Sociology

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/27586

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Open Access
A Feminist Political Economy Analysis of Medical Broker and Fertility Clinic Websites
(2018-11-21) Dowedoff, Penny Melissa; Armstrong, Pat
This dissertation studies the ways in which market-based reproductive health services are advertised and virtually represented on a global scale. I detail the implicit values and assumptions found in the content of reproductive tourism websites. In doing so, I show how medical broker and fertility clinic websites reproduce dominant ideologies and how these websites portray reproductive tourists, egg providers and surrogates. Using a feminist political economy approach, I situate the practice of reproductive tourism within particular historical, economic and political contexts, including both domestic and global neoliberal healthcare reforms. The findings of this thesis reveal that the websites portray neoliberal policies that emphasize consumerism, individual responsibility for ones healthcare and that position reproductive tourists as empowered consumers capable of making informed choices in purchasing new reproductive technologies (NRTs). The marketing of reproductive tourism on these websites also ignore the physical and affective labour of women who are egg providers and surrogates and minimizes the unequal power relationships that exist between reproductive tourists and egg providers and surrogates. Their experiences are erased from view and their bodies objectified and fragmented for market consumption.
Open Access
Adaptation Narratives: Climate Change and Environmental Politics in Mexican Costal Communities
(2015-08-28) Vazquez Garcia, Luz Maria; Vandergeest, Peter
This dissertation explores some key challenges the Mexican government and international organizations such as the World Bank may face when implementing climate change adaptation initiatives in coastal lagoon communities in the Mexican state of Tabasco, in the Gulf of Mexico. My analysis of the government’s climate change adaptation initiatives, scientists’ explanations, and fishers’ views on local environmental changes is based on political ecology approaches to environmental narratives, and critical literature on climate change. It outlines the interaction among three environmental narratives: that produced by the Mexican government and its allies who are re-orienting environmental programs into climate change adaptation programs; scientific narratives on coastal environmental processes including coastal erosion; and the narrative produced by poor fishers who are dependent on lagoon and coastal resources for their livelihoods, and who blame the off shore oil industry for most of their environmental problems. Scientific accounts of coastal environmental change tend to support more the position of fishers than the government, which produces a need for the government to be selective in how it uses science to justify its adaptation programs. The dissertation then examines the challenges that state initiatives of this type face when they interact with local environmental politics involving fishers and the state-owned oil industry. While fishers blame the oil industry for environmental problems, government adaptation programs seek to enrol fishers and the oil industry together as vulnerable to the local effects of climate change such as coastal erosion and increased frequency of hurricanes. I discuss how through processes of simplification, state agencies render complex political issues into technical problems, but how, in light of local conflicts, climate change adaptation interventions become highly political on the ground. I also argue that climate change policy analysis must be done in light of past and failed state interventions in Tabasco, which have resulted in what scholars have called a “harmful development” for fishers and ecosystems (Tudela, 1989).
Open Access
Adorno, Hegel and the Philosophical Origins of Classical Social Theory
(2014-07-09) Fuller, Brian Wayne; Singer, Brian C J
The central claim of my dissertation is that the work of Theodor Adorno offers a valuable framework for reevaluating the philosophical heritage of classical social theory. In his ongoing engagement with the philosophy of German Idealism, and with Hegel in particular, Adorno’s philosophical, sociological, and cultural critical writings involve a critical rethinking of the relationship between subject and object, and between individual and society. I make two primary arguments to substantiate my claim. The first is that Adorno’s work must be understood within the context of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. In particular, I show that Hegel’s critique of Kantian philosophy structures Adorno’s own understanding of the work of philosophy and of critical social theory. In the first part of the dissertation, I review the substance of Kantian epistemology, and of Hegel’s critique (Chapter 2); I then demonstrate that the Adorno’s critical philosophical procedure is grounded in his reading of Kant and Hegel (Chapter 3). My second primary argument is that Adorno’s attempt to articulate a critique of classical social theory is hampered by his own philosophical commitments. Through a juxtaposition of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s practical philosophy with Adorno’s own critique of Hegel (Chapter 4), I show that Adorno’s commitment to the negativity of the dialectic entails a conception of social theory that has not sufficiently addressed the implications of its materialist transformation. Adorno’s work relies upon a reduction of Hegel that remains problematic and unacknowledged. Next, I use a reading of Durkheim’s own philosophical commitments, through the lens of German Idealism, to show that Adorno’s immanent critique of Durkheim reproduces the aporiae that it seeks to rescue (Chapter 5). In the conclusion to the thesis (Chapter 6), I employ a discussion of the common themes and problems of Adorno’s critical-philosophical interpretation of classical social theory to suggest a reconsideration and renewal of its Hegelian heritage.
