, producing a situation where many are strained to imagine different ways of surviving oncology. At the core of this project is a concern for what it means and what it takes to live well with cancer in biomedicine.
Open Access
Pulp Friction: Nature, Politics and Plantation Forestry in Soriano, Uruguay
(2016-09-20) Switzer, Michelle Barbara; McAllister, Carlota
Based on 14 months of fieldwork carried out in the capital of Montevideo and interior department of Soriano, Uruguay, this dissertation analyzes the growing tension between supporters and resisters of the countrys expanding pulp and exotic tree plantation industry. Since the creation of the Forestry Law in 1987, monoculture plantation forestry has grown, currently covering 1 million hectares of land. The ruling left-wing coalition, the Frente Amplio, has continued to support the large-scale, foreign-owned pulp/plantation industry despite its founding principles of carrying out agrarian reform and supporting the rural worker. Drawing from the theoretical work on boundary objects in science and technology studies (STS) as well as writings on the dialectical relationship between the state and civil society, this dissertation is broadly framed by three thematic concerns: 1) How do processes of state formation and market logics rearrange the natural environment? 2) How do such processes impact the relationships between local populations, their physical environment, and the state? 3) What does neo-extractivism do? Is neo-extractivism under the direction of a progressive state different from the kinds of extractivist projects that dominated in Latin America during the 20th century? Exploring how and why local populations respond to these entanglements in the ways that they do, I note that anti-industry activists make logical arguments based on their particular interpretations of economic development, natural production, and progressive politics, which clash with the states technical and reformed approach. As such, my research contributes to our understanding of the ways that social and political relationships and state formation projects form within in the context of large-scale neo-extractivist projects.
Open Access
Mythologizing a 'Zone City': Urban Fantasies of and in Songdo, South Korea
(2016-09-20) Posner, Simon Dennis; Gururani, Shubhra
Songdo is a city built within Koreas first Free Economic Zone (FEZ). The city has become imbued with three distinct yet interrelated fantasies a grand state project envisioned to guide the country towards modernity; a blank slate onto which an organized and efficient utopian community can be built; and an urban node in a frictionless world. In this thesis, I present an anthropology of and in the city by exploring the relations between the urban imagination of Songdo and particular groups in the city. I argue that Songdos fantasies shape the behaviours, perceptions, and material practices of people working and living in the city, who in turn interpret and act upon Songdos physical and symbolic spaces. I attempt to demonstrate that while Songdos mythologies and their concomitant practices link to global trends, the production and experiences of the city reflect a situated and locally embedded urban form.
Open Access
Bean There, Grind That: Queer Coffee Culture and the Politics of Place, Belonging and Representation
(2016-09-20) Faranda, Daniel; Murray, David A. B.
The gay village located in Toronto, Ontario, is generally thought by mainstream society to be excessively determined by the establishments, individuals and normative LGBTQ identity representations located in the area i.e. mostly white, middle/upper class. Based on this and the interviews with my informants, I assert how the dominance of normative LGBTQ identity makes the area over-determined. However, I will attempt to highlight the importance of alternative queer places along the strip in the Church and Wellesley Street area. My thesis will explore the relationship between place formations, LGBTQ identity construction, and coffee consumption. I aim to create a richer understanding of the various ways in which queer identities are understood, created, and negotiated within coffee shops. I highlight how, at times, queer coffee shops are open and dynamic, and allow for new and old meanings to become generated in and out of these places. Queer coffee shops shed light on how my research informants grapple and work with or against these complex sites of negotiations. Ultimately, queer coffee shops in the Church and Wellesley Street area are microcosms of the larger LGBTQ community in the same neighbourhood. These processes help to shape LGBTQ identity, membership, place, rootedness, and belonging while simultaneously encouraging misunderstanding, tension, conflict, and estrangement.
Open Access
Hamdard and Unani: The Contested Terrain of Indo-Muslim Medical Knowledge
(2016-11-25) Shah, Radha; Gururani, Shubhra
This thesis is a historical anthropological study of the Indian branch of herbal pharmaceutical company Hamdard. I examine Hamdards commercial representation of the Indo-Islamic tradition of medicine called Unani, through a document analysis of a variety of company commissioned literature, including marketing pamphlets, conference proceedings, scientific journal articles, newsprint media, educational materials, and print advertisements. Established in 1906, Hamdard emerged and developed during a period of Indian Muslim cultural modernization, Hindu nationalism, and anti-colonial politicization. I analyze the ways in which Hamdard literature contextualizes a narrative of the companys growth within this history, which sets the backdrop for Unanis professional reform in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. An emergent theme in my textual analysis, which I address throughout my project, is how Hamdardas an Indian Muslim companynegotiates this identity while articulating belonging in India.