Open Access
Afghanistan Before the Invasions: The Subversion of Democracy in 1973
(2015-12-16) Ramyar, Khalida; Das Gupta, Tania
Using the Wikileaks PlusD Archive of US State Department cables from Kabul in 1973, this thesis presents an analysis of the politics of the Helmand Water Treaty between Afghanistan and Iran and the role of the US in Afghanistan's politics at the time. The analysis of the cables shows: a) that US policy was directed towards the promotion of neoliberalism in Afghanistan; b) that Afghanistan in 1973 was the site of a largely neglected struggle for democracy, and c) that the US, as well as the Afghan establishment, worked together to suppress this democratic struggle. These broader political dynamics are illustrated through a focus on the Helmand Water Treaty as discussed in the cables.
Open Access
Animal Dialectics: Towards a Critical Theory of Animals and Society
(2016-05-31) Weisberg, Zipporah; Horowitz, Asher
Building on the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School, Marxian psychoanalytic theory, and existential phenomenology, this dissertation argues that there is a direct correlation between animal exterminationism-or the systematic annihilation of animals as subjects-of-a-meaningful-life in both theory and practice-and the psychosocial, ethical, and political impoverishment of the human subject in late capitalist modernity. The increasing biotechnological manipulation of nonhuman animals, which enables human beings to seamlessly integrate them with the machinery of production, signals the final and most devastating moment in the history of nonhuman animals' subjugation so far. Animal extermination is not isolated, but is inextricably linked with the repression of human animality. Animal extermination compounds humans' selfestrangement under capitalism, and has led to a host of neuroses and pathological tendencies such as ambivalence, guilt, and misplaced aggression, among other things. However, while the mutual alienation of human and nonhuman animals appears to have reached unprecedented heights in the twenty-first century, so has awareness about the richness of animal subjectivities. The recent rise of animal studies has contributed to the destabilization of the prejudicial presupposition that humans and animals are separated by a vast metaphysical gulf. Unfortunately, with its enthusiasm for boundary dissolution and hybridity, the posthumanist strand of animal studies risks re-affirming rather than undermining the logic oflate capitalism, which thrives on the violation of ontological distinctions between humans, animals, and technics. Other traditions, such as phenomenology and ethology, strike a better balance between asserting the self-unity and co-relationality of the subject and therefore offer a superior platform for restoring, reconciling, and re-enchanting human and nonhuman animal subjects. Despite the anthropocentrism endemic to all forms of humanism, we ought to revive rather than abandon the Left humanist project because its fundamental aims and tenets-namely, the defence of the subject against its reification under capitalism, the pursuit of universal responsible freedom, the revival of the dialectical tradition, and the belief in historical progress-can be easily purged of their anthropocentric biases. Then re-invented beyond the human, Left humanism provides an excellent framework for the development of a coherent and realizable interspecies emancipatory project.
Open Access
Autonomy, Identity and the Right to Die: A Qualitative Study of Medically Assisted Death Attitudes in the Canadian Context
(2019-07-02) Grillo, Carmen Michael; Walsh, Philip D.
In Canada, medically-assisted death has been legal since June 17th, 2016, when Bill C-14 received royal assent in the Canadian legislature. The legal proceedings around MAiD in Canada have been supported by non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, for and against MAiD. The legalization of MAiD is the culmination of decades of organization and advocacy, supported by generally favourable public opinion. In this dissertation, the author develops a theory to explain why individuals increasingly identify with pro-MAiD beliefs. The study consequently makes two contributions to the sociological literature; 1) it reveals the connections between autonomy, care work, humanism, and pro-MAiD identities; 2) it features the development of a critical realist social psychology, focused on the reflexivity and the creation of personal moral identity. Specifically, the study is focused on how lived experiences of death including caregiving, bereavement, and/or serious illness, inform pro-MAiD beliefs for volunteers and other actors involved with pro-euthanasia organizations. The author theorizes that pro-MAiD identities are centred primarily on the principle of autonomy, which is couched within humanist and naturalist cultural frameworks, and enacted through care work. Specifically, over the course of care work, volunteers and other movement participants witnessed what they perceived as a fundamental loss of identity by the people for whom they were caring. The loss of identity witnessed by these carers motivated them to pursue greater autonomy over their own deaths, and to therefore avoid the deterioration they witnessed in others. It also motivated them to act as social carriers for the dissemination of norms associated with pro-MAiD political stances.
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
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
Drone Warfare and the Governing of Sacrifice
(2018-05-28) Baggiarini, Bianca Christina; Singer, Brian C. J.
In this dissertation, I argue that drone warfare suggests a style of violence that always-already transcends the vulnerabilities of the citizen-soldier, burdening the relationship of citizen soldiering to sacrificial cults and idioms. As an archetype of citizenship, the citizen-soldier normalizes a belief that soldiers actions in wartime reflect the highest echelon of sacrifice. I claim that military sacrifice ought to be imagined as a political, paradoxical effect of the contradictions inherent to the neoliberal restructuring of capitalisms link to war. I advance a political-sociological approach to sacrifice by which to analyze the changing meaning of the status of the citizen-soldier archetype. Managing the paradox of sacrifice is a priority for Western liberal governments, who, being casualty-averse, aim to reconcile sovereign and biopolitical modes of power by subjecting sacrifice to governing logic. Here, I reveal the paradoxical effects of a liberal state that is both casualty averse, and engaged in prolonged high technology warfare. The paradox is about how to maintain the ideological, sociopolitical, and militarized conditions to simultaneously demand and deny sacrifice through a complex circumnavigation of bodily politics. I argue that sacrifice is disrupted along three interrelated themes, which all hinge on the sovereign and symbolic power associated with the archetype of the citizen-soldier: publicity, surplus, and embodiment. Pivoting on these themes, drone violence gains credibility through a dialectic of visibility (the battlefield) and invisibility (the violence) by rendering that which was previously unseen, visible. However, the sociopolitical landscape in which drone warfare operates, and gains credibility, is dependent upon the invisibilization of interrelated processesthe politics of emotional trauma, the scene of sacred violence, and the identification of the witness. I conclude that the end of conscription, coupled with neoliberal flexible citizenship, has troubled the content of military sacrifice and its ability to act as a check on violence. Rather than liberal democracys promise of a decline in violence, drone warfare contributes to the expansion of more, increasingly invisible, and therefore meaningless violence.
Open Access
Early Modern Speculative Anthropology
(2015-01-26) McFarlane, Craig John; Singer, Brian C. J.