Open Access
Framing Absence: Visuals of the Wall and the Vanishing Landscapes in Palestine
(2017-07-27) Hatoum, Nayrouz Abu; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This dissertation explores peoples relationship to the landscapes of material, abstract, and visual borders in the context of Palestine-Israel. Since 2002, the construction of the Israeli separation Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has significantly transformed the way locals, particularly on the Palestinian side of the Wall see and articulate their relation to the landscape. Already living in a state of military occupation through restriction of movement, limited access to land and urban expansion on occupied territory, the Wall has considerably shifted Palestinians relationships to the landscape. To them the landscape has become a visual field on which power dynamics and political structures are embodied and expressed. Moreover, for many Palestinians the Israeli construction of the Wall is visible evidence of the on-going process of destruction of the Palestinian landscape. But what is the view of Palestinians and Israelis living on the Israeli side of the Wall and those living in Palestine but in close proximity to the Wall? What is their engagement with the Wall? To answer these questions, this dissertation draws on more than 12 months of ethnographic research in Israel and Palestine that involved extended interviews with Palestinian and Israeli photographers and activists in Israel, as well as Palestinians whose lives were affected by the Walls construction in proximity to their homes and for whom the Wall route brought them into direct confrontation with the Israeli military. This research also examined representations of the Wall in different visual projects. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation asks how do visual fields facilitate the structuring of national imaginaries and what sights and future visions are offered by different readings of the landscape? To answer these questions, I employ anthropological theories of violence, borders and the visual, and propose the concept of landscapocide, a violent visual process through which landscapes are framed, and made to be seen and unseen. Through landscapocide and other anthropologically grounded theories and concepts I offer a new reading of the ways in which people in bordered contexts give meaning to what they see.
Open Access
An Amikwa Family Through Their Eyes: An Auto-ethnographic Study of an Indigenous Community in Northern Ontario Canada
(2017-07-27) Nandlall, Ravindra Atma; Hirji, Zulfikar A.
This work is focused on the lived experience in Northern Ontario, on the Pickerel River. The Mcquabbie Family history is used as a platform for discussing larger socio-political issues directly connected to person-hood, and identity politics. Through this discussion, we attempt to unravel the multitude of ways in which knowledge and the production of knowledge can be interpreted and understood in a variance of ways historically, and cross-culturally.
Open Access
Situating Sikh Diasporic Dubs: A Case Study Featuring Humble the Poet and Sikh Knowledge
(2018-03-01) Kauldher, Amrita; Yon, Daniel
The turban and beard has been a focus of Sikh identity in the diaspora and since 2010 has resurged across North American within popular culture and social media. Based on virtual and visual research conducted on social media, qualitative interviews and lyrical analysis, this case study explores the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism and Canadian hip hop in relationship to Punjabi-Sikh identities, articulated and performed by artists Humble the Poet and Sikh Knowledge. This case study addresses a lacuna of scholarship available on Punjabi-Sikh identity and hip hop by providing an analysis of album Turban Sex and book/album campaign for UnLEARN: Butterflies and Lions. I will explore how both artists respectively affirm and destabilize identity politics of popular representations of Punjabi-Sikh ethnicity and heritage. Looking beyond turbans and beards and labels of "ethno hip hop" or "desi rap", this research aims to interrogate the limits of multiculturalism and antiracism.
Open Access
"Keeping the Kids out of Trouble": Extra-Domestic Labour and Social Reproduction in Toronto's Regent Park, 1959-2012
(2018-03-01) James, Ryan Kristopher; Schrauwers, Albert
This dissertation is an historical ethnography of social reproduction in Regent Park, Canadas first public housing project. Built from 1948 to 1959 as part of a modernist slum clearance initiative, Regent Park was deemed a failure soon after it opened and was then stigmatised for decades thereafter, both for being a working-class enclave and for epitomising an outdated approach to city planning. A second redevelopment began in 2005, whereby the project is being demolished and rebuilt as a mix of subsidised and market housing, retail space, and other amenities. Despite its enduring stigmatisation, however, many current and former residents retain positive memories of Regent Park. Participants in this study tended to refer to it as a community, indicating senses of shared ownership and belonging that residents themselves built in everyday life. This dissertation emphasises the capacity of working-class people to build and maintain community on their own terms, and in spite of multiple and intersecting constraints. To theorise community-building, I begin from the concept of social reproduction: the work of maintaining and replenishing stable living conditions, both day-to-day and across generations. Much of this work is domestic labour unpaid tasks done inside the household such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children. In Regent Park, social reproduction demanded even more of residents: the stability of households was often threatened by dangers and challenges unique to life in a stigmatised housing project, and it was largely left up to residents themselves to redress these. To account for the considerable effort this involved, I propose a concept adjacent to domestic labour that I call extra-domestic labour: unpaid work done outside the household, usually through informal collaboration among members of different households, that is necessary for social reproduction. Extra-domestic labour built community and fostered a territorial solidarity that, I argue, is the primary means through which Regent Parkers developed class consciousness. This was often expressed through emic class categories, which were defined in relation to the locality more so than the workplace, and through which people interpreted their position in the wider social order.