I argue seventeenth century social and political theory, while having the explicit goal of justifying new social, political, and economic arrangements, depended upon and demanded a division of the world into the distinct and separate ontological realms of nature and culture populated, respectively, by the non-human and the human. The explicit point of this move was to create a normative realm for the human free from the inhuman forces of nature. However, this division had severe normative consequences for both humans and non-humans. I focus on four sets of texts in order to demonstrate how this division and separation took place. First, I discuss Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie, first published in 1609, as an example of a transitional text which denies the split between nature and culture, but which draws upon concepts that demand such an ontological split. Second, I discuss Thomas Hobbes's political works (The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan) focusing upon how the movement from the state of nature to the commonwealth depends upon a transformation of the "human animal" into the "human animal." The production of both the human and the non-human is the primordial task of the sovereign. Third, I discuss Samuel Pufendorf's Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, Of the Laws of Nature and Nations, and On the Duty of Man and Citizen focusing upon his distinction between physical entities and moral entities; the latter of which depend upon what he calls "properly human action," but which does so inconsistently. Fourth, I discuss John Locke's Two Treatises of Government focusing upon how his theory of property functions to legitimate the domination of the non-human by the human. Finally, I discuss how the modern division between the human and non-human is untenable, that it leads to perverse consequences, and suggest that the distinction between both human and non-human as well as nature and culture ought to be abandoned in favour of an ecological social science.
Open Access
Enemies, Adversaries & Unlikely Allies: Reimagining Agonal Democratic Theory Through a Classical Sociological Lens
(2021-07-06) Steiner, Philip Alexander; Walsh, Philip D.
Set against the backdrop of increasingly polarized and dysfunctional political discourse within western democratic nations, this dissertation aims to consider the ways in which critical sociology can contribute to, and potentially expand, emergent accounts of an alternative radical democratic politics premised on productive contest. While the mainstream of democratic theory remains dominated by notions of deliberation, compromise, and consensus; a challenge has emerged out of a small but important paradigm of social and political theory - one that conceptually re-prioritized the political ideal of agon. Rejecting notions of post-political compromise or consensus, contemporary scholars of agonal democracy propose perpetually open contest, legitimated struggles, and irresolvable tensions as the proper and desirable content of the political. Yet as richly as these varying accounts have mapped the political character of such agonal principles, very little attention has been paid to their implicit or explicit social dimensions. Through the creative adaptation of certain sociological perspectives of Max Weber, Ferdinand Tnnies, Georg Simmel, and Jrgen Habermas; this project attempts to rethink the social in the context of radical agonistic democracy. Taking up the work of Chantal Mouffe as an exemplar of this agonal paradigm, this project challenges the often-shallow accounts of the social, ultimately suggesting an alternative, though complimentary, theoretical vocabulary through which to explore the important, but consistently underexplored, social dimensions of a (re)turn to the political ideal of agon.
Open Access
Expert Interventions for Democracy: The Historical and Epistemological Foundations of International Democracy
(2014-07-28) Christensen, Michael Jacob; Kurasawa, Fuyuki
The subject of this dissertation research is the field of professional organizations in North America that promote and assist democratization movements around the world. These organizations use a form of specialized expert knowledge to help activists, politicians and civil society organizations build democratic institutions. Specifically, this research investigates how historical academic debates shape the everyday practices of professionals in this field, and how these practices in turn shape contemporary debates. The study adopts a mixed methods approach by combining an intellectual history of democracy research and qualitative interview research with professionals working in the field. By examining the everyday practice of expertise, this dissertation contributes to emerging scholarly debates spanning the intersections of the sociology of knowledge, political sociology and international development studies by asking an ancient question. How can democracy be a collection of popular political ideals, yet also the object of specialized, technical or social scientific knowledge? According to the findings of this research, the contemporary practice of democracy assistance emerged out of debates about this paradox and, more importantly, organizations within this field rely on the insoluble nature of democratic theory and practice to justify expert interventions in countries struggling for democracy.
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
From Foundation to Dissolution: Rethinking the Social Contract Tradition
(2015-08-28) Follert, Michael Walter; Singer, Brian C. J.
The early modern intellectual tradition of the social contract introduces a problematic of the will to the socio-political realm. With power’s institutionalization no longer shrouded by an earlier religious imaginary, the social contract thinkers attempt to explain how civil society and the state legitimately and originally come into being. However, in doing so they produce a series of excesses. This work traces those excesses from the modern natural law lineage of Hobbes and Locke through the Enlightenment with Rousseau and Kant. It is in the crisis of society confronting the mystery of its self-institution that the excesses of the social and the political come into view. Rather than society being rendered present through the mediations of a divine will, the social contract stages society’s foundation as an act of collective human will. Society is ‘discovered’ in this intellectual tradition as self-instituting, but its discovery is only partial. In submitting the social and the political to a kind of deliberate construction, the social contract in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau operates through an ‘artificialist imaginary’. As well, being part of the staging of society’s self-institution, the social contract contributes to the disarticulation of the social from the political. The social begins to come into view as a realm of intelligibility unto itself, historically, at this point. Yet its intelligibility remains subsumed by the ostensible transparency of the will, or in Kant, as an ultimate impasse to pure practical reason. The social must be found by reading between-the-lines of the works of these thinkers. This is because the social stands as an excess that the logic of the social contract cannot contain. There are multiple figures of the social that begin to reveal themselves here: the social as obligation, as sociability, and even as an uncontrollable ‘monstrosity’. Rather than a ballast for the political, the social primarily resists, residually or intractably, the immediate expressions of the political will. These excesses come most fully into view when the contract confronts its dissolution – an act that, by dint of its ‘foundability’, the contract must legitimate at a certain limit point.
Open Access
From Pain to Power: A Socio-Psychological Investigation of Anti-Racist Feminist Ressentiment
(2018-11-21) Amarshi, Aliya; Walsh, Philip D.
In recent years, identity-based movements have increasingly been criticized by outsiders for espousing a culture of outrage both in terms of their academic expressions and activist mobilizations. In the present study, I examine this charge from within the struggle by advancing a self-reflexive socio-psychological investigation into certain emotional responses, attitudes, and practices that have, in significant ways, come to define this type of political agitation. Specifically, I focus my analysis on anti-racist feminism given my personal ties and investment in this movement. Following Wendy Brown, I investigate whether anti-racist feminism suffers from the Nietzschean affliction of ressentiment, and if so, what can be done to reorient the movement towards a more affirmative and humanist future. I address this latter objective through the work of Erich Fromm who I argue provides us with insights that are especially pertinent to our current problem, and which, when developed further with the aid of anti-racist interventions, can offer a fruitful means to moving forward.
Open Access
From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards A Collective Memory Of HIV/AIDS Resistance
(2023-12-08) Da Costa, Jade Crimson Rose; Gazso, Amber M.
The goal of my dissertation is to help mobilize a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that confronts the historical erasure, or whitewashing, of Queer and Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activists from mainstream remembrances of the movement within and around the city colonially known as Toronto. I formulated this goal with the desire to enable younger and future generations of QT/BIPOC activists, advocates, and organizers to better connect with the region’s rich and ongoing history of non-white HIV/AIDS activisms. Approaching collective memory from a bricolage theoretical framework rooted in posthumanist Black feminism, queer of colour affect theory, and hauntology, I argue that the dominant accounts through which Toronto histories of HIV/AIDS resistance are narrated operate according to the racist temporal-spatial-affectual logics of white futurity: that which grants white folx forward-facing agency against an out-of-time, and thus forgettable, racial Other. With this, a whitewashed collective memory of the movement has emerged, and younger racialized and Indigenous individuals who are currently engaged in gender and sexuality organizing writ large, have become primed to forget the work their elders did in response to the pandemic. Accordingly, I conducted 60 in-depth interviews with racialized and Indigenous gender and sexuality activists, organizers, and advocates between the ages of 18–35 about what they felt they knew about local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance, and why. Interview findings reveal that the historical frames through which HIV/AIDS resistance is most narrated within and around Toronto limit younger organizers’ collective memories of the movement to a first occurrence typology that makes white, gay cis men into the first subjects of HIV/AIDS activism. For many participants, this typology took on the form of a racialized haunting, in which their sense of connection to local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance was constrained to the mainstream historical narrative of the AIDS activist figure: the white, cis gay treatment-based AIDS activist of the late 1980s and early 1990s who engaged in radical public dissent and ultimately set the perfect standard of Toronto AIDS activism. QTBIPOC activists (among others) who do not fit this mould, were made periphery to younger organizers’ memories, perpetually posed as newcomers to the movement. The impacts of this were strongly felt within participants’ past and present-day conceptions of HIV/AIDS politics. Those of negative or unknown serostatus often felt wholly disconnected from the ongoing, and largely racialized, struggles of the epidemic, whereas those currently living with HIV felt this way up until their diagnosis (and sometimes, even afterwards). In both cases, participants remained disconnected from the histories of HIV/AIDS resistance. However, a handful of participants indicated the possibility of disrupting this trend, either through their transnational-lived connections to HIV/AIDS, which ultimately thwarted the whitewashing of their collective memories, or through instances in which they engaged pedagogical-cultural sites that briefly disrupted the first occurrence typology’s hold on their memories. Turning to these outliers, I conclude that, to move towards a collective memory of Toronto HIV/AIDS resistance in which younger racialized and Indigenous organizers feel meaningfully connected to the histories of the movement, we need to cultivate accessible educational sites on HIV/AIDS politics that concertedly disrupt the first occurrence typology. From here, we can start to move towards a collective memory of HIV/AIDS resistance that is built, not from hegemony, but from liberation, from transformation, from radical possibility; from the wonderous echoes of QT/BIPOC organizers, past, present, and future.
Open Access
From Revolution to Referendum: Processes of Institutionalization and Practices of Contestation in Post-Socialist Civil Society Building, 1989-2006
(2019-03-05) Baca, Bojan; Kurasawa, Fuyuki
At the intersection of civil society studies and contentious politics research lies an opportunity to better understand the development of civil society through contentious practices. Drawing on a diverse body of work in sociology, as well as these two interdisciplinary fields, I use contentious practices as the unit of analysis to examine how post-socialist civil society in Montenegro was built "from below" during its post-socialist transition from 1989 to 2006. I focus on how three processes of institutionalization that characterized this period democratization of the polity, privatization of the economy, and NGO-ization of civil society affected practices of contestation, and how such practices impinged on these processes. By using Protest Event Analysis to investigate how top-down (formal) processes of institutionalization and bottom-up (informal) practices of contestation interacted in civil society building in Montenegro, I achieve two objectives: firstly, illuminating the empirical reality of the post-socialist space of Montenegro through analysis of actually existing forms of contentious practices through which citizens articulated their grievances, voiced their demands, advanced their claims, and (re-)affirmed their identities; and secondly, analyzing how and to what extent forms, dynamics, sites, scales, and content of contentious practices were affected by elite-driven (formal) macro-processes and, conversely, how these processes were influenced by citizens through civil resistance, social activism, popular politics, and other forms of unconventional participation. Much of the existing literature points to the role of static structures in causing a socially passive, politically apathetic, and civically disengaged post-socialist civil society in Montenegro. In contrast, my findings demonstrate how both the decrease and depoliticization of contentious practices were consequences of dynamic (macro-)processual factors. Furthermore, my findings challenge very idea of Montenegro as a paradigmatic example of the "weak post-socialist civil society" at the European semi-periphery that needed to "catch up" to its Western neighbours. Instead, this dissertation argues that Montenegrin post-socialist civil society was not weak and that it significantly influenced the democratization processes in the country.
Open Access
From the Incinerator to the Bank: A Feminist Qualitative Study of Private Cord Blood Banking in Canada
(2015-08-28) Haw, Jin-Young Jennie; Weir, Lorna
This is a feminist, qualitative study of private umbilical cord blood banking in Canada. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 women who banked cord blood, 6 key informants from 4 different private cord blood banks, and 3 healthcare professionals, I consider what private cord blood banking can tell us about contemporary biopolitics, the production of biovalue in corporeal materials, the promise of “biological insurance,” and the social actor of neoliberalism. My research makes several key contributions to sociological literature on stem cell science, health and contemporary biopolitics. First, I make a feminist, empirical contribution to social science scholarship on private cord blood banking specifically. Second, I expand on the biovalue literature by demonstrating the social production of biovalue in a specific cord blood unit. I show that the production of biovalue in cord blood units is a social process that involves tensions and negotiations between women, private banks and clinicians across different expert discourses and profane knowledges. Third, I critically examine the metaphor of private cord blood banking as “biological insurance.” Private cord blood banks emphasize the future, speculative promises of regenerative stem cell therapies and market their services as a form of insurance. Contrary to this position, I show how in some cases cord blood fails to provide the protection it promises. Fourth, this study challenges contemporary literature on the active subject in health. I argue that women’s experiences of cord blood banking show that the conventional interpretation of the active subject as a rational, calculating subject that engages in contemporary health strategies in a hopeful manner requires revision. I show that women act as precautionary actors who bank in a context of uncertainty and fear. By providing an in-depth, empirical examination of women’s experiences of private cord blood banking, I offer a feminist, critical account of a contemporary biopolitical strategy in the Global North: health optimization through private tissue storage. I challenge biopolitics scholarship that presents an over-generalized, acritical account of contemporary biopolitics and argue for greater analytic and empirical attention to the everyday experiences of people who engage in health optimizing practices.
Open Access
Gladue Courts: Navigating Contradictory Orientations to Rehabilitate and Punish
(2015-01-26) Cifelli, Michael Paul; Lawrence, Bonita
This research thesis details a year-long observation and analysis of Gladue (Aboriginal-specific) courts in Toronto from April 2013 – July 2014. The primary focus of this project is the way Gladue courts reconcile and interpret contradictory demands to both rehabilitate and incarcerate Aboriginal peoples in light of legislative and judicial requirements. Utilizing a discourse analysis methodology for observations and transcripts, this thesis sought to analyze how rehabilitation and punishment is conceptualized and implemented in Gladue courts given recent legislative changes. The overall effect is that neo-liberal and paternalist principles are chosen and applied depending on the individual circumstances of the case, with new punitive policies left for the most egregious offenders. This application underlines a law and order policy that is concerned with pragmatic/practical concerns and which leads to a discursive framework that objectifies Aboriginal peoples through racist/colonial conceptions of intrinsic victimization.
Open Access
Governing Irregular Migration: Logics and Practices in Spanish Immigration Policy
(2015-08-28) Moffette, David; Pratt, Anna C.
Since the first substantive changes to Spanish immigration laws in the 1980s, immigration to Spain and the policies designed to govern it have changed greatly. The pace of this continuous transformation has recently slowed down, offering a good opportunity to reflect on the ways in which irregular migration has been governed over time. Taking stock of more than three decades of debates in the Spanish Congress, laws, policy documents, interview findings and practices, this dissertation offers a sociological analysis of the messy process of immigration governance in a border country of the European Union. The dissertation starts by analyzing the early problematizations of irregular migration in Spain, understood as the result of discursive and non-discursive practices that provide specific ways of thinking about and acting upon objects. Complicating the assumption that policy shifts are a straightforward result of changes in the political orientation of ruling parties, the dissertation traces the existence of three intersecting sets of logics and practices that have shaped Spanish immigration policy over time: (1) culturalization: a set of logics and practices intimately tied to the history of Spanish colonialism and governing migrants as cultural subjects; (2) labouralization: a set of logics and practices that attempt to manage labour migration flows and frame irregular migrants as workers who contribute to the national labour market; and (3) securitization: a set of logics and practices focused on the defence of state sovereignty, the prevention of irregular entry and the framing of irregular migrants as potential threats. The organization of heterogeneous practices into three broad categories acts as a heuristic device to show how various complementary and at times contradictory logics and practices work together to create a practical regime of migration governance based on a long probationary period during which irregular migrants are scrutinized and policed. Ultimately, this dissertation posits the existence in Spain of a regime governing immigration through probation. This regime entails the rescaling of bordering practices across space and time, the deployment of a space of legal liminality in which irregular migrants are kept, and the use of conditionality and discretion in the assessment of desirability.